The Ancient East

works are known to us, these were the first who showed curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient consciousness of the curiosity

us of Halicarnassus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, and with him had marched more than ten thousand Greeks. Not only have works by these three men of letters survived, wholly or in part, to our time, but also many notes on the East as it was before 400 B.C. have been preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we still have so

TWARD MOVEMENT

e of Miletus in establishing a factory on the lowest course of the Canopic Nile. This post and two standing camps of Greek mercenaries, one at Tahpanhes watching the approach from Asia, the other at Memphis overawing the capital and keeping the road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce Ionian civilization to the Delta in the seventh century. Indeed, to this day our knowledge of the earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia and Caria depends largely on the fragments of their vases imported into Egypt which have been found at Tahpanhes, Memphis and another Greek colony, Naukratis, founded a little

ies of the Asiatic Greeks founded a common sanctuary there. Other maritime communities of the same race (probably the more powerful, since Miletus is named among them) had their particular sanctuaries also and their proper places. The Greeks had come to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that throughout the Persian domination, which s

PHOENICIA

Mesopotamia and Syria. The results are plain to see, on the one hand in the fabric and design of early ivories, jewellery and other objects found in the archaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in the decoration of painted pottery produced at Miletus; on the other hand, in the carved ivories of the ninth century found at Calah on the Tigris. But the processes which prod

. The Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy, which looked westward, failed to make head against her at the first, and soon dropped out of the running; nor did the one or two isolated centres of Hellenism on other shores do better. On the other hand, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, although it was her own home-sea, Tyre never succeeded in establishing commercial supremacy, and indeed, so far as we know, she never seriously tried to establish it. It was the sphere of the Aegean mariners and had been so as far back as Phoenician memory ran. The Late Minoan Cretans and men of Argolis, the Achaean rovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armed merchantmen had

t numerous in Rhodes, in Caria and Ionia, and in the Peloponnese. But the main stream of Tyrian commerce hugged the south rather than the north coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Phoenician sailors were essentially southerners

ften either certain or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician. We find the nearest affinities to archaic Cypriote art (where this was indebted to Asiatic art at all) in Cilician and in Hittite Syrian art. Early Ionian and Carian strata contain very little that is of Egyptian character, but much whose inspiration can be traced ultimately to Mesopotamia; and research in inner Asia Minor, imp

y have been responsible for the small Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects which have been found by the excavators of Carchemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of the ninth and eighth centuries; but the carrying of similar objects eastward across the Euphrates was more probably i

our story, during the latter rule of Assyria in the farther East and the subsequent rule of the Medes and the Babylonians in her room, intercourse had been carried on almost entirely by intermediaries, among whom (if something must be allowed to the Cilicians) the Lydians were undoubtedly the most active. In the later part of

HE COMING OF

comers and, probably, to accept a kind of vassalage. Thus, since all lower Mesopotamia with most part of Syria obeyed the Babylonian, a power, partly Iranian, was already overshadowing two-thirds of the East before Cyrus and his Persians issued upon the scene. It is important to bear this fact in mind when one comes to note the ease with which a hitherto obscure king of Anshan in Elam would prove able to possess himself of the whole Semitic Empire, a

yrus as in any case a Persian, but as either grandson of a Median king (though not his natural heir) or merely one of his court officials. What the Greeks had to account for (and so have we) is the subsequent disappearance of the north Iranian kings of the Medes and the fusion of their subjects with the Persian Iranians under a southern dynasty. And what the Greeks did not know, but we do, from cuneiform inscriptions either contemporary with, o

an. The issue was fought out in central West Persia, which had been dominated by the Medes since the time of Kyaxares' father, Phraortes, and when it was decided by the secession of good part of the army of King Astyages, Cyrus of Anshan took possession of the Median Empire with the goodwill of much of the Median population. This empire included then, beside the original Median land, not only territories conquered from Assyria but also all that part of Persia which lay east of Elam. Some time, doubtless, elapsed before the sovereignty of Cyrus was acknowledged

4. FALL

as unfit to cope with the mountaineers of the wild border highlands of Persia as, if Herodotus' story is well founded, they were ignorant of their quality. Croesus took his time, sending envoys to consult oracles near and far. Herodotus tells us that he applied to Delphi not less than thrice and even to the oracle of Ammon in the Eastern Sahara. At least a year must have been spent in these inquiries alone, not to speak of an embassy to Sparta and perhaps others to Egypt and Babylon. These preliminaries at length completed, the Lydian gathered the levies of western Asia Minor and set out for the East. He found the Halys in flood--it must have been in late spring--and having made much ado of crossing it, spent the summer in ravaging with his cavalry the old homeland of the Hatti. Thus he gave Cyrus time to send envoys to the Ionian cities to beg them attack Lydia in the rear, and time to come down himself in force to his far western province. Croesus was brought to battle in the first days of the autumn.

