D. G. Hogarth--Ancient East

7/29/2019 D. G. Hogarth--Ancient East

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THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARYOF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

97

THE ANCIENT EAST


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EDITORS OFThe Home University Library

of Modern KnowledgeGILBERT MURRAY, O.M., D.G.L., F.B.A.

G. N. CLARK, D.LITT., F.B.A.G. R. DE BEER, D.SC., F.R.S.

United StatesJOHN FULTON, M.D., PH.D.

HOWARD MUMFORD JONES, LTTT.D.JULIAN BOYD, LTTT.D.


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The Ancient East

D. G. HOGARTH

Second Edition

Geoffrey CumberlegeOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO


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First published in 1914 and reprinted in 1919, 1926, 1928,1933 wt 1939

Second edition (with slight textual revision and amended bibliographyby Sir John L. Myres) 1945 ; reprinted in 1950

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN


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CONTENTSWUP. MINTRODUCTORY 9I THE EAST IN 1000 B.C. ... 21II THE EAST IN 800 B.C. ... 65in THE EAST IN 600 B.C. . .101IV THE EAST IN 400 B.C. . . * 149V THE VICTORY OF THE WEST . . 193VI EPILOGUE 218

NOTE ON BOOKS . . . .252INDEX * 254


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LIST OF MAPSPLATS FAOI1. THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND

ITS MAIN DIVISIONS . . . ,192. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMEN-

HETEP in 838. HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT.

EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C. . . 874. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST

EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF ASHUR-BANIPAL 118

5. PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATESTEXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS HYSTASPIS . 175

6. HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C. . 225


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THE ANCIENT EASTINTRODUCTORY

THE title of this book needs a word ofexplanation, since each of its terms canlegitimately be used to denote more thanone conception both of time and place.44The East

" is understood widely and vaguelynowadays to include all the continent andislands of Asia, some part of Africa thenorthern part where society and conditionsof life are most like the Asiatic and someregions also of South-Eastern and EasternEurope. Therefore it may appear arbitraryto restrict it in the present book to WesternAsia. But the qualifying term in my titlemust be invoked in justification. It is theEast not of to-day but of antiquity withwhich I have to deal, and, therefore, Iplead that it is not unreasonable to under-stand by "The East" what in antiquityEuropean historians understood by that term.


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10 THE ANCIENT EASTTo Herodotus and his contemporary GreeksEgypt, Arabia and India were the South;Thrace and Scythia were the North; andHither Asia was the East : for they conceivednothing beyond except the fabled stream ofOcean, it can be pleaded also that myrestriction, while not in itself arbitrary,does, in fact, obviate an otherwise inevitableobligation to fix arbitrary bounds to theEast. For the term, as used in moderntimes, implies a geographical area character-ized by society of a certain general type, andaccording to his opinion of this type, eachperson, who thinks or writes of the East,expands or contracts its geographical area.

It is more difficult to justify the restric-tion which will be imposed in the followingchapters on the word Ancient. This termis used even more vaguely and variouslythan the other. If generally it connotes theconverse of " Modern," in some connectionsand particularly in the study of historythe Modern is not usually understood to beginwhere the Ancient ended but to stand only forthe comparatively Recent. For example, inHistory, the ill-defined period called the Middleand Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus


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INTRODUCTORY 11before, in the process of retrospection, we getback to a civilization which (in Europe atleast) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again*in History, we distinguish commonly twoprovinces within the undoubted area of theAncient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, thefirst comprising all the time to which humanmemory, as communicated by surviving litera-ture, ran not, or, at least, not consciously, con-sistently and credibly. At the same time it isnot implied that we can have no knowledge atall of the Prehistoric province. It may even bebetter known to us than parts of the Historic,through sure deduction from archaeologicalevidence. But what we learn from archaeo-logical records is annalistic not historic, sincesuck records have not passed through thetransforming crucible of a human intelligencewhich reasons on events as effects of causes.The boundary between Prehistoric andHistoric, however, depends too much on thesubjectivity of individual historians and istoo apt to vary with the progress of researchto be a fixed moment. Nor can it be thesame for all civilizations. As regards Egypt,for example, we have a body of literarytradition which can reasonably be called


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12 THE ANCIENT EASTHistoric, relating to a time much earlier thanis reached by respectable literary tradition ofElam and Babylonia, though their civilizationswere probably older than the Egyptian.For the Ancient East as here understood,

we possess two bodies of historic literarytradition and two only, the Greek and theHebrew; and as it happens, both (thougheach is independent of the other) loseconsistency and credibility when they dealwith history before 1000 B.C. Moreover,Prof. Myres has covered the prehistoricperiod in the East in his brilliant Dawn ofHistory. Therefore, on all accounts, in treat-ing of the historic period, I am absolved fromlooking back more than a thousand yearsbefore our era.

It is not so obvious where I may stop.The overthrow of Persia by Alexander, con-summating a long stage in a secular contest,which it is my main business to describe,marks an epoch more sharply than any othersingle event in the history of the AncientEast. But there are grave objections tobreaking off abruptly at that date. Thereader can hardly close a book which endsthen, with any other impression than that


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INTRODUCTORY 18since the Greek has put the East under hisfeet, the history of the centuries, which havestill to elapse before Rome shall take overAsia, will simply be Greek history writ largethe history of a Greater Greece which has ex-panded over the ancient East and caused itto lose its distinction from the ancient West.Yet this impression does not by any meanscoincide with historical truth. The Mace-donian conquest of Hither Asia was a victorywon by men of Greek civilization, but onlyto a very partial extent a victory of thatcivilization. The West did not assimilatethe East except in very small measure then,and has not assimilated it in any very largemeasure to this day. For certain reasons,among which some geographical facts thelarge proportion of steppe-desert and of thehuman type which such country breedsare perhaps the most powerful, the East isobstinately unreceptive of western influences,and more than once it has taken its captorscaptive. Therefore, while, for the sake of con-venience and to avoid entanglement in the veryill-known maze of what is called " Hellenistic"history, I shall not attempt to follow theconsecutive course of events after 380 B.C., I


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14 THE ANCIENT EASTpropose to add an epilogue which may preparereaders for what was destined to come out ofWestern Asia after the Christian era, andenable them to understand in particular thereligious conquest of the West by the East.This has been a more momentous fact inthe history of the world than any politicalconquest of the East by the West.

In the further hope of enabling readers toretain a clear idea of the evolution of thehistory, I have adopted the plan of lookingout over the area which is here called theEast, at certain intervals, rather than thealternative and more usual plan of consider-ing events consecutively in each several partof that area. Thus, without repetition andoverlapping, one may expect to convey asense of. the history of the whole East asthe sum of the histories of particular parts.The occasions on which the surveys willbe taken are purely arbitrary chronologicalpoints two centuries apart. The years 1000800, 600, 400 B.C. are not, any of them,distinguished by known events of the kindthat is called epoch-making; nor have roundnumbers been chosen for any peculiar historic


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INTRODUCTORY 15significance. They might just as well havebeen 1001, 801 and so forth, or any otherdates divided by equal intervals. Least ofall is any mysterious virtue to be attachedto the millenary date with which I begin.But it is a convenient starting-point, notonly for the reason already stated, thatGreek literary memory the only literarymemory of antiquity worth anything forearly history goes back to about thatdate; but also because the year 1000 B.C.falls within a period of disturbance duringwhich certain racial elements and groups,destined to exert predominant influence onsubsequent history, were settling down intotheir historic homes.A westward and southward movement of

peoples, caused by some obscure pressurefrom the north-west and north-east, whichhad been disturbing eastern and central AsiaMinor for more than a century and apparentlyhad brought to an end the supremacy of theCappadocian Hatti, was quieting dowa, leav-ing the western peninsula broken up intosmall principalities. Indirectly the samemovement had brought about a like result innorthern Syria. A still more important move-


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16 THE ANCIENT EASTment of Iranian peoples from the fartheEast had ended in the coalescence of twconsiderable social groups, each containinthe germs of higher development, on thnorth-eastern and eastern fringes of the olMesopotamian sphere of influence. Theswere the Medic and the Persian. A littlearlier, a period of unrest in the Syria]and Arabian deserts, marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the wester:fringe-lands, had ended in the formation onew Semitic states in all parts of Syrifrom Shamal in the extreme north-wes(perhaps even from Cilicia beyond Amanusto Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finall;there is this justification for not trying tf Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but>n the central west coast about the Bay ofSmyrna and in the Caystrian plain, fromivhich points of vantage they held directelations with the immigrant Greeks them-;elves. It seems, therefore, certain that at;ome time before 800 B.C. nearly all the western


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96 THE ANCIENT EASThalf of the peninsula owed allegiance moreor less complete to the power on the Sangarius,and that even the Heraclid kings of Lydiawere not independent of it.

