SECTION 6. CILICIA

When an Assyrian emperor crossed Euphrates and took up quarters in Pitru to receive the submission of the western chiefs and collect his forces for raiding the lands of any who might be slow to comply, he was much nearer the frontiers of Asia Minor than those of Phoenicia or the Kingdom of Damascus. Yet on three occasions out of four, the lords of the Middle Assyrian Kingdom were content to harry once again the oft-plundered lands of mid-Syria, and on the fourth, if they turned northward at all, they advanced no farther than eastern Cilicia, that is, little beyond the horizon which they might actually see on a clear day from any high ground near Pitru. Yet on the other side of the snow-streaked wall which bounded the northward view lay desirable kingdoms, Khanigalbat with its capital, Milid, comprising the fertile district which later would be part of Cataonia; Tabal to west of it, extending over the rest of Cataonia and southern Cappadocia; and Kas, possessing the Tyanitis and the deep Lycaonian plain. Why, then, did those imperial robbers in the ninth century so long hold their hands from such tempting prey? No doubt, because they and their armies, which were not yet recruited from other populations than the Semites of Assyria proper, so far as we know, were by origin Arabs, men of the south, to whom the high-lying plateau country beyond Taurus was just as deterrent as it has been to all Semites since. Tides of Arab invasion, surging again and again to the foot of the Taurus, have broken sometimes through the passes and flowed in single streams far on into Asia Minor, but they have always ebbed again as quickly. The repugnance felt by the Assyrians for Asia Minor may be contrasted with the promptitude which their Iranian successors showed in invading the peninsula, and may be illustrated by all subsequent history. No permanent footing was ever established in Asia Minor by the Saracens, its definite conquest being left to the north-country Turks. The short-lived Arab power of Mehemet Ali, which rebelled against the Turks some eighty years ago, advanced on to the plateau only to recede at once and remain behind the Taurus. The present dividing line of peoples which speak respectively Arabic and Turkish marks the Semite's immemorial limit. So soon as the land-level of northern Syria attains a mean altitude of 2500 feet, the Arab tongue is chilled to silence.

We shall never find Assyrian armies, therefore, going far or staying long beyond Taurus. But we shall find them going constantly, and as a matter of course, into Cilicia, notwithstanding the high mountain wall of Amanus which divides it from Syria. Cilicia—all that part of it at least which the Assyrians used to raid—lies low, faces south and is shielded by high mountains from northerly and easterly chills. It enjoys, indeed, a warmer and more equable climate than any part of Syria, except the coastal belt, and socially it has always been related more nearly to the south lands than to its own geographical whole, Asia Minor. A Semitic element was predominant in the population of the plain, and especially in its chief town, Tarsus, throughout antiquity. So closely was Cilicia linked with Syria that the Prince of Kue (its eastern part) joined the Princes of Hamath and of Damascus and their south Syrian allies in that combination for common defence against Assyrian aggression, which Shalmaneser broke at Karkar in 854: and it was in order to neutralize an important factor in the defensive power of Syria that the latter proceeded across Patin in 849 and fell on Kue. But some uprising at Hamath recalled him then, and it was not till the latter part of his reign that eastern Cilicia was systematically subdued.

Shalmaneser devoted a surprising amount of attention to this small and rather obscure corner of Asia Minor. He records in his twenty-fifth year that already he had crossed Amanus seven times; and in the year succeeding we find him again entering Cilicia and marching to Tarsus to unseat its prince and put another more pliable in his room. Since, apparently, he never used Cilicia as a base for further operations in force beyond Taurus, being content with a formal acknowledgment of his majesty by the Prince of Tabal, one is forced to conclude that he invaded the land for its own sake. Nearly three centuries hence, out of the mist in which Cilicia is veiled more persistently than almost any other part of the ancient East, this small country will loom up suddenly as one of the four chief powers of Asia, ruled by a king who, hand in hand with Nebuchadnezzar II, negotiates a peace between the Lydians and the Medes, each at the height of their power. Then the mist will close over it once more, and we shall hear next to nothing of a long line of kings who, bearing a royal title which was graecized under the form Syennesis, reigned at Tarsus, having little in common with other Anatolian princes. But we may reasonably infer from the circumstances of the pacific intervention just mentioned that Cilician power had been growing for a long time previous; and also from the frequency with which Shalmaneser raided the land, that already in the ninth century it was rich and civilized. We know it to have been a great centre of Sandan worship, and may guess that its kings were kin of the Mushki race and, if not the chief survivors of the original stock which invaded Assyria in Tiglath Pileser's time, ranked at least among the chief inheritors of the old Hatti civilization. Some even date its civilization earlier still, believing the Keftiu, who brought rich gifts to the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and succeeding dynasties, to have been Cilicians.

Unfortunately, no scientific excavation of early sites in Cilicia has yet been undertaken; but for many years past buyers of antiquities have been receiving, from Tarsus and its port, engraved stones and seals of singularly fine workmanship, which belong to Hittite art but seem of later date than most of its products. They display in their decoration certain peculiar designs, which have been remarked also in Cyprus, and present some peculiarities of form, which occur also in the earliest Ionian art. Till other evidence comes to hand these little objects must be our witnesses to the existence of a highly developed sub-Hittite culture in Cilicia which, as early as the ninth century, had already been refined by the influence of the Greek settlements on the Anatolian coasts and perhaps, even earlier, by the Cretan art of the Aegean area. Cilician civilization offers a link between east and west which is worth more consideration and study than have been given to it by historians.

SECTION 7. ASIA MINOR

Into Asia Minor beyond Taurus we have no reason to suppose that an Assyrian monarch of the ninth century ever marched in person, though several raiding columns visited Khanigalbat and Tabal, and tributary acknowledgment of Assyrian dominance was made intermittently by the princes of both those countries in the latter half of Shalmaneser's reign. The farther and larger part of the western peninsula lay outside the Great King's reach, and we know as little of it in the year 800 as, perhaps, the Assyrians themselves knew. We do know, however, that it contained a strong principality centrally situated in the southern part of the basin of the Sangarius, which the Asiatic Greeks had begun to know as Phrygian. This inland power loomed very large in their world—so large, indeed, that it masked Assyria at this time, and passed in their eyes for the richest on earth. On the sole ground of its importance in early Greek legend, we are quite safe in dating not only its rise but its attainment of a dominant position to a period well before 800 B.C. But, in fact, there are other good grounds for believing that before the ninth century closed this principality dominated a much wider area than the later Phrygia, and that its western borders had been pushed outwards very nearly to the Ionian coast. In the Iliad, for example, the Phrygians are spoken of as immediate neighbours of the Trojans; and a considerable body of primitive Hellenic legend is based on the early presence of Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but on the central west coast about the Bay of Smyrna and in the Caystrian plain, from which points of vantage they held direct relations with the immigrant Greeks themselves. It seems, therefore, certain that at some time before 800 B.C. nearly all the western half of the peninsula owed allegiance more or less complete to the power on the Sangarius, and that even the Heraclid kings of Lydia were not independent of it.

