the land of he two rivers - forgotten books

THE LAND OF

HE TWO R IVERS

EDWYN BEVAN

8 7 0 3 7 .

FOURTH IMPRES S IO

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

1 9 1 8

All rig i d: reserved

PREFACE

TH I S little book does not aim at setting down

anything new or serving purposes of reference ,like a textbook or an encyclopaedia article . My

obj ect has been rather to do in writing what one

might do in conversation,if anyone casually put

the question : What as a matter of fact has Meso

potamia stood for in the past The country

which we incorrectly call Mesopotamia and the

countries connected with it—Armenia , Asia Minor ,Palestine , Persia—have recently become associatedwith living interests of the hour and immedi ate

questions of practical politics ; that may seem a

reason for trying to give a fresh rapid survey

of what their significance has been in former

ages . Their past stretches out through a long

procession of centuries ; if these are to be flashed

before the mind of a reader in the space of an

hour or so , one is obviously confronted with the

dilemma of either so crowding together details that

the Whole becomes a dry rehearsal of unfamiliar facts

and names , or , on the other hand, of dropping

PREFACE

essential things out of the picture . I have tried

to seize the main points and leave out a ll details

which did not contribute to making them a ppre

hensible . No more proper names of persons and

places have been introduced than seemed strictly

necessary . I have supposed myself addressing

someone with no special knowledge of ancient

history beyond those general notions attached for

everybody to Greece and Rome and certain familiar

Bible names .

CONTENTS

I . THE “UNCHANGEABLE EASTII . THE PROGRESS OF MANIII . TEN THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE CHRISTIV. THE DAWN IN EGYPTV. THE DAWN IN SHINARVI. EARLY K INGS OF SUMER AND AKKADVII . INFLUENCE ON OTHER LANDSVIII . THE RISE OF BABYLONl ix . THE ORIGINAL INDO -EUROPEANSX . THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIREXI . ISRAELXII . THE SECOND ASSYRIAN EMPIREXIII . ASSYRIA AND EGYPTXIV. THE GLORY AND FALL OF ASSYRIAQXV. MEDEs AND ARMENIAN SXVI . THE NEw BABYLONIAN K INGDOMXVII . AN EPOCH IN HISTORYXVIII . CYRUS THE PERSIANXIX . THE PERSIAN EMPIRE UNDER DARIUS

THE RELIGION OF ZOROASTERXXI . THE HELLENES

XXII . ALEXANDER THE GREATXXIII. HELLENISM UNDER THE SELEUCIDS

viii CONTENTS

XXI V . DIS INTEGRAT ION OF THE SELEUCID EMPIRE ,AND THE R ISE OF THE PAR THIAN S

PAGE

XXV . ARMENIA

XXVI . DYNASTIES IN AS IA MINORXXVII . SELEUCID AND PTOLEMY : THE QUESTION OF

PALESTINE

XXVIII . THE GROWTH OF THE JEWISH STATE

XXIX . THE CANDIDATES FOR THE INHER ITANCE

ROME DIVIDES THE HER ITAGE WITHPARTHIA

XXXI . WAR S BETWEEN ROME AND PAR THIAXXXII . THE PER S IAN SASANIAN DYNASTY

XXXIII . THE ROMAN EMPIRE BECOMES CHR ISTIAN

XXXIV. HELLENISM IN THE ROMAN EASTXXXV . CHR ISTIAN ROME AGAIN ST PER S IAXXXVI . ARAB IA INTERVENESXXXVII . HELLENISM IN ISLAM

MAP a t end

THE LAND OF THE TWORIVERS

THE UNCHANGEABLE EAST

FEW catchwords have more misled popular opini onthan that of the unchangeable East .