If Phrygia was powerful enough in theninth century to hold the west Anatolianlands in fee, did it also dominate enough ofthe eastern peninsula to be ranked the imperialheir of the Cappadocian Hatti ? The answerto this question (if any at all can be returnedon very slight evidence) will depend on theview taken about the possible identity of thePhrygian power with that obscure but realpower of the Mushki, of which we have alreadyheard. The identity in question is so gener-ally accepted nowadays that it has becomea commonplace of historians to speak ofthe " Mushki-Phrygians." Very possibly theyare right. But, by way of caution, it mustbe remarked that the identification de-pends ultimately on another, namely, thatof Mita, King of the Mushki, against whomAshurbanipal would fight more than a centurylater, with Midas, last King of Phrygia, whois mentioned by Herodotus and celebrated inGreek myth. To assume this identity is very


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THE EAST IN 800 B.C. 97attractive. Mita of Mushki and Midas ofPhrygia coincide well enough in date; bothruled in Asia Minor; both were apparentlyleading powers there; both fought with theGimirrai or Cimmerians. But there are alsocertain difficulties of which too little accounthas perhaps been taken. While Mita seems tohave been a common name in Asia as far inlandas Mesopotamia at a much earlier period thanthis, the name Midas, on the other hand,came much later into Phrygia from the west,if there is anything in the Greek traditionthat the Phryges or Briges had immigratedfrom south-east Europe. And supported asthis tradition is not only by the occurrenceof similar names and similar folk-tales inMacedonia and in Phrygia, but also by thewestern appearance of the later Phrygianart and script, we can hardly refuse it credit.Accordingly, if we find ^the origin of thePhrygians in the Macedonian Briges, we mustallow that Midas, as a Phrygian name, camefrom Europe very much later than the first ap-pearance of kings called Mita in Asia, and weare compelled to doubt whether the lattername is necessarily the same as Midas. When


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98 THE ANCIENT EASTallusions to the Mushki in Assyrian records giveany indication of their local habitat, it liesin the east, not the west, of the centralAnatolian plain nearly, in fact, where theMoschi lived in later historical times. Thefollowing points, therefore, must be left openat present: (1) whether the Mushki eversettled in Phrygia at all ; (2) whether, if theydid, the Phrygian kings who bore the namesGordius and Midas can ever have been Mush-ki or have commanded Mushki allegiance;(3) whether the kings called Mita in recordsof Sargon and Ashurbanipal were not lordsrather of the eastern Mushki than of Phrygia.It cannot be assumed, on present evidence atany rate (though it is not improbable), thatPhrygian kings ruled the Mushki of Cappa-docia, and in virtue of that rule had anempire almost commensurate with the lostsway of the Hatti.

Nevertheless theirs was a strong power,the strongest in Anatolia, and the fame ofits wealth and its walled towns dazzledand awed the Greek communities, which werethickly planted by now on the western andsouth-western coasts. Some of these had


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THE EAST IN 800 B.C. 99passed through the trials of infancy and weregrown to civic estate, having establishedwide trade relations both by land and sea.In the coming century Cyme of JSolis wouldgive a wife to a Phrygian king. Ephesusseems to have become already an importantsocial as well as religious centre. Theobjects of art found in 1905 on the floor of theearliest temple of Artemis in the plain (therewas an earlier one in the hills) must be datedsome of them not later than 700, and their

design and workmanship bear witness toflourishing arts and crafts long established inthe locality. Miletus, too, was certainly anadult centre of Hellenism and about to becomea mother of new cities, if she had not alreadybecome so. But, so early as this year 800,we know little about the Asiatic Greek citiesbeyond the fact of their existence; and itwill be wiser to Jet them grow for anothertwo centuries and to speak of them moreat length when they have become a potentfactor in West Asian society. When we ringup the curtain again after two. hundred years,it will be found that the light shed on theeastern scene has brightened; for not only


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100 THE ANCIENT EASTwill contemporary records have increased involume and clarity, but we shall be able touse the lamp of literary history fed by tradi-tions, which had not had to survive the lapseof more than a few generations.


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CHAPTER HITHE EAST IN 600 B.C.WHEN we look at the East again in 600 B.C.

after two centuries of war and tumultuousmovements we perceive that almost all itslands have found fresh masters. The politicalchanges are tremendous. Cataclysm hasfollowed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygiandynasty has gone down in massacre and rapine,andfrom another seat of power its former clientrules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholdsof the lesser Semitic peoples have almost allsuccumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bonesnatched by one foreign dog from another.The Assyrian colossus which bestrid thewest Asiatic world has failed and collapsed,and the Medes and the Chaldseans these twoclouds no bigger than a man's hand whichhad lain on Assyria's horizon fill her seatand her room. As we look back on it now,the political revolution is complete; but had

101


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102 THE ANCIENT EASTwe lived in the year 600 at Assihur or Damascusor Tyre or Tarsus, it might have impressed usless. A new master in the East did not anddoes not always mean either a new earth ora new heaven.

Let us see to how much the change reallyamounted. The Assyrian Empire was nomore. This is a momentous fact, not to beesteemed lightly. The final catastrophe hashappened only six years before our date;but the power of Assyria had been goingdownhill for nearly half a century, and itis clear, from the freedom with which otherpowers were able to move about the area ofher empire some time before the end, thatthe East had been free of her interference foryears. Indeed, so near and vital a centre ofAssyrian nationality as Calah, the old capitalof the Middle Empire, had been taken andsacked, ere he who was to be the last " GreatKing " ol the northern Semites ascended histhrone.

1. THE NEW ASSYBIAN KINGDOMFor the last hundred and fifty years

Assyrian history a record of black oppres-


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104 THE ANCIENT EASTto express new ideas. A soldier by profession,indebted to the sword for his throne, hewould have a standing and paid force alwaysat his hand, not one which had to be calledfrom the plough spring by spring. The lands,which used to render blackmail to forces sentexpressly all the way from the Tigris, musthenceforward be incorporated in the territorialempire and pay their contributions to residentgovernors and garrisons. Moreover,whyshouldthese same lands not bear a part for theempire in both defence and attack by sup-plying levies of their own to the imperialarmies ? Finally the capital, Calah, with itstraditions of the dead dynasty, the old regimeand the recent rebellion, must be replaced bya new capital, even as once on a time Asshur,with its Babylonian and priestly spirit, hadbeen replaced. Accordingly sites, a littlehigher up the Tigris and more centrallysituated in relation to both the homelandand the main roads from west and east,must be promoted to be capitals. But inthe event it was not till after the reign ofSargon closed that Nineveh was made thedefinitive seat of the last Assyrian kings.

Organized and strengthened during Tiglath


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 105Pileser's reign of eighteen years, this newimperial machine, with its standing profes-sional army, its myriad levies drawn from allfighting races within its territory, its largeand secure revenues and its bureaucracykeeping the provinces in constant relation tothe centre, became the most tremendouspower of offence which the world had seen.So soon as Assyria was made conscious ofher new vigour by the ease with which theUrartu raiders, who had long been encroachingon Mesopotamia, and even on Syria, weredriven back across the Nairi lands and pennedinto their central fastnesses of Van; by theease, too, with which Babylonia was humbledand occupied again, and the Phoenician portsand the city of Damascus, impregnable there-tofore, were taken and held to tribute shebegan to dream of world empire, the firstsociety in history to conceive this unattain-able ideal . Certain influences and events, how-ever, would defer awhile any attempt to realizethe dream. Changes of dynasty took place,thanks partly to reactionary forces at homeand more to the praetorian basis on whichthe kingdom now reposed, and only one ofhis house succeeded Tiglath Pileser. But the


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106 THE ANCIENT EASTset-back was of brief duration. In the year722 another victorious general thrust himselfon to the throne and, under the famous nameof Sargon, set forth to extend the bounds ofthe empire towards Media on the east, andover Cilicia into Tabal on the west, until hecame into collision with King Mita of theMushki and held him to tribute.

2. THE EMPIRE OF SARGONThough at least one large province hadstill to be added to the Assyrian Empire,

Jargon's reign may be considered the periodrf its greatest strength. He handed on toSennacherib no conquests which could notlave been made good, and the widest extent)f territory which the central power wasidequate to hold. We may pause, then, justBefore Sargon's death in 705, to see what theirea of that territory actually was.Its boundaries cannot be stated, of course,

ffith any approach to the precision of anodern political geographer. Occupied terri-;ories faded imperceptibly into spheres ofnfluence and these again into lands habitually,>r even only occasionally, raided. In some


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 107quarters, especially from north-east round tonorth-west, our present understanding of theterms of ancient geography, used by Semiticscribes, is very imperfect, and, when anAssyrian king has told us carefully whatlands, towns, mountains and rivers his armyvisited, it does not follow that we can identifythem with any exactness * Nor should theroyal records be taken quite at their facevalue. Some discount has to be allowed(but how much it is next to impossible tosay) on reports, which often ascribe all theactions of a campaign not shared in by theKing in person (as in certain instances canbe proved) to his sole prowess, and grandilo-quently enumerate twoscore princedoms andkingdoms which were traversed and subdued inthe course of one summer campaign in verydifficult country. The illusion of immenseachievement, which it was intended thus tocreate, has often imposed itself on moderncritics, and Tiglath Pileser and Sargon arecredited with having marched to the neigh-bourhood of the Caspian, conquering orholding to ransom great provinces, when theirforces were probably doing no more thanclimbing from valley to valley about the


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108 THE ANCIENT EASTheadwaters of the Tigris affluents, and raidingchiefs of no greater territorial affluence thanthe Kurdish beys of Hakkiari.