If Phrygia was powerful enough in the ninth century to hold the west Anatolian lands in fee, did it also dominate enough of the eastern peninsula to be ranked the imperial heir of the Cappadocian Hatti? The answer to this question (if any at all can be returned on very slight evidence) will depend on the view taken about the possible identity of the Phrygian power with that obscure but real power of the Mushki, of which we have already heard. The identity in question is so generally accepted nowadays that it has become a commonplace of historians to speak of the "Mushki-Phrygians." Very possibly they are right. But, by way of caution, it must be remarked that the identification depends ultimately on another, namely, that of Mita, King of the Mushki, against whom Ashurbanipal would fight more than a century later, with Midas, last King of Phrygia, who is mentioned by Herodotus and celebrated in Greek myth. To assume this identity is very attractive. Mita of Mushki and Midas of Phrygia coincide well enough in date; both ruled in Asia Minor; both were apparently leading powers there; both fought with the Gimirrai or Cimmerians. But there are also certain difficulties of which too little account has perhaps been taken. While Mita seems to have been a common name in Asia as far inland as Mesopotamia at a much earlier period than this, the name Midas, on the other hand, came much later into Phrygia from the west, if there is anything in the Greek tradition that the Phryges or Briges had immigrated from south-east Europe. And supported as this tradition is not only by the occurrence of similar names and similar folk-tales in Macedonia and in Phrygia, but also by the western appearance of the later Phrygian art and script, we can hardly refuse it credit. Accordingly, if we find the origin of the Phrygians in the Macedonian Briges, we must allow that Midas, as a Phrygian name, came from Europe very much later than the first appearance of kings called Mita in Asia, and we are compelled to doubt whether the latter name is necessarily the same as Midas. When allusions to the Mushki in Assyrian records give any indication of their local habitat, it lies in the east, not the west, of the central Anatolian plain—nearly, in fact, where the Moschi lived in later historical times. The following points, therefore, must be left open at present: (1) whether the Mushki ever settled in Phrygia at all; (2) whether, if they did, the Phrygian kings who bore the names Gordius and Midas can ever have been Mushkite or have commanded Mushkite allegiance; (3) whether the kings called Mita in records of Sargon and Ashurbanipal were not lords rather of the eastern Mushki than of Phrygia. It cannot be assumed, on present evidence at any rate (though it is not improbable), that Phrygian kings ruled the Mushki of Cappadocia, and in virtue of that rule had an empire almost commensurate with the lost sway of the Hatti.

Nevertheless theirs was a strong power, the strongest in Anatolia, and the fame of its wealth and its walled towns dazzled and awed the Greek communities, which were thickly planted by now on the western and south-western coasts. Some of these had passed through the trials of infancy and were grown to civic estate, having established wide trade relations both by land and sea. In the coming century Cyme of Aeolis would give a wife to a Phrygian king. Ephesus seems to have become already an important social as well as religious centre. The objects of art found in 1905 on the floor of the earliest temple of Artemis in the plain (there was an earlier one in the hills) must be dated—some of them—not later than 700, and their design and workmanship bear witness to flourishing arts and crafts long established in the locality. Miletus, too, was certainly an adult centre of Hellenism and about to become a mother of new cities, if she had not already become so. But, so early as this year 800, we know little about the Asiatic Greek cities beyond the fact of their existence; and it will be wiser to let them grow for another two centuries and to speak of them more at length when they have become a potent factor in West Asian society. When we ring up the curtain again after two hundred years, it will be found that the light shed on the eastern scene has brightened; for not only will contemporary records have increased in volume and clarity, but we shall be able to use the lamp of literary history fed by traditions, which had not had to survive the lapse of more than a few generations.



CHAPTER III

THE EAST IN 600 B.C.

When we look at the East again in 600 B.C. after two centuries of war and tumultuous movements we perceive that almost all its lands have found fresh masters. The political changes are tremendous. Cataclysm has followed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygian dynasty has gone down in massacre and rapine, and from another seat of power its former client rules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholds of the lesser Semitic peoples have almost all succumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone snatched by one foreign dog from another. The Assyrian colossus which bestrid the west Asiatic world has failed and collapsed, and the Medes and the Chaldaeans—these two clouds no bigger than a man's hand which had lain on Assyria's horizon—fill her seat and her room. As we look back on it now, the political revolution is complete; but had we lived in the year 600 at Asshur or Damascus or Tyre or Tarsus, it might have impressed us less. A new master in the East did not and does not always mean either a new earth or a new heaven.

Let us see to how much the change really amounted. The Assyrian Empire was no more. This is a momentous fact, not to be esteemed lightly. The final catastrophe has happened only six years before our date; but the power of Assyria had been going downhill for nearly half a century, and it is clear, from the freedom with which other powers were able to move about the area of her empire some time before the end, that the East had been free of her interference for years. Indeed, so near and vital a centre of Assyrian nationality as Calah, the old capital of the Middle Empire, had been taken and sacked, ere he who was to be the last "Great King" of the northern Semites ascended his throne.

SECTION 1. THE NEW ASSYRIAN KINGDOM

For the last hundred and fifty years Assyrian history—a record of black oppression abroad and blacker intrigue at home—has recalled the rapid gathering and slower passing away of some great storm. A lull marks the first half of the ninth century. Then almost without warning the full fury of the cloud bursts and rages for nearly a hundred years. Then the gloom brightens till all is over. The dynasty of Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser II slowly declined to its inevitable end. The capital itself rose in revolt in the year 747, and having done with the lawful heirs, chose a successful soldier, who may have been, for aught we know, of royal blood, but certainly was not in the direct line. Tiglath Pileser—for he took a name from earlier monarchs, possibly in vindication of legitimacy—saw (or some wise counsellor told him) that the militant empire which he had usurped must rely no longer on annual levies of peasants from the Assyrian villages, which were fast becoming exhausted; nor could it continue to live on uncertain blackmail collected at uncertain intervals now beyond Euphrates, now in Armenia, now again from eastern and southern neighbours. Such Bedawi ideas and methods were outworn. The new Great King tried new methods to express new ideas. A soldier by profession, indebted to the sword for his throne, he would have a standing and paid force always at his hand, not one which had to be called from the plough spring by spring. The lands, which used to render blackmail to forces sent expressly all the way from the Tigris, must henceforward be incorporated in the territorial empire and pay their contributions to resident governors and garrisons. Moreover, why should these same lands not bear a part for the empire in both defence and attack by supplying levies of their own to the imperial armies? Finally the capital, Calah, with its traditions of the dead dynasty, the old regime and the recent rebellion, must be replaced by a new capital, even as once on a time Asshur, with its Babylonian and priestly spirit, had been replaced. Accordingly sites, a little higher up the Tigris and more centrally situated in relation to both the homeland and the main roads from west and east, must be promoted to be capitals. But in the event it was not till after the reign of Sargon closed that Nineveh was made the definitive seat of the last Assyrian kings.

Organized and strengthened during Tiglath Pileser's reign of eighteen years, this new imperial machine, with its standing professional army, its myriad levies drawn from all fighting races within its territory, its large and secure revenues and its bureaucracy keeping the provinces in constant relation to the centre, became the most tremendous power of offence which the world had seen. So soon as Assyria was made conscious of her new vigour by the ease with which the Urartu raiders, who had long been encroaching on Mesopotamia, and even on Syria, were driven back across the Nairi lands and penned into their central fastnesses of Van; by the ease, too, with which Babylonia was humbled and occupied again, and the Phoenician ports and the city of Damascus, impregnable theretofore, were taken and held to tribute—she began to dream of world empire, the first society in history to conceive this unattainable ideal. Certain influences and events, however, would defer awhile any attempt to realize the dream. Changes of dynasty took place, thanks partly to reactionary forces at home and more to the praetorian basis on which the kingdom now reposed, and only one of his house succeeded Tiglath Pileser. But the set-back was of brief duration. In the year 722 another victorious general thrust himself on to the throne and, under the famous name of Sargon, set forth to extend the bounds of the empire towards Media on the east, and over Cilicia into Tabal on the west, until he came into collision with King Mita of the Mushki and held him to tribute.