” One cansee how it arose

,that relative truth in it which

made it plausible . It is true that the pooreststratum of society in all countries—those whoselife is mainly filled with the satisfaction of themost primitive needs

,getting food out ofthe ground

or out of the waters,keeping their bodi es warm

and dry—remains wonderfully uniform from age toage . (Or perhaps one should sa y remained for

modern civilization,far more penetrating than any

previous one—with popular education and motorploughs and cinemas—is affecting the life of thepoorest in all European countries as it has neverbeen affected before . ) The different characteristics which in different regions mark the tillers ofthe soil and the fisher—folk of sea and river andlagoon have been largely caused by special physicalconditions in those regions , which are permanent .It is true that the traveller to-day in Egypt maysee the fella hz

'

n using various simple processes9

10 THE LAND OF THE TWO RIVERS

which were used by their fathers three thousandyea rs ago , and the traveller in Babylonia

* may see

on the rivers and canals rafts on inflated skins , likethose described by Herodotus . If he talks to thepeople of the land

,their outlook on the world may

strike him as like that recorded in parts of theBible . And the traveller , it may be , comes homedeclaring that the East never changes . But , if so ,he forgets that this life of the cultivator and fisherman and hand—labourer has been in the past thesubstratum only beneath changing civilization , thebasis for the life which thought and wrote andmade poems and pictures and statues , which rearedgreat monuments and works of public use , whichdesigned great schemes of law and government .And it is what man has achieved in these lineswhich gives their character and their interest tothe civilizations of the past . In Italy, too ,

thetraveller in some out-oi—the-way country regionscan still , or could till recently, find a primitiveplough in use like that described by Virgil . Itwould be a mistake, for that reason , to talk aboutthe unchangeable West

,as if the Roman civili za

tion which had been erected upon the basis of that

It h a s become comm on in the English Press to use theword Mesopotam ia to indica te the a lluv ia l region betweenthe lower rea ches of the Euphra tes and Tigr is, of whi chBaghda d is the ca pita l . This is not a ccording to the usageof antiqui ty ; Mesopotam ia , for the Greeks and Rom ans ,wa s the m ore northern country (in Ara bic the Jez ireh )nea rer the Arm enian highlands, a country of undula tinggra ssy pla ins . The southern country where our troopsha ve been fighting they ca lled Ba byloni an its Ara bic nam e

is Irak . In this sur vey Mesopotam ia is to be understooda s not Including Ba bylonia .

THE UNCHANGEABLE EAST 1 1

old Italia n country life counted for nothing . Thedifference between Italy and the East is that herethe Vision of the traveller is so occupied with themanifestations of a still living and changing civili zation

,the child of the old Roman , that there is no

danger of his thinking that the rela tive constancyof Italian peasant life through the ages means thatin Italy things are as they always have been . Butif our modern civilization had perished and thetillers of the ground in Italy continued to followtheir ancestral ways

,then perhaps some traveller

who had seen ancient ploughs depicted on vasesor bas-reliefs , and saw the like still in use , mightthink of the West as simply this sort Of thingindefini tely drawn out . In the East the Old civili zations ha ve been destroyed . What the travellerthere sees of them to—day is the sordid relic—theshreds and remains . He does not always apprehendthe difference between the East that he sees andthe East that was . He sees the same sort of boatsbeing used on the Tigris as were used two thousandyears a go .

‘And he comes home saying the Eastnever changes .

THE PROGRES S OF MAN

THE life of the creature Man upon this planet inthe Solar System

,we cannot tell to what it is

moving ; we cannot tell the full ultimate meaningof the story, because we are only part of the way


through with it . This is not the place to inquirewhether the story will be characterized by progressup to the end

,as Victorian Optimism seemed to

ta ke for granted, or whether a time will come whenthe main movement upon this planet will be , notascent

,but decline . SO much , however , we can

say—that the movement hitherto , taken in its

entirety,disregarding partial and local arrests and

retrogressions,has been a progress . Even this

statement has to be guarded if it is to keep wideof controversy . There are people di sposed todoubt whether the average amount Of happinessor of goodness among civilized man is greater thanthat among the men Of the Stone Age . But thereis one respect in which progress is unquestionablein knowledge and in power , in that command overmaterial Nature which goes with knowledge .

This progress till recently had not been SO mucha continuous advance as an advance by sta ges , ateach of which the forward movement appearedtemporarily to have come to a standstill . Theadvance in knowledge and power wa S o conditioned

in a large degree by an extension of the means ofcommunication, because the things which eachindividual man by himself can do are small ; andthe larger the number of men whose work can beco-ordinated for common ends

,the greater and

more complex are the things which human effortcan do . At the beginning m an could communicatewith man only by speech and gesture ; the nextstage was marked by the invention ofwriting ; thenext that of printing ; the next by those va st new

THE PROGRESS OF MAN 13

possibilities of communi cation brought about inour own time by steam , electricity , and petrol .And it is to be noted that the periods of time

between the different stages of advance growshorter wi th each stage .