East of Assyria proper, the territorial em-pire of Sargon does not seem to have extendedquite up to the Zagros watershed; but hissphere of influence included not only the headsof the Zab valleys, but also a region on theother side of the mountains, reaching as faras Hamadan and south-west Azerbaijan, al-though certainly not the eastern or northerndistricts of the latter province, or Kaswan,or any part of the Caspian littoral. On thenorth,the frontierof Assyrian territorial empirecould be passed in a very few days' marchfrom Nineveh. The shores of neither theUrmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularlyoccupied by Assyria, and, though Sargoncertainly brought into his sphere of influencethe kingdom of Urartu, which surroundedthe latter lake and controlled the tribes asfar as the western shore of the former, it isnot proved that his armies ever went roundthe east and north of the Urmia Lake, andit is fairly clear that they left the north-western region of mountains between Bitlis andthe middle Euphrates to its own tribesmen.


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 109Westwards and southwards, however, Sar-

gon's arm swept a wider circuit. He held ashis own all Mesopotamia up to Diarbekr, andbeyond Syria not only eastern and centralCilicia, but also some districts north of Taurus,namely, the low plain of Milid or Malatia, andthe southern part of Tabal ; but probably hishand reached no farther over the plateauthan to a line prolonged from the head ofthe Tokhma Su to the neighbourhood ofTyana, and returning thence to the CilicianGates. Beyond that line began a sphere ofinfluence which we cannot hope to define,but may guess to have extended over Cappa-docia, Lycaonia and the southern part ofPhrygia. Southward, all Syria was Sargon's,most of it by direct occupation, and the restin virtue of acknowledged overlordship andpayment of tribute. Even the seven princesof Cyprus made such submission. One or twostrong Syrian towns, Tyre and Jerusalem, forexample, withheld payment if no Assyrianarmy was at hand ; but their show of indepen-dence was maintained only on sufferance. ThePhilistine cities, after Sargon's victory overtheir forces and Egyptian allies at Raphia,in 720, no longer defended their walls, and the


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110 THE ANCIENT EASTGreat King's sphere of influence stretched east-ward right across the Hamad and southwardover north Arabia. Finally, Babylonia wasall his own even to the Persian Gulf, the richmerchants supporting him firmly in theinterests of their caravan trade, however thepriests and the peasantry might murmur. ButElam, whose king and people had carriedserious trouble into Assyria itself early inthe reign, is hardly to be reckoned to Sargoneven as a sphere of influence. The marshesof its south-west, the tropical plains of thecentre and the mountains on the east, madeit a difficult land for the northern Semites toconquer and hold. Sargon had been wiseenough to let it be. Neither so prudentnor so fortunate would be his son andsuccessors.

8. THE CONQUEST OF EGYPTSuch was the empire inherited by Sargon's

son, Sennacherib. Not content, he wouldgo farther afield to make a conquest whichhas never remained long in the hands of anAsiatic power. It was not only lust of loot,however, which now urged Assyria towards


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. IllEgypt. The Great Kings had long foundtheir influence counteracted in southern Syriaby that of the Pharaohs. Princes of bothHebrew states, of the Phoenician and thePhilistine cities and even of Damascus, hadall relied at one time or another on Egypt,and behind their combinations for defenceand their individual revolts Assyria had feltthe power on the Nile, The latter generallydid no more in the event to save its friendsthan it had done for Israel when ShalmaneserIV beleaguered, and Sargon took and garri-soned, Samaria ; but even ignorant hopes andempty promises of help cause constant unrest.Therefore Sennacherib, after drastic chastise-ment of the southern states in 701 (both Tyreand Jerusalem, however, kept him outsidetheir walls), and a long tussle with ChaldseanBabylon, was impelled to set out in the lastyear, or last but one, of his reign for Egypt.In southern Palestine he was as successful asbefore, but, thereafter, some signal disasterbefell him. Probably an epidemic pestilenceovertook his army when not far across thefrontier, and he returned to Assyria only tobe murdered.He bequeathed the venture to the son who,


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112 THE ANCIENT EASTafter defeating his parricide brothers, securedhis throne and reigned eleven years under aname which it has been agreed to writeEsarhaddon. So soon as movements inUrartu and south-western Asia Minor had beensuppressed, and, more important, Babylon,which his father had dishonoured, was ap-peased, Esarhaddon took up the incompleteconquest. Egypt, then in the hands of analien dynasty from the Upper Nile and dividedagainst itself, gave him little trouble at first.In his second expedition (670) he reachedMemphis itself, carried it by assault, anddrove the Cushite Tirhakah past Thebesto the Cataracts. The Assyrian proclaimedEgypt his territory and spread the net ofNinevite bureaucracy over it as far southas the Thebaid; but neither he nor his suc-cessors cared to assume the style and titlesof the Pharaohs, as Persians and Greeks,wiser in their generations, would do lateron. Presently trouble at home, excited bya son rebelling after the immemorial practiceof the east, recalled Esarhaddon to Assyria;Tirhakah moved up again from the south;the Great King returned to meet him anddied on the march.


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Plate4

H 113


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114 THE ANCIENT EASTBut Memphis was reoecupied by Esarhad-

don's successor, and since the latter tookand ruined Thebes also, and, after Tirhakah'sdeath, drove the Cushites right out of Egypt,the doubtful credit of spreading the territorialempire of Assyria to the widest limits it everreached falls to Ashurbanipal. Even Tyresuccumbed at last, and he stretched hissphere of influence over Asia Minor to Lydia.First of Assyrian kings he could claim Elamwith its capital Susa as his own (after 647),and in the east he professed overlordshipover all Media. Mesopotamian arts andletters now reached the highest point atwhich they had stood since Hammurabi'sdays, and the fame of the wealth and luxuryof " Sardanapal " went out even into theGreek lands. About 660 B.C. Assyria seemedin a fair way to be mistress of the desirableearth.

4. DECLINE AND FALL OF ASSYRIAStrong as it seemed in the 7th century, the

Assyrian Empire was, however, rotten at thecore. In ridding itself of some weaknesses ithad created others. The later Great Kings


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 115of Nineveh, raised to power and maintainedby the spears of paid praetorians, found lesssupport even than the old dynasty of Calahhad found, in popular religious sentiment,which (as usual in the East) was the ultimatebasis of Assyrian nationality ; nor, under thecircumstances, could they derive much strengthfrom tribal feeling, which sometimes survivesthe religious basis. Throughout the history ofthe New Kingdom we can detect the influenceof a strong opposition centred at Asshur.There the last monarch of the Middle Kingdomhad fixed his dwelling under the wing of thepriests ; there the new dynasty had dethronedhim as the consummation of an anti-sacerdotalrising of nobles and of peasant soldiery.Sargon seems to have owed his elevationtwo generations later to revenge taken forthis victory by the city folk; but Sargon'sson, Sennacherib, in his turn, found priestlydomination intolerable, and, in an effort tocrush it for ever, wrecked Babylon andterrorized the central home of Semitic cult,the great sacerdotal establishment of Bel-Marduk. After his father's murder, Esar-haddon veered back to the priests, and didso much to court religious support, that the


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116 THE ANCIENT EASTmilitaryparty incited Ashurbanipal to rebellionand compelled his father to associate the sonin the royal power before leaving Assyria forthe last time to die (or be killed) on the wayto Egypt, Thus the whole record of dynasticsuccession in the New Kingdom has beentypically Oriental, anticipating, at everychange of monarch, the history of IslamicEmpires. There is no trace of unanimousnational sentiment for the Great King. Oneoccupant of the throne after another gainspower by grace of a party and holds it bymercenary swords.Another imperial weakness was even more

fatal. So far as can be learned from Assyria'sown records and those of others, she lived onher territorial empire without recognizing theleast obligation to render anything to herprovinces for what they gave not even torender what Rome gave at her worst, namely,peace. She regarded them as existing simplyto endow her with money and men. Whenshe desired to garrison or to reduce to im-potence any conquered district, the populationof some other conquered district would bedeported thither, while the new subjectstook the vacant place. What happened