SECTION 2. THE EMPIRE OF SARGON

Though at least one large province had still to be added to the Assyrian Empire, Sargon's reign may be considered the period of its greatest strength. He handed on to Sennacherib no conquests which could not have been made good, and the widest extent of territory which the central power was adequate to hold. We may pause, then, just before Sargon's death in 705, to see what the area of that territory actually was.

Its boundaries cannot be stated, of course, with any approach to the precision of a modern political geographer. Occupied territories faded imperceptibly into spheres of influence and these again into lands habitually, or even only occasionally, raided. In some quarters, especially from north-east round to north-west, our present understanding of the terms of ancient geography, used by Semitic scribes, is very imperfect, and, when an Assyrian king has told us carefully what lands, towns, mountains and rivers his army visited, it does not follow that we can identify them with any exactness. Nor should the royal records be taken quite at their face value. Some discount has to be allowed (but how much it is next to impossible to say) on reports, which often ascribe all the actions of a campaign not shared in by the King in person (as in certain instances can be proved) to his sole prowess, and grandiloquently enumerate twoscore princedoms and kingdoms which were traversed and subdued in the course of one summer campaign in very difficult country. The illusion of immense achievement, which it was intended thus to create, has often imposed itself on modern critics, and Tiglath Pileser and Sargon are credited with having marched to the neighbourhood of the Caspian, conquering or holding to ransom great provinces, when their forces were probably doing no more than climbing from valley to valley about the headwaters of the Tigris affluents, and raiding chiefs of no greater territorial affluence than the Kurdish beys of Hakkiari.

East of Assyria proper, the territorial empire of Sargon does not seem to have extended quite up to the Zagros watershed; but his sphere of influence included not only the heads of the Zab valleys, but also a region on the other side of the mountains, reaching as far as Hamadan and south-west Azerbaijan, although certainly not the eastern or northern districts of the latter province, or Kaswan, or any part of the Caspian littoral. On the north, the frontier of Assyrian territorial empire could be passed in a very few days' march from Nineveh. The shores of neither the Urmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularly occupied by Assyria, and, though Sargon certainly brought into his sphere of influence the kingdom of Urartu, which surrounded the latter lake and controlled the tribes as far as the western shore of the former, it is not proved that his armies ever went round the east and north of the Urmia Lake, and it is fairly clear that they left the northwestern region of mountains between Bitlis and the middle Euphrates to its own tribesmen.

Westwards and southwards, however, Sargon's arm swept a wider circuit. He held as his own all Mesopotamia up to Diarbekr, and beyond Syria not only eastern and central Cilicia, but also some districts north of Taurus, namely, the low plain of Milid or Malatia, and the southern part of Tabal; but probably his hand reached no farther over the plateau than to a line prolonged from the head of the Tokhma Su to the neighbourhood of Tyana, and returning thence to the Cilician Gates. Beyond that line began a sphere of influence which we cannot hope to define, but may guess to have extended over Cappadocia, Lycaonia and the southern part of Phrygia. Southward, all Syria was Sargon's, most of it by direct occupation, and the rest in virtue of acknowledged overlordship and payment of tribute. Even the seven princes of Cyprus made such submission. One or two strong Syrian towns, Tyre and Jerusalem, for example, withheld payment if no Assyrian army was at hand; but their show of independence was maintained only on sufferance. The Philistine cities, after Sargon's victory over their forces and Egyptian allies at Raphia, in 720, no longer defended their walls, and the Great King's sphere of influence stretched eastward right across the Hamad and southward over north Arabia. Finally, Babylonia was all his own even to the Persian Gulf, the rich merchants supporting him firmly in the interests of their caravan trade, however the priests and the peasantry might murmur. But Elam, whose king and people had carried serious trouble into Assyria itself early in the reign, is hardly to be reckoned to Sargon even as a sphere of influence. The marshes of its south-west, the tropical plains of the centre and the mountains on the east, made it a difficult land for the northern Semites to conquer and hold. Sargon had been wise enough to let it be. Neither so prudent nor so fortunate would be his son and successors.

SECTION 3. THE CONQUEST OF EGYPT

Such was the empire inherited by Sargon's son, Sennacherib. Not content, he would go farther afield to make a conquest which has never remained long in the hands of an Asiatic power. It was not only lust of loot, however, which now urged Assyria towards Egypt. The Great Kings had long found their influence counteracted in southern Syria by that of the Pharaohs. Princes of both Hebrew states, of the Phoenician and the Philistine cities and even of Damascus, had all relied at one time or another on Egypt, and behind their combinations for defence and their individual revolts Assyria had felt the power on the Nile. The latter generally did no more in the event to save its friends than it had done for Israel when Shalmaneser IV beleaguered, and Sargon took and garrisoned, Samaria; but even ignorant hopes and empty promises of help cause constant unrest. Therefore Sennacherib, after drastic chastisement of the southern states in 701 (both Tyre and Jerusalem, however, kept him outside their walls), and a long tussle with Chaldaean Babylon, was impelled to set out in the last year, or last but one, of his reign for Egypt. In southern Palestine he was as successful as before, but, thereafter, some signal disaster befell him. Probably an epidemic pestilence overtook his army when not far across the frontier, and he returned to Assyria only to be murdered.

He bequeathed the venture to the son who, after defeating his parricide brothers, secured his throne and reigned eleven years under a name which it has been agreed to write Esarhaddon. So soon as movements in Urartu and south-western Asia Minor had been suppressed, and, more important, Babylon, which his father had dishonoured, was appeased, Esarhaddon took up the incomplete conquest. Egypt, then in the hands of an alien dynasty from the Upper Nile and divided against itself, gave him little trouble at first. In his second expedition (670) he reached Memphis itself, carried it by assault, and drove the Cushite Tirhakah past Thebes to the Cataracts. The Assyrian proclaimed Egypt his territory and spread the net of Ninevite bureaucracy over it as far south as the Thebaid; but neither he nor his successors cared to assume the style and titles of the Pharaohs, as Persians and Greeks, wiser in their generations, would do later on. Presently trouble at home, excited by a son rebelling after the immemorial practice of the east, recalled Esarhaddon to Assyria; Tirhakah moved up again from the south; the Great King returned to meet him and died on the march.

[Plate 4: ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF ASHURBANIPAL]

But Memphis was reoccupied by Esarhaddon's successor, and since the latter took and ruined Thebes also, and, after Tirhakah's death, drove the Cushites right out of Egypt, the doubtful credit of spreading the territorial empire of Assyria to the widest limits it ever reached falls to Ashurbanipal. Even Tyre succumbed at last, and he stretched his sphere of influence over Asia Minor to Lydia. First of Assyrian kings he could claim Elam with its capital Susa as his own (after 647), and in the east he professed overlordship over all Media. Mesopotamian arts and letters now reached the highest point at which they had stood since Hammurabi's days, and the fame of the wealth and luxury of "Sardanapal" went out even into the Greek lands. About 660 B.C. Assyria seemed in a fair way to be mistress of the desirable earth.