5. PERSI

eral appearing before Babylon itself received it without a struggle at the hands of the disaffected priests of Bel-Marduk. The famous Herodotean tale of Cyrus' secret penetration down the dried bed of Euphrates seems to be a mistaken memory of a later recapture of the city after a revolt from Darius, of which more hereafter. Thus once more it was given to Cyrus to close a long chapter of Ea

edia; and at the last, having brought the enemy to bay beyond the Araxes, he met there defeat and death. But Cambyses not only completed his father's work in Syria, but fulfilled what is said to have been his further project by capturing Egypt and establishing there a foreign domination which was to last, with some interval

were highlanders of unimpaired vigour, frugal habit, settled agricultural life, long-established social cohesion and spiritual religious conceptions. Possibly, too, before they issued from the vast Iranian plateau, they were not wholly unversed in the administration of wide territories. In any case, their quick intelligence enabled them to profit by models of imperial organization which persisted in the lands they now acquired; for relics of the Assyrian system had survived under the New Babylonian rule, and perhaps also under the Median. Thereafter the experience gained by Cambyses in Egypt must have gone for something in the imperial education of his successor Darius, to whom historians ascribe the final organization of Persian territor

they did not seek to impose their creed. Seeing that the Persian Empire was extensive, decentralized and provided with imperfect means of communication, it could subsist only by practising provincial tolerance. Its provincial tolerance seems to have been systematic. We know a good deal of the Greeks and the Jews under its sway, and in the history of both we miss such signs of religious and social oppression as marked Assyrian rule. In western Asia Minor the satraps showed themselves on the whole singularly conciliatory towards local religious feeling and even personally comformable to it; and in Judaea the hope of the Hebrews that the Persian would prove a deliverer and a restorer of their estate was not falsified. Hardly an echo of outrage on the subjects of Persia in time of peace has r

ON 6.

ia. By 520 the Jewish population in South Palestine was sufficiently strong again to make itself troublesome to Darius, and in 516 the Temple was in process of restoration. Before the middle of the next century Jerusalem was once more a fortified city and its population had been further reinforced by many returned exiles who had imbibed the economic civilization, and also the religiosity of Babylonia. Thenceforward the development of the Jews into a commercial people proceeds without apparent interruption from Persian governors, who (as, for example, Nehemiah) could themselves be of the subject race. Even if large accretions of other Semites, notably Aramaeans, be allowed for--accretions easily accepted by a people which had become rather a church than

. ASIA UN

of either the centralized strength or the theoretic justification of modern civilized rule, achieved a very considerable advance, and

WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXT

wider lands east, west and south, and even Mediterranean islands which lay near the Asiatic shores. Among these last was Cyprus, now more closely linked to Phoenicia than of old, and combining with the latter to provide navies for the Great King's needs. On the East, the Iranian plateau, watched from two royal residences, Pasargadae in the south and Ecbatana in the north, swelled this realm to greater dimensions

royal house, Darius, son of Hystaspes, a strong man, slew the pretender, and once secure on the throne, brought Media, Armenia, Elam and at last Babylonia, back to obedience. The old imperial city on the Euphrates would make one more bid for freedom six years later and then relapse into the estate of a provincial town. Darius spent some twenty years in organizing his empire on the satra