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 117when Sargon captured Samaria happenedoften elsewhere (Ashurbanipal, for example,made Thebes and Elam exchange inhabitants),for this was the only method of assimilatingalien populations ever conceived by Assyria,When she attempted to use natives to governnatives the result was such disaster as followedAshurbanipaPs appointment of Psammetichus,son of Necho, to govern Memphis and theWestern Delta.Rotten within, hated and coveted by

vigorous and warlike races on the east, thenorth and the south, Assyria was movingsteadily towards her catastrophe amid all theglory of " Sardanapal." The pace quickenedwhen he was gone. A danger, which hadlain long below the eastern horizon, was nowcome up into the Assyrian field of vision.Since Sargon's triumphant raids, the GreatKing's writ had run gradually less and lessfar into Media; and by his retaliatory in-vasions of Elam, which Sennacherib hadprovoked, Ashurbanipal not only exhaustedhis military resources, but weakened a powerwhich had served to check more dangerousfoes.We have seen that the "Mede" was


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118 THE ANCIENT EASTprobably a blend of Scythian and Iranian,the latter element supplying the ruling andpriestly classes. The Scythian element, itseems, had been receiving considerable rein-forcement. Some obscure cause, disturbing thenorthern steppes, forced its warlike shepherdsto move southward in the mass. A largebody, under the name Gimirrai or Cim-merians, descended on Asia Minor in theseventh century and swept it to the westernedge of the plateau and beyond; otherspressed into central and eastern Armenia,and, by weakening the Vannic king, enabledAshurbanipal to announce the humiliationof Urartu ; others again ranged behind Zagrosand began to break through to the Assyrianvalleys. Even while Ashurbanipal was still onthe throne some of these last had venturedvery far into his realm; for in the year ofhis death a band of Scythians appeared inSyria and raided southwards even to thefrontier of Egypt. It was this raid whichvirtually ended the Assyrian control of Syriaand enabled Josiah of Jerusalem and othersto reassert independence.The death of Ashurbanipal coincided alsowith the end of direct Assyrian rule over


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 119Babylon. After the death of arebellious brotherand viceroy in 648, the Great King himselfassumed the Babylonian crown and ruled thesacred city under a Babylonian name. Butthere had long been Chaldaean principalities inexistence, very imperfectly incorporated in theAssyrian Empire, and these, inspiring revoltsfrom time to time, had already succeeded inplacing more than one dynast on the throneof Babylon. As soon as " Sardanapal " wasno more and the Scythians began to overrunAssyria, one of these principalities (it is notknown which) came to the front and securedthe southern crown for its prince Nabu-aplu-utsur, or, as the Greeks wrote the name,Nabopolassar. This Chaldaean hastened tostrengthen himself by marrying his son,Nebuchadnezzar, to a Median princess, andthrew off the last pretence of submission toAssyrian suzerainty. He had made himselfmaster of southern Mesopotamia and theEuphrates Valley trade-route by the year 609.At the opening of the last decade of the cen-

tury, therefore, we have this state of things.Scythians and Medes are holding most ofeastern and central Assyria ; Chaldseans holdsouth Mesopotamia ; while Syria, isolatedfrom


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120 THE ANCIENT EASTthe old centre of empire, is anyone's to takeand keep. A claimant appears immediatelyin the person of the Egyptian Necho, sprungfrom the loins of that Psammetichus whohad won the Nile country back from Assyria.Pharaoh entered Syria probably in 609, brokeeasily through the barrier which Josiah ofJerusalem, greatly daring in this day ofAssyrian weakness, threw across his path atMegiddo, went on to the north and proceededto deal as he willed with the west of theAssyrian empire for four or five years.Meanwhile the destiny of Nineveh was beingfulfilled. With almost everything lost out-side her walls, she fell in 612 before thecombined assaults of the Mede Uvakhshatra,known to the Greeks as Kyaxares, and hisScythian and Babylonian allies. The fieldarmy cut its way out, and was only surroundedand destroyed on the Khabur in 606. Thefallen capital of West Asia was devastated bythe conquerors to such effect that it neverrecovered, and its life passed away for everacross the Tigris, where Mosul now stands.

5. THE BABYLONIANS AND THE MEDESSix years later, in 600 B.C. this was

the position of that part of the East which


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 121had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebu-chadnezzar, the Chaldaean king of Babylon,who had succeeded his father about 605,held the greater share of it to obedience andtribute, but not, apparently, by means of anysuch centralized bureaucratic organization asthe Assyrians had established. Just beforehis father's death he had beaten the Egyptiansin a pitched battle under the walls of Car-chemish, and subsequently had pursued themsouth through Syria, and perhaps across thefrontier, before being recalled to take up hissuccession. He had now, therefore, no rivalor active competitor in Syria, and this partof the lost empire of Assyria seems to haveenjoyed a rare interval of peace undernative client princes who ruled more or lesson Assyrian lines. The only fenced placeswhich made any show of defiance were Tyreand Jerusalem, which both relied on Egypt.The first would outlast an intermittent siegeof thirteen years; but the other, with farless resources, was soon to pay full price forhaving leaned too long on the " staff of abroken reed."About the east and north a different story

would certainly have to be told, if we could tell


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122 THE ANCIENT EASTit in full. But though Greek traditions cometo our aid, they have much less to sayabout these remote regions than the inscribedannals of that empire, which had just cometo its end, have had hitherto : and unfortu-nately the Median inheritors of Assyria haveleft no epigraphic records of their own atleast none have been found. If, as seemsprobable, the main element of Kyaxares* warstrength was Scythian, we can hardly expectto find records either of his conquest or thesubsequent career of the Medes, even thoughEcbatana should be laid bare below the siteof modern Hamadan ; for the predatory Scyth,like the mediaeval Mongol, halted too shorta time to desire to carve stones, and probablylacked skill to inscribe them. To completeour discomfiture, the only other possiblesource of light, the Babylonian annals, shedsnone henceforward on the north country andvery little on any country. Nebuchadnezzar

so far as his records have been found andread did not adopt the Assyrian custom ofenumerating first and foremost his expeditionsand his battles; and were it not for theHebrew Scriptures, we should hardly knowthat his armies ever left Babylonia, the


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 128rebuilding and redecoration of whose citiesand shrines appear to have constituted hischief concern. True, that in such silenceabout warlike operations, he follows theprecedent of previous Babylonian kings;but probably that precedent arose from thefact that for a long time past Babylon hadbeen more or less continuously a clientstate.We must, therefore, proceed by inference.There are two or three recorded events earlierand later than our date, which are of ser-vice. First, we learn from Babylonian annalsthat Kyaxares, besides overrunning all Assyriaand the northern part of Babylonia after thefall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harranand its temple in north-west Mesopotamia.Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourthin succession to Nebuchadnezzar, we shalllearn further that this temple did not comeinto Babylonian hands till the middle of thefollowing century. The reasonable inferenceis that it had remained since 606 B.C. inthe power of the Medes, and that northernMesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed partof a loose-knit Median " Empire " for a fullhalf century before 552 B.C.


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 125nezzar for he it must have been, when thedate is considered, though Herodotus callshim by a name, Labynetus, otherwise un-known was not a wholly independent ruler,though ruler doubtless of the first and greatestof the client states of Media. Perhaps thatis why he has told us so little of expeditionsand battles, and confined his records sonarrowly to domestic events. If his armiesmarched only to do the bidding of an alienkinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepidpride 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 andstretching westward over all Armenia (wherethe Vannic kingdom had ceased to be), andsouthward to an ill-defined point in Meso-potamia. Beyond this point south and westextended a Median sphere of influence whichincluded Babylonia and all that obeyedNebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elamon the one hand and the border of Egypt onthe other. Since the heart of this " Empire "lay in the north, its main activities took placethere too, and probably the discretion of theBabylonian king was seldom interfered with


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126 THE ANCIENT EASTby his Median suzerain. In expanding theirpower westward to Asia Minor, the Medesfollowed routes north of Taurus, not theold Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of somuch we can be fairly sure. Much else thatwe are told of Media by Herodotus hismarvellous account of Ecbatana and scarcelyless wonderful account of the reigning housemust be passed by till some confirmation ofit comes to light; and that, perhaps, will comesoon from American excavation at Hamadan.