SECTION 4. DECLINE AND FALL OF ASSYRIA

Strong as it seemed in the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire was, however, rotten at the core. In ridding itself of some weaknesses it had created others. The later Great Kings of Nineveh, raised to power and maintained by the spears of paid praetorians, found less support even than the old dynasty of Calah had found, in popular religious sentiment, which (as usual in the East) was the ultimate basis of Assyrian nationality; nor, under the circumstances, could they derive much strength from tribal feeling, which sometimes survives the religious basis. Throughout the history of the New Kingdom we can detect the influence of a strong opposition centred at Asshur. There the last monarch of the Middle Kingdom had fixed his dwelling under the wing of the priests; there the new dynasty had dethroned him as the consummation of an anti-sacerdotal rising of nobles and of peasant soldiery. Sargon seems to have owed his elevation two generations later to revenge taken for this victory by the city folk; but Sargon's son, Sennacherib, in his turn, found priestly domination intolerable, and, in an effort to crush it for ever, wrecked Babylon and terrorized the central home of Semitic cult, the great sacerdotal establishment of Bel-Marduk. After his father's murder, Esarhaddon veered back to the priests, and did so much to court religious support, that the military party incited Ashurbanipal to rebellion and compelled his father to associate the son in the royal power before leaving Assyria for the last time to die (or be killed) on the way to Egypt. Thus the whole record of dynastic succession in the New Kingdom has been typically Oriental, anticipating, at every change of monarch, the history of Islamic Empires. There is no trace of unanimous national sentiment for the Great King. One occupant of the throne after another gains power by grace of a party and holds it by mercenary swords.

Another imperial weakness was even more fatal. So far as can be learned from Assyria's own records and those of others, she lived on her territorial empire without recognizing the least obligation to render anything to her provinces for what they gave—not even to render what Rome gave at her worst, namely, peace. She regarded them as existing simply to endow her with money and men. When she desired to garrison or to reduce to impotence any conquered district, the population of some other conquered district would be deported thither, while the new subjects took the vacant place. What happened when Sargon captured Samaria happened often elsewhere (Ashurbanipal, for example, made Thebes and Elam exchange inhabitants), for this was the only method of assimilating alien populations ever conceived by Assyria. When she attempted to use natives to govern natives the result was such disaster as followed Ashurbanipal's appointment of Psammetichus, son of Necho, to govern Memphis and the Western Delta.

Rotten within, hated and coveted by vigorous and warlike races on the east, the north and the south, Assyria was moving steadily towards her catastrophe amid all the glory of "Sardanapal." The pace quickened when he was gone. A danger, which had lain long below the eastern horizon, was now come up into the Assyrian field of vision. Since Sargon's triumphant raids, the Great King's writ had run gradually less and less far into Media; and by his retaliatory invasions of Elam, which Sennacherib had provoked, Ashurbanipal not only exhausted his military resources, but weakened a power which had served to check more dangerous foes.

We have seen that the "Mede" was probably a blend of Scythian and Iranian, the latter element supplying the ruling and priestly classes. The Scythian element, it seems, had been receiving considerable reinforcement. Some obscure cause, disturbing the northern steppes, forced its warlike shepherds to move southward in the mass. A large body, under the name Gimirrai or Cimmerians, descended on Asia Minor in the seventh century and swept it to the western edge of the plateau and beyond; others pressed into central and eastern Armenia, and, by weakening the Vannic king, enabled Ashurbanipal to announce the humiliation of Urartu; others again ranged behind Zagros and began to break through to the Assyrian valleys. Even while Ashurbanipal was still on the throne some of these last had ventured very far into his realm; for in the year of his death a band of Scythians appeared in Syria and raided southwards even to the frontier of Egypt. It was this raid which virtually ended the Assyrian control of Syria and enabled Josiah of Jerusalem and others to reassert independence.

The death of Ashurbanipal coincided also with the end of direct Assyrian rule over Babylon. After the death of a rebellious brother and viceroy in 648, the Great King himself assumed the Babylonian crown and ruled the sacred city under a Babylonian name. But there had long been Chaldaean principalities in existence, very imperfectly incorporated in the Assyrian Empire, and these, inspiring revolts from time to time, had already succeeded in placing more than one dynast on the throne of Babylon. As soon as "Sardanapal" was no more and the Scythians began to overrun Assyria, one of these principalities (it is not known which) came to the front and secured the southern crown for its prince Nabu-aplu-utsur, or, as the Greeks wrote the name, Nabopolassar. This Chaldaean hastened to strengthen himself by marrying his son, Nebuchadnezzar, to a Median princess, and threw off the last pretence of submission to Assyrian suzerainty. He had made himself master of southern Mesopotamia and the Euphrates Valley trade-route by the year 609.

At the opening of the last decade of the century, therefore, we have this state of things. Scythians and Medes are holding most of eastern and central Assyria; Chaldaeans hold south Mesopotamia; while Syria, isolated from the old centre of empire, is anyone's to take and keep. A claimant appears immediately in the person of the Egyptian Necho, sprung from the loins of that Psammetichus who had won the Nile country back from Assyria. Pharaoh entered Syria probably in 609, broke easily through the barrier which Josiah of Jerusalem, greatly daring in this day of Assyrian weakness, threw across his path at Megiddo, went on to the north and proceeded to deal as he willed with the west of the Assyrian empire for four or five years. The destiny of Nineveh was all but fulfilled. With almost everything lost outside her walls, she held out against the Scythian assaults till 606, and then fell to the Mede Uvakhshatra, known to the Greeks as Kyaxares. The fallen capital of West Asia was devastated by the conquerors to such effect that it never recovered, and its life passed away for ever across the Tigris, to the site on which Mosul stands at the present day.

SECTION 5. THE BABYLONIANS AND THE MEDES

Six years later,—in 600 B.C.—this was the position of that part of the East which had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldaean king of Babylon, who had succeeded his father about 605, held the greater share of it to obedience and tribute, but not, apparently, by means of any such centralized bureaucratic organization as the Assyrians had established. Just before his father's death he had beaten the Egyptians in a pitched battle under the walls of Carchemish, and subsequently had pursued them south through Syria, and perhaps across the frontier, before being recalled to take up his succession. He had now, therefore, no rival or active competitor in Syria, and this part of the lost empire of Assyria seems to have enjoyed a rare interval of peace under native client princes who ruled more or less on Assyrian lines. The only fenced places which made any show of defiance were Tyre and Jerusalem, which both relied on Egypt. The first would outlast an intermittent siege of thirteen years; but the other, with far less resources, was soon to pay full price for having leaned too long on the "staff of a broken reed."

About the east and north a different story would certainly have to be told, if we could tell it in full. But though Greek traditions come to our aid, they have much less to say about these remote regions than the inscribed annals of that empire, which had just come to its end, have had hitherto: and unfortunately the Median inheritors of Assyria have left no epigraphic records of their own—at least none have been found. If, as seems probable, the main element of Kyaxares' war strength was Scythian, we can hardly expect to find records either of his conquest or the subsequent career of the Medes, even though Ecbatana should be laid bare below the site of modern Hamadan; for the predatory Scyth, like the mediaeval Mongol, halted too short a time to desire to carve stones, and probably lacked skill to inscribe them. To complete our discomfiture, the only other possible source of light, the Babylonian annals, sheds none henceforward on the north country and very little on any country. Nebuchadnezzar—so far as his records have been found and read—did not adopt the Assyrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures, we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have constituted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.

We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service. First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides overrunning all Assyria and the northern part of Babylonia after the fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552 B.C.

Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained, under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in the widest sense of this vague term.

Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar—for he it must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown—was not a wholly independent ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their achievements.

In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be), and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power westward to Asia Minor, the Medes followed routes north of Taurus, not the old Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of so much we can be fairly sure. Much else that we are told of Media by Herodotus—his marvellous account of Ecbatana and scarcely less wonderful account of the reigning house—must be passed by till some confirmation of it comes to light; and that, perhaps, will never be.