PERSIA AN

ies which possessed a civilization superior, not only potentially but actually, to her own; on cities where individual and communal passion for freedom constituted the one religion incompatibl

ves with the goodwill of Persia actually brought on their revolt, but it only precipitated a struggle inevitable ultimately on one side of the Aegean or the other. After setting the whole Anatolian coast from the Bosporus to Pamphylia and even Cyprus in a blaze for two years, the Ionian Revolt failed, owing as much to the particularist jealousies of the Greek cities themselves as to vigorous measures taken against them by Darius on land and his obedient Phoenicians at sea. A naval defeat sealed the fate of Miletus, whose citizens found, to the horror of all Greece, that, on occasion, t

reacherous co-operation; and he summoned other Greek states to make formal submission and keep the peace. A first armada sent to coast round the northern shore in 492 added Macedonia to the Persian Empire; but it was crippled and stayed by storms. A second, sent two years later direct across the Aegean, reduced the Cyclad isles, revenged itself on Eretria, one of the minor culprits in the Sardian affair, and finally brought up by the Attic shore at Marathon.

S OF THE PERSIAN

gnal defeats had been suffered in Greece, and a fourth off the shore of Asia itself--the battle of Mycale--upon which followed closely the loss of Sestus, the European key of the Hellespont, and more remotely the loss not only of all Persian holdings in the Balkans and the islands, but also of the Ionian Greek cities and most of the Aeolian, and at last (after the final naval defeat off the Eurymedon) of the whole littoral of Anat

, but much for continued and even increasing Hellenic poverty. In the event Persia found herself in a position almost to regain by gold what she had lost by battle, and to exercise a financial influence on Greece greater and longer lasting than she ever established by arms. Moreover, her empire was less likely to be attacked when it was limited by the western edge of the Anatolian plateau

, was dissipated. No less obviously those expeditions served to suggest to the Greeks for the first time that there existed both a common enemy of all their race and an external field for their own common encroachment and plundering. So far as an idea of nationality was destined ever to be operative on Greek minds it would draw its inspiration thenceforward from a sense of common superiority and common hostility to the Oriental. Persia, in a word, had laid the foundations and promoted the d

ing cordial relations with the Ionian cities, hospitably entertaining Greeks of distinction and conciliating Greek political and religious prepossessions. They must have attained considerable success, while thus unwittingly preparing disaster. When, a little more than a century later, western Europe would come eastward in force, to make an end of Persian dominion, some of the greater Ionian and Carian cities would offer a prolonged resistance to it which is not to be accounted for only by the influence of Persian gold or of a Persian element in their administration. Miletus and Halicarnassus shut thei

THE FIRST CO

acknowledging less willingly a Spartan supremacy established at first with Persian co-operation. Many of these cities, which had long maintained very close relations with the Persian governors of the nearer hinterland, not only shaped their policy to please the latter, but even acknowledged Persian suzerainty; and since, as it happens, at this particular moment Sparta had fallen out with Persia, and a Spartan army, under Dercyllidas, was occupying the Aeolian district o

st by the waters of the Great River itself) for Babylon. But they never reached that city. Cyrus met death and his oriental soldiers accepted defeat at Cunaxa, some four days' march short of the goal. But the undefeated Greeks, refusing to surrender, and, few though they were, so greatly dreaded by the Persians that they were not directly molested, had to get back to their own land as best they might. How, robbed of their original leaders they yet reached the Black Sea and safety by way of the Tigr

t of the plains only by such periodic chastisement as Cyrus allowed his army to inflict in Pisidia and Lycaonia. Cilicia is being administered and defended by its own prince, who bears the same name or title as his predecessor in the days of Sennacherib, but is feudally accountable to the Great King. His land is so far his private property that Cyrus, though would-be lord of all the empire, encourages the pillage of the rich provincial capital. The fleet of Cyrus lands men and stores unmolested in

h of the Euphrates valley up to the Black Sea all was practical independence. We do not know anything precise about the far eastern provinces or the south Syrian in this year, 400. Artaxerxes, the Great King, came from Susa to meet his rebellious brother, but to Babylon he returned to put to death the betrayed leaders of the Greeks. At this moment Ctesias, the Cnidian Greek, was his court physician and no friend either to Cyrus or to Spartans; he was even then in correspondence with the Athenian Conon who would presently be made a Persian admiral and smash the Spartan fleet. Of his history of Persia some few fragments and some epitomized extracts relating to this ti

ed by harem intrigue; an unenthusiastic body of subjects, abandoned to the schemes of satraps; inefficient and casually collected armies in which foreign mercenaries were almost the only genuine soldiers--such was Persia now. It was something very unlike the vigorous rule of