6. ASIA MINOEA good part of the East, however, remains

which owed allegiance neither to Media norto Babylon. It is, indeed, a considerably largerarea than was independent of the FartherEast at the date of our last survey. AsiaMinor was in all likelihood independent fromend to end, from the JSgean to the Euphrates

for in 600 B.C. Kyaxares had probably notyet come through Urartu and from theBlack Sea to the Gulf of Issus. Aboutmuch of this area we have far more trust-worthy information now than when we lookedat it last, because it had happened to fall


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 127under the eyes of the Greeks of the westerncoastal cities, and to form relations with themof trade and war. But about the residue,which lay too far eastward to concern theGreeks much, we have less information thanwe had in 800 B.C., owing to the failure of theAssyrian imperial annals.The dominant fact in Asia Minor in 600 B.C.is the existence of a new imperial power, thatof Lydia. Domiciled in the central west ofthe peninsula, its writ ran eastwards overthe plateau about as far as the former limitsof the Phrygian power, on whose ruins it hadarisen. As has been stated already, there isreason to believe that its "sphere of in-fluence," at any rate, included Cilicia, andthe battle to be fought on the plateau, fifteenyears after our present survey, will arguethat some control of Cappadocia also hadbeen attempted. Before we speak of theLydian kingdom, however, and of its riseto its present position, it will be best todispose of that outlying state on the south-east, probably an ally or even client ofLydia, which, we are told, was at this timeone of the "four powers of Asia." Thesepowers included Babylon also, and accord-


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128 THE ANCIENT EASTingly, if our surmise that the Mede was thenthe overlord of Nebuchadnezzar be correct,this statement of Eusebius, for what it isworth, does not imply that Cilicia had at-tained an imperial position. Doubtless ofthe four " powers," she ranked lowest.

7. CILICIAIt will be remembered how much attention

a great raiding Emperor of the MiddleAssyrian period, Shalmaneser II, had devotedto this little country. The conquering kingsof later dynasties had devoted hardly less.From Sargon to Ashurbanipal they or theirarmies had been there often, and theirgovernors continuously.

Sennacherib is saidto have rebuilt Tarsus "in the likeness ofBabylon," and Ashurbanipal, who had to con-cern himself with the affairs of Asia Minor morethan any of his predecessors, was so intimatelyconnected with Tarsus that a popular traditionof later days placed there the scene of his deathand the erection of his great tomb. And, infact, he may have died there for all that weknow to the contrary; for no Assyrian recordtells us that he did not. Unlike the rest of


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 129Asia Minor, Cilicia was saved by the Assyriansfrom the ravages of the Cimmerians. Theirleader, Dugdamme, whom the Greeks calledLygdamis, is said to have met his deathon the frontier hills of Taurus, which,no doubt, he failed to pass. Thus, whenAshurbanipal's death and the shrinking ofNinevite power permitted distant vassals toresume independence, the unimpaired wealthof Cilicia soon gained for her considerableimportance. The kings of Tarsus now ex-tended their power into adjoining lands, suchas Kue on the east and Tabal on the north,and probably over even the holding of theKummukh ; for Herodotus, writing a centuryand a half after our date, makes the Euphratesa boundary of Cilicia. He evidently under-stood that the northernmost part of Syria,called by later geographers (but never byhim) Commagene, was then and had longbeen Cilician territory. His geographicalideas, in fact, went back to the greater Ciliciaof pre-Persian time,

which had been one ofthe ** four great powers of Asia."The most interesting feature of Cilician

history, as it is revealed very rarely and verydimly in the annals of the New Assyrian


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130 THE ANCIENT EASTKingdom, consists in its relation to the earliesteastward venturing of the Greeks. The firstAssyrian king with whom these western menseem to have collided was Sargon, who latein the eighth century, finding their ships inwhat he considered his own waters, i. e. onthe coasts of Cyprus and Cilicia, boasts thathe "caught them like fish." Since thisaction of his, he adds, " gave rest to Kue andTyre," we may reasonably infer that the" Ionian pirates " did not then appear onthe shores of Phoenicia and Cilicia for thefirst time; but, on the contrary, that theywere already a notorious danger in the eastern-most Levant. In the year 720 we find anameless Greek of Cyprus (or Ionia) actuallyruling Ashdod. Sargon's successor, Senna-cherib, had serious trouble with the loniansonly a few years later, as has been learnedfrom the comparison of a royal record of his,only recently recovered and read, with somestatements made probably in the first placeby the Babylonian historian, Berossus, butpreserved to us in a chronicle of much laterdate, not hitherto much heeded. Piecingthese scraps of information together, theAssyrian scholar, L. W. King, inferred that, in


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 181the important campaign which a revolt ofTarsus, aided by the peoples of the Tauruson the west and north, compelled the generalsof Sennacherib to wage in Cilicia in the year698, lonians took a prominent part by land,and probably also by sea. Sennacherib is said(by a late Greek historian) to have erectedan " Athenian " temple in Tarsus after thevictory, which was hardly won; and if thismeans, as it may well do, an " Ionic " temple,it states a by no means incredible fact, see-ing that there had been much local contactbetween the Cilicians and the men of thewest. Striking similarities of form and artisticexecution between the early glyptic and toreu-tic work of Ionia and Cilicia respectively havebeen mentioned in the last chapter; and itneed only be added here, in conclusion, that ifCilicia had relations with Ionia as early asthe opening of the seventh century relationssufficient to lead to alliance in war and tomodification of native arts it is naturalenough that she should be found allied afew years later with Lydia rather than withMedia.


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 188the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom asopposing Sargon, when the latter, early in hisreign, tried to push his sphere of influence>if not his territorial empire, beyond theTaurus to include the principalities of Kueand Tabal; and the same Mite appears tohave been allied with Carchemish in therevolt which ended with its siege and finalcapture in 717 B.C. As has been said in thelast chapter, it is usual to identify this kingwith one of those "Phrygians" known tothe Greeks as Midas preferably with theson of the first Gordius, whose wealth andpower have been immortalized in mythology.If this identification is correct, we have topicture Phrygia at the close of the eighthcentury as dominating almost all Asia Minor,whether by direct or by indirect rule; asprepared to measure her forces (thoughwithout ultimate success) against the strong-est power in Asia ; and as claiming interestseven outside the peninsula. Pisiris, kingof Carchemish, appealed to Mita as hisally, either because the Mushki of Asia Minorsat in the seat of his own forbears, theHatti of Cappadocia, or because he washimself of Mushki kin. There can be no


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134 THE ANCIENT EASTdoubt that the king thus invoked was kingof Cappadoeia. Whether he was king also ofPhrygia, i. e. really the same as Midas sonof Gordius, is, as has been said already, lesscertain. Mita's relations with Kue, Tabaland Carchemish do not, in themselves, arguethat his seat of power was anywhere elsethan in the east of Asia Minor, where Moschidid actually survive till much later times :but, on the other hand, the occurrence ofinscriptions in the distinctive script ofPhrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and atTyana, south-east of the central Anatoliandesert, argue that at some time the filamentsof Phrygian power did stretch into Cappa-docia and towards the land of the laterMoschi.

It must also be admitted that the splendourof the surviving rock monuments near thePhrygian capital is consistent with its havingbeen the centre of a very considerable empire,and hardly consistent with its having beenanything less. The greatest of these, the tombof a king Midas (son not of Gordius but ofAtys), has for faade a cliff about a hundredfeet high, cut back to a smooth face on whichan elaborate geometric pattern has been left


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136 THE ANCIENT EASTleft its name to Crim Tartary, and the presentCrimea, swept southward and westward aboutthe middle of the seventh century, and Greekrecords tell how they took and sacked thecapital of Phrygia and put to death or forcedto suicide the last Bang Midas.

9. LYDIAIt must have been in the hour of that

disaster, or but little before, that a Mermnadprince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyriansand Gyges by Greeks, threw off any allegiancehe may have owed to Phrygia and began toexalt his house and land of Lydia. He was thefounder of a new dynasty, having been byorigin, apparently, a noble of the court whocame to be elevated to the throne by eventsdifferently related but involving in all theaccounts some intrigue with his predecessor'squeen. One historian, who says that he pre-vailed by the aid of Carians, probably states afact; for it was this same Gyges who a fewyears later seems to have introduced Carianmercenaries to the notice of Psammetichus ofEgypt. Havingmet and repulsed the dimmer-ian horde without the aid of Ashurbanipal of


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 137Assyria, to whom he had applied in vain,Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebelwho had just founded the Saite dynasty, andproceeded to enlarge his boundaries by at-tacking the prosperous Greeks on his westernhand. But he was successful only againstColophon and Magnesia on the Maeander,inland places, and failed before Smyrna andMiletus, which could be provisioned by theirfleets and probably had at their call a largerproportion of those warlike " Ionian pirates "who had long been harrying the Levant. Inthe course of a long reign, which Herodotus(an inexact chronologist) puts at thirty-eightyears, Gyges had time to establish his powerand to secure for his Lydians the control of theoverland trade ; and though a fresh Cimmerianhorde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians(perhaps these were not unconnected withthe Medes then moving westward, as weknow), came down from the north, defeatedand killed him, sacked the unfortified partof his capital and swept on to plunder whatit could of the land as far as the sea withoutpausing to take fenced places, his son Ardys,who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, andmade his submission to Ashurbanipal, was