SECTION 6. ASIA MINOR

A good part of the East, however, remains which owed allegiance neither to Media nor to Babylon. It is, indeed, a considerably larger area than was independent of the Farther East at the date of our last survey. Asia Minor was in all likelihood independent from end to end, from the Aegean to the Euphrates—for in 600 B.C. Kyaxares had probably not yet come through Urartu—and from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Issus. About much of this area we have far more trustworthy information now than when we looked at it last, because it had happened to fall under the eyes of the Greeks of the western coastal cities, and to form relations with them of trade and war. But about the residue, which lay too far eastward to concern the Greeks much, we have less information than we had in 800 B.C., owing to the failure of the Assyrian imperial annals.

The dominant fact in Asia Minor in 600 B.C. is the existence of a new imperial power, that of Lydia. Domiciled in the central west of the peninsula, its writ ran eastwards over the plateau about as far as the former limits of the Phrygian power, on whose ruins it had arisen. As has been stated already, there is reason to believe that its "sphere of influence," at any rate, included Cilicia, and the battle to be fought on the Halys, fifteen years after our present survey, will argue that some control of Cappadocia also had been attempted. Before we speak of the Lydian kingdom, however, and of its rise to its present position, it will be best to dispose of that outlying state on the southeast, probably an ally or even client of Lydia, which, we are told, was at this time one of the "four powers of Asia." These powers included Babylon also, and accordingly, if our surmise that the Mede was then the overlord of Nebuchadnezzar be correct, this statement of Eusebius, for what it is worth, does not imply that Cilicia had attained an imperial position. Doubtless of the four "powers," she ranked lowest.

SECTION 7. CILICIA

It will be remembered how much attention a great raiding Emperor of the Middle Assyrian period, Shalmaneser II, had devoted to this little country. The conquering kings of later dynasties had devoted hardly less. From Sargon to Ashurbanipal they or their armies had been there often, and their governors continuously. Sennacherib is said to have rebuilt Tarsus "in the likeness of Babylon," and Ashurbanipal, who had to concern himself with the affairs of Asia Minor more than any of his predecessors, was so intimately connected with Tarsus that a popular tradition of later days placed there the scene of his death and the erection of his great tomb. And, in fact, he may have died there for all that we know to the contrary; for no Assyrian record tells us that he did not. Unlike the rest of Asia Minor, Cilicia was saved by the Assyrians from the ravages of the Cimmerians. Their leader, Dugdamme, whom the Greeks called Lygdamis, is said to have met his death on the frontier hills of Taurus, which, no doubt, he failed to pass. Thus, when Ashurbanipal's death and the shrinking of Ninevite power permitted distant vassals to resume independence, the unimpaired wealth of Cilicia soon gained for her considerable importance. The kings of Tarsus now extended their power into adjoining lands, such as Kue on the east and Tabal on the north, and probably over even the holding of the Kummukh; for Herodotus, writing a century and a half after our date, makes the Euphrates a boundary of Cilicia. He evidently understood that the northernmost part of Syria, called by later geographers (but never by him) Commagene, was then and had long been Cilician territory. His geographical ideas, in fact, went back to the greater Cilicia of pre-Persian time, which had been one of the "four great powers of Asia."

The most interesting feature of Cilician history, as it is revealed very rarely and very dimly in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom, consists in its relation to the earliest eastward venturing of the Greeks. The first Assyrian king with whom these western men seem to have collided was Sargon, who late in the eighth century, finding their ships in what he considered his own waters, i.e. on the coasts of Cyprus and Cilicia, boasts that he "caught them like fish." Since this action of his, he adds, "gave rest to Kue and Tyre," we may reasonably infer that the "Ionian pirates" did not then appear on the shores of Phoenicia and Cilicia for the first time; but, on the contrary, that they were already a notorious danger in the easternmost Levant. In the year 720 we find a nameless Greek of Cyprus (or Ionia) actually ruling Ashdod. Sargon's successor, Sennacherib, had serious trouble with the Ionians only a few years later, as has been learned from the comparison of a royal record of his, only recently recovered and read, with some statements made probably in the first place by the Babylonian historian, Berossus, but preserved to us in a chronicle of much later date, not hitherto much heeded. Piecing these scraps of information together, the Assyrian scholar, King, has inferred that, in the important campaign which a revolt of Tarsus, aided by the peoples of the Taurus on the west and north, compelled the generals of Sennacherib to wage in Cilicia in the year 698, Ionians took a prominent part by land, and probably also by sea. Sennacherib is said (by a late Greek historian) to have erected an "Athenian" temple in Tarsus after the victory, which was hardly won; and if this means, as it may well do, an "Ionic" temple, it states a by no means incredible fact, seeing that there had been much local contact between the Cilicians and the men of the west. Striking similarities of form and artistic execution between the early glyptic and toreutic work of Ionia and Cilicia respectively have been mentioned in the last chapter; and it need only be added here, in conclusion, that if Cilicia had relations with Ionia as early as the opening of the seventh century—relations sufficient to lead to alliance in war and to modification of native arts—it is natural enough that she should be found allied a few years later with Lydia rather than with Media.

SECTION 8. PHRYGIA

When we last surveyed Asia Minor as a whole it was in large part under the dominance of a central power in Phrygia. This power is now no more, and its place has been taken by another, which rests on a point nearer to the western coast. It is worth notice, in passing, how Anatolian dominion has moved stage by stage from east to west—from the Halys basin in northern Cappadocia, where its holders had been, broadly speaking, in the same cultural group as the Mesopotamian East, to the middle basin of the Sangarius, where western influences greatly modified the native culture (if we may judge by remains of art and script). Now at last it has come to the Hermus valley, up which blows the breath of the Aegean Sea. Whatever the East might recover in the future, the Anatolian peninsula was leaning more and more on the West, and the dominion of it was coming to depend on contact with the vital influence of Hellenism, rather than on connection with the heart of west Asia.

A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas—preferably with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been immortalized in mythology. If this identification is correct, we have to picture Phrygia at the close of the eighth century as dominating almost all Asia Minor, whether by direct or by indirect rule; as prepared to measure her forces (though without ultimate success) against the strongest power in Asia; and as claiming interests even outside the peninsula. Pisiris, king of Carchemish, appealed to Mita as his ally, either because the Mushki of Asia Minor sat in the seat of his own forbears, the Hatti of Cappadocia, or because he was himself of Mushki kin. There can be no doubt that the king thus invoked was king of Cappadocia. Whether he was king also of Phrygia, i.e. really the same as Midas son of Gordius, is, as has been said already, less certain. Mita's relations with Kue, Tabal and Carchemish do not, in themselves, argue that his seat of power was anywhere else than in the east of Asia Minor, where Moschi did actually survive till much later times: but, on the other hand, the occurrence of inscriptions in the distinctive script of Phrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and at Tyana, south-east of the central Anatolian desert, argue that at some time the filaments of Phrygian power did stretch into Cappadocia and towards the land of the later Moschi.

It must also be admitted that the splendour of the surviving rock monuments near the Phrygian capital is consistent with its having been the centre of a very considerable empire, and hardly consistent with its having been anything less. The greatest of these, the tomb of a king Midas (son not of Gordius but of Atys), has for facade a cliff about a hundred feet high, cut back to a smooth face on which an elaborate geometric pattern has been left in relief. At the foot is a false door, while above the immense stone curtain the rock has been carved into a triangular pediment worthy of a Greek temple and engraved with a long inscription in a variety of the earliest Greek alphabet. There are many other rock-tombs of smaller size but similar plan and decoration in the district round the central site, and others which show reliefs of human figures and of lions, the latter of immense proportions on two famous facades. When these were carved, the Assyrian art of the New Kingdom was evidently known in Phrygia (probably in the early seventh century), and it is difficult to believe that those who made such great things under Assyrian influence can have passed wholly unmentioned by contemporary Assyrian records. Therefore, after all, we shall, perhaps, have to admit that they were those same Mushki who followed leaders of the name Mita to do battle with the Great Kings of Nineveh from Sargon to Ashurbanipal.