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138 THE ANCIENT EASTsoon able to resume the offensive against theGreeks. After an Assyrian attack on theCimmerian flank or rear had brought aboutthe death of the chief barbarian leader in theCilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm,the Lydian marched down the Mseander again.He captured Priene, but like his predecessorand his successor, he failed to snatch themost coveted prize of the Greek coast, thewealthy city Miletus at the Mseander mouth.Up to the date of our present survey, how-

ever, and for half a century yet to come, theseconquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia andCaria amounted to little more than foraysfor plunder and the levy of blackmail, likethe earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They mightresult in the taking and sacking of a townhere and there, but not in the holding of it.The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not muchmore than a century later, tells us expresslythat up to the time of Croesus, that is, to hisown grandfather's time, all the Greeks kepttheir freedom : and even if he means by thisstatement, as possibly he does, that pre-viously no Greeks had been subjected toregular slavery, it still supports our point :for, if we may judge by Assyrian practice,


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 139the enslaving of vanquished peoples beganonly when their land was incorporated in aterritorial empire. We hear nothing of Lydiangovernors in the Greek coastal cities and findno trace of a ** Lydian period " in the strataof such Ionian and Carian sites as have beenexcavated. So it would appear that theLydians and the Greeks lived up to and after600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each peopleholding its own on the whole and learningabout the other in the only internationalschool known to primitive men, the schoolof war.Herodotus represents that the Greek cities

of Asia, according to the popular belief ofhis time, were deeply indebted to Lydia fortheir civilization. The larger part of this debt(if real) was incurred probably after 600 B.C. ;but some constituent items of the accountmust have been of older date the coiningof money, for example. There is, however,much to be set on the other side of the ledger,more than Herodotus knew, and more thanwe can yet estimate. Too few monumentsof the arts of the earlier Lydians and too fewobjects of their daily use have been found intheir ill-explored land for us to say whether


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140 THE ANCIENT EASTthey owed most to the West or to the East.From the American excavation of Sardes,however, we have already learned for certainthat their script was of a Western type, nearerakin to the Ionian than even the Phrygianwas; and since their language contained agreat number of Indo-European words, theLydians should not, on the whole, be reckonedan Eastern people. Though the names givenby Herodotus to their earliest kings areMesopotamian and may be reminiscent ofsome political connection with the Far Eastat a remote epoch perhaps that of theforeign relations of Ur, which seem to haveextended to Cappadocia all the later royaland other Lydian names recorded are dis-tinctly Anatolian. At any rate all connectionwith Mesopotamia must have long been for-gotten before AshurbanipaPs scribes couldmention the prayer of " Guggu King ofLuddi " as coming from a people and a landof which their master and his forbears hadnot so much as heard. As the excavation ofSardes and of other sites in Lydia proceeds,we shall perhaps find that the higher civiliza-tion of the country was a comparatively lategrowth, dating mainly from the rise of the


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 141Mermnads, and that its products will showan influence of the Hellenic cities whichbegan not much earlier than 600 B.C., andwas most potent in the century succeedingthat date.We know nothing of the extent of Lydianpower towards the east, unless the suggestionsalready based on the passage of Herodotusconcerning 'the clash of Alyattes of Lydiawith Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, someyears later than the date of our presentsurvey, are well founded. If they are, thenLydia's sphere of influence may be assumedto have included Cilicia on the south-east,and its interests must have been involvedin Cappadocia on the north-east. It is notunlikely that the Mermnad dynasty inheritedmost of what the Phrygian kings had heldbefore the Cimmerian attack; and perhapsit was due to an oppressive Lydian occu-pation of the plateau as far east as theHalys and the foot of Anti-Taurus, thatthe Mushki came to be represented in latertimes only by Moschi in western Armenia,and the men of Tabal by the equally remoteand insignificant Tibareni.


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142 THE ANCIENT EAST

10. THE GREEK CITIESOf the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast

something has been said already. The greatperiod of the elder ones as free and independentcommunities falls between the opening ofthe eighth century and the close of thesixth. Thus they were in their full bloomabout the year 600. By the foundation ofsecondary colonies (Miletus alone is said tohave founded sixty !) and the establishmentof trading posts, they had pushed Hellenicculture eastwards round the shores of thepeninsula, to Pontus on the north and toCilicia on the south. In the eyes of Herodotusthis was the happy age when " all Helleneswere free *' as compared with his own ex-perience of Persian overlordship. Miletus,he tells us, was then the greatest of thecities, mistress of the sea; and certainlysome of the most famous among her citizens,Anaximander, Anaximenes, Hecataeus andThales, belong approximately to this epoch,as do equally famous names from otherAsiatic Greek communities, such as Alcaeusand Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 143or Colophon, Anacreon of Teos, and manymore. The fact is significant, because studiesand literary activities like theirs could hardlyhave been pursued except in highly civilized,free and leisured societies where life andwealth were secure.

If, however, the brilliant culture of theAsiatic Greeks about the opening of thesixth century admits no shadow of doubt,singularly few material things, which theirarts produced, have been recovered for usto see to-day. Miletus has been excavatedby Germans to a very considerable extent,without yielding anything really worthy ofits great period, or, indeed, much that canbe referred to that period at all, exceptsherds of a fine painted ware. It looks as ifthe city at the mouth of the greatest andlargest valley, which penetrates Asia Minorfrom the west coast, was too important insubsequent ages and suffered chastisementstoo drastic and reconstructions too thoroughfor remains of its earlier greatness to surviveexcept in holes and corners. Ephesus hasgiven us more archaic treasures, from thedeposits bedded down under the later re-constructions of its great shrine of Artemis;


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144 THE ANCIENT EASTbut here again the site of the city itself, thoughlong explored by Austrians, has not added tothe store. The ruins of the great Romanbuildings which overlie its earlier strata haveproved, perhaps, too serious an impediment tothe excavators and too seductive a prize.Branchidse, with its temple of Apollo andSacred Way, has preserved for us a littlearchaic statuary, as have also Samos and Chios.We have archaic gold work and painted vasesfrom Rhodes, painted sarcophagi from Clazo-mense, and painted pottery made there and atother places in Asia Minor, although foundmostly abroad. But all this amounts to avery poor representation of the Asiatic Greekcivilization of 600 B.C. Fortunately the soilstill holds far more than has been got out ofit. With those two exceptions, Miletus andEphesus, the sites of the elder Hellenic citieson or near the Anatolian coast still awaitexcavators who will go to the bottom of allthings and dig systematically over a largearea; while some sites await any excavationwhatsoever, except such as is practised byplundering peasants.In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks

carried into fullest practice the Hellenic con-


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 145ception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained, exclusive. Their several societieshad in consequence the intensely vivid andinterested communal existence which de-velops civilization as a hot-house developsplants; but they were not democratic, andthey had little sense of nationality defectsfor which they were to pay dearly in thenear future. In spite of their associationsfor the celebration of common festivals, suchas the League of the twelve Ionian cities,and that of the Dorian Hexapolis in thesouth-west, which led to discussion of commonpolitical interests, a separatist instinct, re-inforced by the strong geographical boundarieswhich divided most of the civic territories,continually reasserted itself. The same instinctwas ruling the history of European Greeceas well. But while the disaster, which in theend it would entail, was long avoided therethrough the insular situation of the mainGreek area as a whole and the absence of anystrong alien power on its continental frontier,disaster impended over Asiatic Greece fromthe moment that an imperial state shouldbecome domiciled on the western fringe ofthe inland plateau. Such a state had now


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146 THE ANCIENT EASTappeared and established itself; and if theGreeks of Asia had had eyes to read, thewriting was on their walls in 600 B.C.Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into

eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes and theirinfluence penetrated far up into Asia. Thehands which carved some of the ivories foundin the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus workedon artistic traditions derived ultimately fromthe Tigris. So, too, worked the smiths whomade the Rhodian jewellery, and so, theartists who painted the Milesian ware andthe Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the other sideof the ledger (though three parts of its pageis still hidden from us) we must put to Greekcredit the script of Lydia, the rock pedimentsof Phrygia, and the forms and decorativeschemes of many vessels and small articlesin clay and bronze found in the Gordiantumuli and at other points on the westernplateau from Mysia to Pamphylia. The menof " Javan," who had held the Syrian sea fora century past, were known to Ezekiel as greatworkers in metal; and in Cyprus they hadlong met and mingled their culture with thatof men from the East.


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THE EAST IN 600 B.C. 147It was implied in the opening of this chapter

that in 600 B.C. social changes in the East wouldbe found disproportionate to political changes ;and on the whole they seem so to have been.The Assyrian Empire was too lately fallenfor any great modification of life to havetaken place in its area, and, in fact, the largerpart of that area was being administeredstill by a Chaldsean monarchy on the estab-lished lines of Semitic imperialism. Whetherthe centre of such a government lay at Ninevehor at Babylon can have affected the subjectpopulations very little. No new religiousforce had come into the ancient East, unlessthe Mede is to be reckoned one in virtueof his Zoroastrianism. Probably he did notaffect religion much in his early phase ofraiding and conquest. The great experience,which was to convert the Jews from insig-nificant and barbarous highlanders into acultured, commercial and cosmopolitan peopleof tremendous possibilities had indeed begun,but only for a part of the nation, and so farwithout obvious result. The first incursion ofIranians in force, and that slow soakage ofIndo-European tribes from Russia, which was


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CHAPTER IVTHE EAST IN 400 B.C.

As the fifth century draws to its close theEast lies revealed at last in the light of his-tory written by Greeks. Among the peopleswhose literary works are known to us, thesewere the first who showed curiosity about theworld in which they lived and sufficient con-sciousness of the curiosity of others to recordthe results of inquiry. Before our presentdate the Greeks had inquired a good dealabout 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, evensoldiers of theirs in thousands, had goneup into Inner Asia and returned. LeadingAthenians, Solon, Hippias and Themistocles,had been received at Eastern courts or had ac-companied Eastern sovereigns to war, and onemore famous even than these, Alcibiades, had

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150 THE ANCIENT EASTlately lived with a Persian Governor. Greekphysicians, Democedes of Croton, Apollonidesof Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had ministered tokings 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 notesfor a history of the Persian Empire ; Xenophonof Attica had tramped from the Mediterraneanto the Tigris and from the Tigris to the BlackSea, and with him had marched more thanten thousand Greeks. Not only have worksby these three men of letters survived,wholly or in part, to our time, but also manynotes on the East as it was before 400 B.C.have been preserved in excerpts, paraphrasesand epitomes by later authors. And we stillhave some archaeological documents to fallback upon. If the cuneiform records of thePersian Empire are less abundant than those ofthe later Assyrian Kingdom, they neverthelessinclude such priceless historical inscriptions asthat graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, onthe rock of Behistun. There are also hiero-glyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of PersianEgypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and afew of archaic Greece; and much other mis-


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 151cellaneous archaeological material from variousparts of the East, which, even if uninscribed,can inform us of local society and life.

1. EASTWARD MOVEMENT OF THEGREEKS

The Greek had been pushing eastward fora long time. More than three hundred yearsago, as has been shown in the last chapter,he had become a terror in the farthest Levant.Before another century had passed he foundhis way into Egypt also. Originally hired asmercenaries to support a native revolt againstAssyria, the Greeks remained in the Nilevalley not only to fight but to trade. Thefirst introduction of them to the Saite Pharaoh,Psammetichus, was promoted by Gyges theLydian to further his own ends, but the firstdevelopment of their social influence in Egyptwas due to the enterprise of Miletus in estab-lishing a factory on the lowest course of theCanopic Nile. This post and two standingcamps of Greek mercenaries, one at Tahpanheswatching the approach from Asia, the otherat Memphis overawing the capital and keepingthe road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce


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152 THE ANCIENT EASTIonian civilization to the Delta in the seventhcentury. Indeed, to this day our knowledge ofthe earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia andCaria depends largely on the fragments of theirvases imported into Egypt which have beenfound at Tahpanhes, Memphis and anotherGreek colony, Naukratis, founded a little later(as will be told presently) to supersedethe original Milesian factory. Though thoseforeign vases themselves, with their decorationof nude figure subjects which revolted vulgarEgyptian sentiment, did not go much beyondthe Greek settlements (like the Greek courte-sans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed onlyto the more cosmopolitan Saites), their artcertainly influenced all the finer art of theSaitic age, initiating a renascence whosecharacteristics of excessive refinement andmeticulous delicacy survived to be reinforcedin the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion ofHellenic culture.So useful or so dangerous at any rate so

numerous did the Greeks become in LowerEgypt by the opening of the sixth centurythat a reservation was assigned to them besidethe Egyptian town of Piemro, and to this alone,according to Herodotus, newcomers from the


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 153sea were allowed to make their way. Thisforeign suburb of Piemro was named Nau-kratis, and nine cities of the Asiatic Greeksfounded a common sanctuary there. Othermaritime communities of the same race(probably the more powerful, since Miletus isnamed among them) had their particularsanctuaries also and their proper places. TheGreeks had come to Egypt to stay. Wehave learned from the remains of Naukratisthat throughout the Persian domination,which superseded the Saitic before the closeof the sixth century, a constant importa-tion of products of Ionia, Attica, Sparta,Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was main-tained. The place was in full life whenHerodotus visited Egypt, and it continuedto prosper until the Greek race, becomingrulers of all the land, enthroned Hellenism atAlexandria,

2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERSNor was it only through Greek sea-rovers

and settlers in Cilicia, and through Greekmercenaries, merchants and courtesans in theNile-Delta, that the East and the West had


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154 THE ANCIENT EASTbeen making mutual acquaintance. Otheragencies of communication had been active inbringing Mesopotamian models to the artistsof the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor,and Ionian models to Mesopotamia and Syria.The results are plain to see, on the one handin the fabric and design of early ivories,jewellery and other objects found in thearchaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in thedecoration of painted pottery produced atMiletus; on the other hand, in the carvedivories of the ninth century found at Calah onthe Tigris. But the processes which producedthese results are not so clear. If the agentsor carriers of those mutual influences werecertainly the Phoenicians and the Lydians, wecannot yet apportion with confidence to eachof these peoples the responsibility for theresults, or be sure that they were the onlyagents, or independent of other middlemenmore directly in contact with one party orthe other.The Phoenicians have pushed far afield sincewe looked at them last. By founding Carthagemore than half-way towards the Pillars of

Hercules the city of Tyre completed heroccupation of sufficient African harbours,


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 155beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of theGreek sphere, to appropriate to herself bythe end of the ninth century the trade of thewestern Mediterranean basin. By means ofsecondary settlements in west Sicily, Sardiniaand Spain, she proceeded to convert thissea for a while into something like a Phoeni-cian lake. No serious rival had forestalledher there or was to arise to dispute hermonopoly till she herself, long after our date,would provoke Rome. The Greek colonies inSicily and Italy, which looked westward, failedto make head against her at the first, andsoon dropped out of the running ; nor did theone or two isolated centres of Hellenism onother shores do better. On the other hand, inthe eastern basin of the Mediterranean, al-though it was her own home-sea, Tyre neversucceeded in establishing commercial supre-macy, and indeed, so far as we know, she neverseriously tried to establish it. It was the sphereof the ^Egean mariners and had been so as farback as Phoenician memory ran. The LateMinoan Cretans and men of Argolis,the Achaeanrovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armedmerchantmen had successively turned awayfrom it all but isolated and peaceful ships of


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158 THE ANCIENT EASTreached westernmost Asia chiefly by overlandways. As for the European sites, since theirOrientalism appears to have been drawn fromIonia, it also had come through Asia overland.

Therefore on the whole, though Herodotusasserts that the Phoenician mariners carried"Assyrian" cargoes, there is remarkably littleevidence that those cargoes reached the West,and equally little that Phoenicians had anyconsiderable direct trade with Mesopotamia.They may have been responsible for the smallEgyptian and Egyptianizing objects whichhave been found by the excavators of Car-chemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of the ninthand eighth centuries; but the carrying ofsimilar objects eastward across the Euphrateswas more probably in Hittite hands thantheirs. The strongest Nilotic influence whichaffected Mesopotamian art is to be noticedduring the latter half of the New AssyrianKingdom, when there was no need for alienintermediaries to keep Nineveh in communi-cation with its own province of Egypt.

Apparently, therefore, it was not throughthe Phoenicians that the Greeks had learnedmost of what they knew about the East in 400B.C. Other agents had played a greater part


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 159and almost all the intercommunication hadbeen 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 latterrule of Assyria in the farther East and thesubsequent rule of the Medes and the Baby-lonians in her room, intercourse had beencarried on almost entirely by intermediaries,among whom (if something must be allowedto the Cilicians) the Lydians were undoubtedlythe most active. In the later part of thestory it will be seen that the intermediarieshave vanished; the barriers are down; theEast has itself come to the West and inter-course is immediate and direct. How thishappened what agency brought Greeks andOrientals into an intimate contact which wasto have the most momentous consequencesto both remains to be told.