There is no doubt how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the last King Midas.

SECTION 9. LYDIA

It must have been in the hour of that disaster, or but little before, that a Mermnad prince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyrians and Gyges by Greeks, threw off any allegiance he may have owed to Phrygia and began to exalt his house and land of Lydia. He was the founder of a new dynasty, having been by origin, apparently, a noble of the court who came to be elevated to the throne by events differently related but involving in all the accounts some intrigue with his predecessor's queen. One historian, who says that he prevailed by the aid of Carians, probably states a fact; for it was this same Gyges who a few years later seems to have introduced Carian mercenaries to the notice of Psammetichus of Egypt. Having met and repulsed the Cimmerian horde without the aid of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, to whom he had applied in vain, Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebel who had just founded the Saite dynasty, and proceeded to enlarge his boundaries by attacking the prosperous Greeks on his western hand. But he was successful only against Colophon and Magnesia on the Maeander, inland places, and failed before Smyrna and Miletus, which could be provisioned by their fleets and probably had at their call a larger proportion of those warlike "Ionian pirates" who had long been harrying the Levant. In the course of a long reign, which Herodotus (an inexact chronologist) puts at thirty-eight years, Gyges had time to establish his power and to secure for his Lydians the control of the overland trade; and though a fresh Cimmerian horde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians (perhaps these were not unconnected with the Medes then moving westward, as we know), came down from the north, defeated and killed him, sacked the unfortified part of his capital and swept on to plunder what it could of the land as far as the sea without pausing to take fenced places, his son Ardys, who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, and made his submission to Ashurbanipal, was soon able to resume the offensive against the Greeks. After an Assyrian attack on the Cimmerian flank or rear had brought about the death of the chief barbarian leader in the Cilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm, the Lydian marched down the Maeander again. He captured Priene, but like his predecessor and his successor, he failed to snatch the most coveted prize of the Greek coast, the wealthy city Miletus at the Maeander mouth.

Up to the date of our present survey, however, and for half a century yet to come, these conquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia and Caria amounted to little more than forays for plunder and the levy of blackmail, like the earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They might result in the taking and sacking of a town here and there, but not in the holding of it. The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not much more than a century later, tells us expressly that up to the time of Croesus, that is, to his own father's time, all the Greeks kept their freedom: and even if he means by this statement, as possibly he does, that previously no Greeks had been subjected to regular slavery, it still supports our point: for, if we may judge by Assyrian practice, the enslaving of vanquished peoples began only when their land was incorporated in a territorial empire. We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.

Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the popular belief of his time, were deeply indebted to Lydia for their civilization. The larger part of this debt (if real) was incurred probably after 600 B.C.; but some constituent items of the account must have been of older date—the coining of money, for example. There is, however, much to be set on the other side of the ledger, more than Herodotus knew, and more than we can yet estimate. Too few monuments of the arts of the earlier Lydians and too few objects of their daily use have been found in their ill-explored land for us to say whether they owed most to the West or to the East. From the American excavation of Sardes, however, we have already learned for certain that their script was of a Western type, nearer akin to the Ionian than even the Phrygian was; and since their language contained a great number of Indo-European words, the Lydians should not, on the whole, be reckoned an Eastern people. Though the names given by Herodotus to their earliest kings are Mesopotamian and may be reminiscent of some political connection with the Far East at a remote epoch—perhaps that of the foreign relations of Ur, which seem to have extended to Cappadocia—all the later royal and other Lydian names recorded are distinctly Anatolian. At any rate all connection with Mesopotamia must have long been forgotten before Ashurbanipal's scribes could mention the prayer of "Guggu King of Luddi" as coming from a people and a land of which their master and his forbears had not so much as heard. As the excavation of Sardes and of other sites in Lydia proceeds, we shall perhaps find that the higher civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an influence of the Hellenic cities which began not much earlier than 600 B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date.

We know nothing of the extent of Lydian power towards the east, unless the suggestions already based on the passage of Herodotus concerning the meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally remote and insignificant Tibareni.

SECTION 10. THE GREEK CITIES

Of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast something has been said already. The great period of the elder ones as free and independent communities falls between the opening of the eighth century and the close of the sixth. Thus they were in their full bloom about the year 600. By the foundation of secondary colonies (Miletus alone is said to have founded sixty!) and the establishment of trading posts, they had pushed Hellenic culture eastwards round the shores of the peninsula, to Pontus on the north and to Cilicia on the south. In the eyes of Herodotus this was the happy age when "all Hellenes were free" as compared with his own experience of Persian overlordship. Miletus, he tells us, was then the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon of Teos, and many more. The fact is significant, because studies and literary activities like theirs could hardly have been pursued except in highly civilized, free and leisured societies where life and wealth were secure.

If, however, the brilliant culture of the Asiatic Greeks about the opening of the sixth century admits no shadow of doubt, singularly few material things, which their arts produced, have been recovered for us to see to-day. Miletus has been excavated by Germans to a very considerable extent, without yielding anything really worthy of its great period, or, indeed, much that can be referred to that period at all, except sherds of a fine painted ware. It looks as if the city at the mouth of the greatest and largest valley, which penetrates Asia Minor from the west coast, was too important in subsequent ages and suffered chastisements too drastic and reconstructions too thorough for remains of its earlier greatness to survive except in holes and corners. Ephesus has given us more archaic treasures, from the deposits bedded down under the later reconstructions of its great shrine of Artemis; but here again the site of the city itself, though long explored by Austrians, has not added to the store. The ruins of the great Roman buildings which overlie its earlier strata have proved, perhaps, too serious an impediment to the excavators and too seductive a prize. Branchidae, with its temple of Apollo and Sacred Way, has preserved for us a little archaic statuary, as have also Samos and Chios. We have archaic gold work and painted vases from Rhodes, painted sarcophagi from Clazomenae, and painted pottery made there and at other places in Asia Minor, although found mostly abroad. But all this amounts to a very poor representation of the Asiatic Greek civilization of 600 B.C. Fortunately the soil still holds far more than has been got out of it. With those two exceptions, Miletus and Ephesus, the sites of the elder Hellenic cities on or near the Anatolian coast still await excavators who will go to the bottom of all things and dig systematically over a large area; while some sites await any excavation whatsoever, except such as is practised by plundering peasants.

In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained, exclusive. Their several societies had in consequence the intensely vivid and interested communal existence which develops civilization as a hot-house develops plants; but they were not democratic, and they had little sense of nationality—defects for which they were to pay dearly in the near future. In spite of their associations for the celebration of common festivals, such as the League of the twelve Ionian cities, and that of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-west, which led to discussion of common political interests, a separatist instinct, reinforced by the strong geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become domiciled on the western fringe of the inland plateau. Such a state had now appeared and established itself; and if the Greeks of Asia had had eyes to read, the writing was on their walls in 600 B.C.

Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes and their influence penetrated far up into Asia. The hands which carved some of the ivories found in the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus worked on artistic traditions derived ultimately from the Tigris. So, too, worked the smiths who made the Rhodian jewellery, and so, the artists who painted the Milesian ware and the Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the other side of the ledger (though three parts of its page is still hidden from us) we must put to Greek credit the script of Lydia, the rock pediments of Phrygia, and the forms and decorative schemes of many vessels and small articles in clay and bronze found in the Gordian tumuli and at other points on the western plateau from Mysia to Pamphylia. The men of "Javan," who had held the Syrian sea for a century past, were known to Ezekiel as great workers in metal; and in Cyprus they had long met and mingled their culture with that of men from the East.