3. THE COMING OF THE PERSIANSWe have seen already how a power, whichhad grown behind the frontiermountains of the

Tigris basin, forced its way at last through thedefiles and issued in the riverine plains withfatal results to the north Semitic kings. By


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 161What events, passing in the far East among

the divers groups of the Iranians themselvesand their Scythian allies, led to this king of adistrict in Elam, whose own claim to havebelonged by blood to any of those groupsis doubtful, consolidating all the Iranianswhether of the south or north under hissingle rule into a mighty power of offence, wedo not know. Stories current among theGreeks and reported by Herodotus and Ctesiasrepresented Cyrus as in any case a Persian, butas either grandson of a Median king (thoughnot his natural heir) or merely one of hiscourt officials. What the Greeks had toaccount for (and so have we) is the subsequentdisappearance of the north Iranian kings ofthe Medes and the fusion of their subjectswith the Persian Iranians under a southerndynasty. And what the Greeks did notknow, but we do, from cuneiform inscriptionseither contemporary with, or very little subse-quent to, Cyrus' time, only complicates theproblem; since these bear witness that Cyruswas known at first (as has been indicated)for a king of Anshan in Elam, and not till laterfor a king of Persia. Ctesias, who lived atSusa itself while it was the Persian capital,


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164 THE ANCIENT EASTwith which the royal house of Lydia hadbeen in close alliance since the Halys pact,was a disaster which Croesus, now king ofSardes in the room of Alyattes, was rashenough to attempt to repair. He had con-tinued with success his father's policy ofextending Lydian dominion to the JSgeanat the expense of the Ionian Greeks; and,master of Ephesus, Colophon and Smyrna,as well as predominant partner in the Milesiansphere, he secured to Lydia the control andfruition of Anatolian trade, perhaps themost various and profitable in the worldat that time. A byword for wealth andluxury, the Lydians and their king hadnowadays become soft, slow-moving folk, asunfit to cope with the mountaineers of the wildborder highlands of Persia as, if Herodotus'story is well founded, they were ignorant oftheir quality. Croesus took his time, sendingenvoys to consult oracles near and far. Hero-dotus tells us that he applied to Delphi not lessthan thrice and even to the oracle of Ammonin the Eastern Sahara, At least a year musthave been spent in these inquiries alone, notto speak of an embassy to Sparta andperhaps others to Egypt and Babylon. These


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 165preliminaries at length completed, the Lydiangathered the levies of western Asia Minor andset out for the East. He found the Halys inflood it must have been in late spring andhaving made much ado of crossing it, spent thesummer in ravaging with his cavalry the oldhomeland of the Hatti. Thus he gave Cyrustime to send envoys to the Ionian cities to begthem attack Lydia in the rear, and time tocome down himself in force to his far westernprovince. Croesus was brought to battle inthe first days of the autumn. The engage-ment was indecisive, but the Lydians, havingno mind to stay out the winter on thebleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspi-cion that the enemy would think of. furtherwarfare before spring, went back at theirleisure to the Hennus valley, only to hearat Sardes itself that the Persian was hotin pursuit. A final battle was fought underthe very walls of the Lydian capital andlost by Croesus; the lower town was takenand sacked; and the king, who had shut him-self with his guards into the citadel andsummoned his allies to his rescue come fivemonths, was a prisoner of Cyrus within twoweeks. It was the end of Lydia and of all


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166 THE ANCIENT EASTbuffers between the Orient and Greece.East and West were in direct contact and theomens boded ill to the West. Cyrus refusedterms to the Greeks, except the powerfulMilesians, and departing for the East again,left Lydia to be pacified and all the cities ofthe western coasts, Ionian, Carian, Lycianand what not, excepting only Miletus, to bereduced by his viceroys.

5. PERSIAN EMPIRECyrus himself had still to deal with a part

of the East which, not having been occupiedby the Medes, though in a measure allied andsubservient to them, saw no reason now toacknowledge the new dynasty. This is thepart which had been included in the NewBabylonian Empire. The Persian armies in-vaded Babylonia. Nabonidus was defeatedfinally at Opis in June 588; Sippara fell,and Cyrus' general appearing before Babylonitself received it without a struggle at thehands of the disaffected priests of Bel-Marduk.The famous Herodotean tale of Cyrus* secretpenetration down the dried bed of Euphratesseems to be a mistaken memory of a later re-


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 167capture of the city after a revolt from Darius,of which more hereafter. Thus once more itwas given to Cyrus to close a long chapterof Eastern history the history of imperialBabylon. Neither did he make it his capital,nor would any other lord of the East so favourit. If Alexander perhaps intended to reviveits imperial position, his successor, Seleucus,so soon as he was assured of his inheritance,abandoned the Euphratean city for the banksof the Tigris and Orontes, leaving it tocrumble to the heap which it is to-day.The Syrian fiefs of the Babylonian kingspassed de jure to the conqueror ; but probablyCyrus himself never had leisure or opportunityto secure them de facto. The last decade ofhis life seems to have been spent in Persiaand the north-east, largely in attempts toreduce the Scythian element, which threatenedthe peace of Media ; and at the last, havingbrought the enemy to bay beyond the Araxes,he met there defeat and death. But Cambysesnot only completed his father's work in Syria,but fulfilled what is said to have been hisfurther project by capturing Egypt andestablishing there a foreign domination whichwas to last, with some intervals, nearly two


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 169tions. Possibly, too, before they issued fromthe vast Iranian plateau, they were not whollyunversed in the administration of wide terri-tories. In any case, their quick intelligenceenabled them to profit by models of imperialorganization which persisted in the lands theynow acquired ; for relics of the Assyrian systemhad survived under the New Babylonian rule,and perhaps also under the Median. There-after the experience gained by Cambysesin Egypt must have gone for something inthe imperial education of his successor Darius,to whom historians ascribe the final organ-ization of Persian territorial rule. Fromthe latter's reign onward we find a regularprovincial system linked to the centre as wellas might be by a postal service passing overstate roads. The royal power is delegated toseveral officials, not always of the ruling race,but independent of each other and directlyresponsible to Susa : these live upon theirprovinces but must see to it first and foremostthat the centre receives a fixed quota of moneyand a fixed quota of fighting men whenrequired. The Great Bong maintains royalresidences in various cities of the empire, andnot infrequently visits them; but in general


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170 THE ANCIENT EASThis viceroys are left singularly free to keep thepeace of their own governorates and even todeal with foreign neighbours at their properdiscretion.

If we compare the Persian theory of Empirewith the Assyrian, we note still a capitalfault. The Great King of Susa recognizedno more obligation than his predecessors ofNineveh to consider the interests of those heruled and to make return to them for what hetook. But while, on the one hand, no betterimperial theory was conceivable in the sixthcentury B.C., and certainly none was held oracted upon in the East down to the nineteenthcentury A.D., on the other, the Persian imperialpractice mitigated its bad effects far more thanthe Assyrian had done. Free from the Semitictradition of annual raiding, the Persians re-duced the obligation of military service to abearable burden and avoided continual provo-cation of frontier neighbours. Free likewisefrom Semitic supermonotheistic ideas, theydid not seek to impose their creed. Seeingthat the Persian Empire was extensive,decentralized and provided with imperfectmeans of communication, it could subsistonly by practising provincial tolerance. Its


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 171provincial tolerance seems to have beensystematic. We know a good deal of theGreeks and the Jews under its sway, and inthe history of both we miss such signs ofreligious and social oppression as markedAssyrian rule. In western Asia Minor thesatraps showed themselves on the whole singu-larly conciliatory towards local religious feelingand even personally comformable to it; andin Judaea the hope of the Hebrews that thePersian would prove a deliverer and a restorerof their estate was not falsified. Hardly anecho of outrage on the subjects of Persia intime oi peace has reached our ears. If thesovereign ofthe Asiatic Greek cities ran counterto Hellenic feeling by insisting on " tyrant "rule, he did no more than continue a systemunder which most of those cities had grownrich. It is clear that they had little else tocomplain of than absence of a democraticfreedom which, as a matter of fact, some ofthem had not enjoyed in the day of theirindependence. The satraps seem to havebeen supplied with few, or even no, Persiantroops, and with few Persian aides on theiradministrative staff. The Persian element inthe provinces must, in fact, have, been extra-


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172 THE ANCIENT EASTordinarily small so small that an Empire,which for more than two centuries compre-hended nearly all western Asia, has lefthardly a single provincial monument of itself,graven on rock or carved on stone.

6. JEWSIf we look particularly at the Jews those

subjects of Persia who necessarily share mostof our interest with the Greeks we find thatPersian imperial rule was no sooner establishedsecurely over the former Babylonian fief inPalestine than it began to undo the destructivework of its predecessors. Vainly expectinghelp from the restored Egyptian power, Jeru-salem had held out against Nebuchadnezzartill 587. On its capture the dispersion of thesouthern Jews, which had already begun withlocal emigrations to Egypt, was largely in-creased by the deportation of a numerous bodyto Babylonia. As early, however, as 588, theyear of Cyrus' entry into Babylon (doubtlessas one result of that event), began a return ofexiles to Judaea and perhaps also to Samaria.By 520 the Jewish population in South Pales-tine was sufficiently strong again to make


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THE EAST IN 400 B.C. 173itself troublesome to Darius, and in 516 theTemple was in process of restoration. Beforethe middle of the next century Jerusalem wasonc

Documents

D. G. Hogarth--Ancient East