It was implied in the opening of this chapter that in 600 B.C. social changes in the East would be found disproportionate to political changes; and on the whole they seem so to have been. The Assyrian Empire was too lately fallen for any great modification of life to have taken place in its area, and, in fact, the larger part of that area was being administered still by a Chaldaean monarchy on the established lines of Semitic imperialism. Whether the centre of such a government lay at Nineveh or at Babylon can have affected the subject populations very little. No new religious force had come into the ancient East, unless the Mede is to be reckoned one in virtue of his Zoroastrianism. Probably he did not affect religion much in his early phase of raiding and conquest. The great experience, which was to convert the Jews from insignificant and barbarous highlanders into a cultured, commercial and cosmopolitan people of tremendous possibilities had indeed begun, but only for a part of the race, and so far without obvious result. The first incursion of Iranians in force, and that slow soakage of Indo-European tribes from Russia, which was to develop the Armenian people of history, are the most momentous signs of coming change to be noted between 800 and 600 B.C. with one exception, the full import of which will be plain at our next survey. This was the eastward movement of the Greeks.



CHAPTER IV

THE EAST IN 400 B.C.

As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose literary 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 of others to record the results of inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men, military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these, Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians, Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus 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 some archaeological documents to fall back upon. If the cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of the later Assyrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform us of local society and life.

SECTION 1. EASTWARD MOVEMENT OF THE GREEKS

The Greek had been pushing eastward for a long time. More than three hundred years ago, as has been shown in the last chapter, he had become a terror in the farthest Levant. Before another century had passed he found his way into Egypt also. Originally hired as mercenaries to support a native revolt against Assyria, the Greeks remained in the Nile valley not only to fight but to trade. The first introduction of them to the Saite Pharaoh, Psammetichus, was promoted by Gyges the Lydian to further his own ends, but the first development of their social influence in Egypt was due to the enterprise 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 later (as will be told presently) to supersede the original Milesian factory. Though those foreign vases themselves, with their decoration of nude figure subjects which revolted vulgar Egyptian sentiment, did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion of Hellenic culture.

So useful or so dangerous—at any rate so numerous—did the Greeks become in Lower Egypt by the opening of the sixth century that a reservation was assigned to them beside the Egyptian town of Piemro, and to this alone, according to Herodotus, newcomers from the sea were allowed to make their way. This foreign suburb of Piemro was named Naukratis, and nine cities 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 superseded the Saitic before the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was maintained. The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the land, enthroned Hellenism at Alexandria on the sea itself.

SECTION 2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERS

Nor was it only through Greek sea-rovers and settlers in Cilicia, and through Greek mercenaries, merchants and courtesans in the Nile-Delta, that the East and the West had been making mutual acquaintance. Other agencies of communication had been active in bringing Mesopotamian models to the artists of the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor, and Ionian models to 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 produced these results are not so clear. If the agents or carriers of those mutual influences were certainly the Phoenicians and the Lydians, we cannot yet apportion with confidence to each of these peoples the responsibility for the results, or be sure that they were the only agents, or independent of other middlemen more directly in contact with one party or the other.

The Phoenicians have pushed far afield since we looked at them last. By founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours, beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western Mediterranean basin. By means of secondary settlements in west Sicily, Sardinia and Spain, she proceeded to convert this sea for a while into something like a Phoenician lake. No serious rival had forestalled her there or was to arise to dispute her monopoly till she herself, long after our date, would provoke Rome. 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 successively turned away from it all but isolated and peaceful ships of Sidon and Tyre, and even so near a coast as Cyprus remained foreign to the Phoenicians for centuries after Tyre had grown to full estate. In the Homeric stories ships of the Sidonians, though not unknown, make rare appearances, and other early legends of the Greeks, which make mention of Phoenician visits to Hellenic coasts, imply that they were unusual phenomena, which aroused much local curiosity and were long remembered. The strangeness of the Phoenician mariners, the unfamiliar charm of their cargoes—such were the impressions left on Greek story by the early visits of Phoenician ships.

That they did pay such visits, however, from time to time is certain. The little Egyptian trinkets, which occur frequently in Hellenic strata of the eighth to the sixth centuries, are sufficient witness of the fact. They are most 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—men who, if they would brave now and again the cold winds of the Aegean and Adriatic, refused to do so oftener than was necessary—men to whom African shores and a climate softened by the breath of the Ocean were more congenial.

If, however, the Phoenicians were undoubtedly agents who introduced the Egyptian culture to the early Hellenes of both Asia and Europe, did they also introduce the Mesopotamian? Not to anything like the same extent, if we may judge by the products of excavations. Indeed, wherever Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often 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, imperfect though its results are yet, has brought to light on the plateau so much parallelism to Ionian Orientalizing art, and so many examples of prior stages in its development, that we must assume Mesopotamian influence to have reached westernmost Asia chiefly by overland ways. As for the European sites, since their Orientalism appears to have been drawn from Ionia, it also had come through Asia overland.

Therefore on the whole, though Herodotus asserts that the Phoenician mariners carried Assyrian cargoes, there is remarkably little evidence that those cargoes reached the West, and equally little that Phoenicians had any considerable direct trade with Mesopotamia. They may 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 in Hittite hands than theirs. The strongest Nilotic influence which affected Mesopotamian art is to be noticed during the latter half of the New Assyrian Kingdom, when there was no need for alien intermediaries to keep Nineveh in communication with its own province of Egypt.

Apparently, therefore, it was not through the Phoenicians that the Greeks had learned most of what they knew about the East in 400 B.C. Other agents had played a greater part and almost all the intercommunication had been effected by way, not of the Levant Sea, but of the land bridge through Asia Minor. In the earlier part of 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 the story it will be seen that the intermediaries have vanished; the barriers are down; the East has itself come to the West and intercourse is immediate and direct. How this happened—what agency brought Greeks and Orientals into an intimate contact which was to have the most momentous consequences to both—remains to be told.

SECTION 3. THE COMING OF THE PERSIANS

We have seen already how a power, which had grown behind the frontier mountains of the Tigris basin, forced its way at last through the defiles and issued in the riverine plains with fatal results to the north Semitic kings. By the opening of the sixth century Assyria had passed into Median hands, and these were reaching out through Armenia to central Asia Minor. Even the south Semites of Babylonia had had to acknowledge the superior power of the newcomers 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, and the rapidity with which his arms would appear in the farthest west of Asia Minor on the confines of the Greeks themselves. Nebuchadnezzar allied with and obedient to the Median king, helping him on the Halys in 585 B.C. to arrange with Lydia a division of the peninsula of Asia Minor on the terms uti possidetis—that is the significant situation which will prepare us to find Cyrus not quite half a century later lord of Babylon, Jerusalem and Sardes.

What events, passing in the far East among the divers groups of the Iranians themselves and their Scythian allies, led to this king of a district in Elam, whose own claim to have belonged by blood to any of those groups is doubtful, consolidating all the Iranians whether of the south or north under his single rule into a mighty power of offence, we do not know. Stories current among the Greeks and reported by Herodotus and Ctesias represented Cyrus 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, or very little subsequent to, Cyrus' time, only complicates the problem; since these bear witness that Cyrus was known at first (as has been indicated already) for a king of Elam, and not till later for a king of Persia. Ctesias, who lived at Susa itself while at was the Persian capital, agrees with Herodotus that Cyrus wrested the lordship of the Medes from the native dynasty by force; but Herodotus adds that many Medes were consenting parties.

These problems cannot be discussed here. The probability is, summarily, this. Some part of the southern or Persian group of Iranians which, unlike the northern, was not contaminated with Scyths, had advanced into Elam while the Medes were overrunning and weakening the Semitic Empire; and in Anshan it consolidated itself into a territorial power with Susa for capital. Presently some disaffection arose among the northern Iranians owing, perhaps, to favour shown by the Median kings to their warlike Scythian subjects, and the malcontents called in the king of Anshan. 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 by all Persia; but, once his lordship over this land was an accomplished fact, he naturally became known as king primarily of the Persians, and only secondarily of the Medes, while his seat remained at Susa in his own original Elamite realm. The Scythian element in and about his Median province remained unreconciled, and one day he would meet his death in a campaign against it; but the Iranian element remained faithful to him and his son, and only after the death of the latter gave expression by a general revolt to its discontent with the bargain it had made.

SECTION 4. FALL OF LYDIA

Cyrus must have met with little or no opposition in the western Median provinces, for we find him, within a year or two of his recognition by both Persians and Medes, not only on his extreme frontier, the Halys river, but able to raid across it and affront the power of Lydia. To this action he was provoked by Lydia itself. The fall of the Median dynasty, with which the royal house of Lydia had been in close alliance since the Halys pact, was a disaster which Croesus, now king of Sardes in the room of Alyattes, was rash enough to attempt to repair. He had continued with success his father's policy of extending Lydian dominion to the Aegean at the expense of the Ionian Greeks; and, master of Ephesus, Colophon and Smyrna, as well as predominant partner in the Milesian sphere, he secured to Lydia the control and fruition of Anatolian trade, perhaps the most various and profitable in the world at that time. A byword for wealth and luxury, the Lydians and their king had nowadays become soft, slow-moving folk, 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. The engagement was indecisive, but the Lydians, having no mind to stay out the winter on the bleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspicion that the enemy would think of further warfare before spring, went back at their leisure to the Hermus valley, only to hear at Sardes itself that the Persian was hot in pursuit. A final battle was fought under the very walls of the Lydian capital and lost by Croesus; the lower town was taken and sacked; and the king, who had shut himself with his guards into the citadel and summoned his allies to his rescue come five months, was a prisoner of Cyrus within two weeks. It was the end of Lydia and of all buffers between the Orient and Greece. East and West were in direct contact and the omens boded ill to the West. Cyrus refused terms to the Greeks, except the powerful Milesians, and departing for the East again, left Lydia to be pacified and all the cities of the western coasts, Ionian, Carian, Lycian and what not, excepting only Miletus, to be reduced by his viceroys.

SECTION 5. PERSIAN EMPIRE

Cyrus himself had still to deal with a part of the East which, not having been occupied by the Medes, though in a measure allied and subservient to them, saw no reason now to acknowledge the new dynasty. This is the part which had been included in the New Babylonian Empire. The Persian armies invaded Babylonia. Nabonidus was defeated finally at Opis in June 538; Sippara fell, and Cyrus' general 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 Eastern history—the history of imperial Babylon. Neither did he make it his capital, nor would any other lord of the East so favour it. If Alexander perhaps intended to revive its imperial position, his successor, Seleucus, so soon as he was assured of his inheritance, abandoned the Euphratean city for the banks of the Tigris and Orontes, leaving it to crumble to the heap which it is to-day.

The Syrian fiefs of the Babylonian kings passed de jure to the conqueror; but probably Cyrus himself never had leisure or opportunity to secure them de facto. The last decade of his life seems to have been spent in Persia and the north-east, largely in attempts to reduce the Scythian element, which threatened the peace of Media; 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 intervals, nearly two hundred years. By the end of the sixth century one territorial empire was spread over the whole East for the first time in history; and it was with a colossus, bestriding the lands from the Araxes to the Upper Nile and from the Oxus to the Aegean Sea, that the Greeks stood face to face in the gate of the West.

Before, however, we become absorbed in contemplation of a struggle which will take us into a wider history, let us pause a moment to consider the nature of the new power come out of the East, and the condition of such of its subject peoples as have mattered most in the later story of mankind. It should be remarked that the new universal power is not only non-Semitic for the first time in well-certified history, but controlled by a very pure Aryan stock, much nearer kin to the peoples of the West than any Oriental folk with which they have had intimate relations hitherto. The Persians appeared from the Back of Beyond, uncontaminated by Alarodian savagery and unhampered by the theocratic prepossessions and nomadic traditions of Semites. They 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 territorial rule. From the latter's reign onward we find a regular provincial system linked to the centre as well as might be by a postal service passing over state roads. The royal power is delegated to several officials, not always of the ruling race, but independent of each other and directly responsible to Susa: these live upon their provinces but must see to it first and foremost that the centre receives a fixed quota of money and a fixed quota of fighting men when required. The Great King maintains royal residences in various cities of the empire, and not infrequently visits them; but in general his viceroys are left singularly free to keep the peace of their own governorates and even to deal with foreign neighbours at their proper discretion.

If we compare the Persian theory of Empire with the Assyrian, we note still a capital fault. The Great King of Susa recognized no more obligation than his predecessors of Nineveh to consider the interests of those he ruled and to make return to them for what he took. But while, on the one hand, no better imperial theory was conceivable in the sixth century B.C., and certainly none was held or acted upon in the East down to the nineteenth century A.D., on the other, the Persian imperial practice mitigated its bad effects far more than the Assyrian had done. Free from the Semitic tradition of annual raiding, the Persians reduced the obligation of military service to a bearable burden and avoided continual provocation of frontier neighbours. Free likewise from Semitic supermonotheistic ideas, 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 reached our ears. If the sovereign of the Asiatic Greek cities ran counter to Hellenic feeling by insisting on "tyrant" rule, he did no more than continue a system under which most of those cities had grown rich. It is clear that they had little else to complain of than absence of a democratic freedom which, as a matter of fact, some of them had not enjoyed in the day of their independence. The satraps seem to have been supplied with few, or even no, Persian troops, and with few Persian aides on their administrative staff. The Persian element in the provinces must, in fact, have been extraordinarily small—so small that an Empire, which for more than two centuries comprehended nearly all western Asia, has left hardly a single provincial monument of itself, graven on rock or carved on stone.

SECTION 6. JEWS

If we look particularly at the Jews—those subjects of Persia who necessarily share most of our interest with the Greeks—we find that Persian imperial rule was no sooner established securely over the former Babylonian fief in Palestine than it began to undo the destructive work of its predecessors. Vainly expecting help from the restored Egyptian power, Jerusalem had held out against Nebuchadnezzar till 587. On its capture the dispersion of the southern Jews, which had already begun with local emigrations to Egypt, was largely increased by the deportation of a numerous body to Babylonia. As early, however, as 538, the year of Cyrus' entry into Babylon (doubtless as one result of that event), began a return of exiles to Judaea and perhaps also to Samaria. 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 a nation—it remains a striking testimony to Persian toleration that after only some six or seven generations the once insignificant Jews should have grown numerous enough to contribute an important element to the populations of several foreign cities. It is worth remark also that even when, presumably, free to return to the home of their race, many Jews preferred to remain in distant parts of the Persian realm. Names mentioned on contract tablets of Nippur show that Jews found it profitable to still sit by the waters of Babylon till late in the fifth century; while in another distant province of the Persian Empire (as the papyri of Syene have disclosed) a flourishing particularist settlement of the same race persisted right down to and after 500 B.C.