The period during which mankind had no meansof communi cation but speech and gesture stretchesback into an incalculable number of centuries .Had an immortal Visitor from some other worldVisited this earth at intervals of a thousand years ,he might have inferred that this creature , livingand breeding in caves and forests , and fighting theother animals with weapons of chipped stone , butwith the peculiarity that he could communicate hisdesires to his fellows and concert plans by themedi um of articulate sentences , had reached theterm of his development . A thousand years havegone by, so many thousands of times the sun hastraversed the Sky above mountains and forests ,deserts and seas , and the creature man is still whathe had been before , the generations living the samelife in their little huddled groups or roving hordes ,a movement and shifting of races that pass withouta memorial . Another thousand years , and noessential change . And so on, millennium aftermillennium . Nay , there are parts of the humanrace which have changed but little even up to our

time . The Tasmanians , when discovered in theeighteenth century , were still in the Ea rly StoneAge . When at last man moved on to the nextstage , it was not a general advance ; in the fir stinstance it is certa in tribes which push out ahead .


The next stage was ini tiated by the invention ofwriting . All the civilizations of what we call theancient world were condi tioned by writing .

Writing not only extended the possibili ties ofcommuni cation between men separated by space ,and so made possible the co-Operation of largernumbers

,but bound the generations together by

the transmission of thought in books . We may

sa y that this stage , co-extensive with the ancientcivilizations

,and continuing up to the end of the

Middle Ages , lasted some years—from thefirst invention of writing in Egypt , somewhereabout 5000 B .C . , to the Renaissance in Europewhich ushered in the modern world—only Six

millenniums and a half, as against the long seriesof millenniums during which mankind paused atthe first stage .

The modern world Western, European, civiliz a tion since the Renaissance—would have beenimpossible without the multiplication of books andpapers through printing . But the modern worldhas not been at all a time of pause . There havebeen no other three centuries and a half in humanhistory during which we can see so continuous anadvance in knowledge and in command over Nature ,during which change has been so rapid . Betweenthe invention of printing and the di scovery ofsteam-power and electricity

,which have given the

whole globe , as it were , a single nervous system ,

we have the lapse of less than four centuries . Onewonders whether any increased acceleration in therate of progress is possible—or even desirable forthe mental stability ofmankind .

TEN THOUSAND YEAR S BEFORE CHRIST 15

TEN THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE CHRIST

SUPPOS ING we could pass in an aeroplane whi ch ,like Mr. Wells ’s Time Machine , had the faculty of

travelling backwards in time as well as traversing

Space , over the earth 10000 B .C . , we Should, inpassing over EurOpe , look down on nothing butregion after region of dark forest and rocky mountain and waste moorland ; and there where someday was to be London and Paris and Rome weshould see at most , in the way of something human ,some skin—clad shaggy creature , crawling , like acunning animal, through the bush , in quest ofgame .

When, having passed over the Mediterranean Sea ,we came to the north-east corner of Africa

,we

should see the river we call the Nile rolling northwards its volume of waters , and men of a darkerSpecies but no higher in the scale than the skinclad men of Europe , naked in body, crouchingamong the papyrus j ungles on the river-banks , orpaddling rude boats here and there over the surfaceof the water , to catch the river-fowl or fish . Andas we passed on eastward s , having crossed a vastempty desert of sand , we should come to anothercountry where two great rivers flowed southwardsfrom the mountain mass of Armenia , and enteredside by side , only twenty-five miles apart , a greatalluvial plain—a wide flat land, with no borderinghills like the Nile Valley , a land that was here dry


desert and there rank swamp , and then fartheraway from the river a country of thin scrub , changing still farther off into the desolation of bare sand .

The two rivers rise in flood in the early summer,

and change their beds from time to time in the softyielding mud . Part of their waters runs off andends in great stagnant lagoons , part ultimately bydi fferent channels finds its way into the arm of theocean which we call the Persian Gulf . Where themoisture from the rivers penetrated, we should see

thick forests of date—palms and poplars . It is aland of very fierce heat in the summer , and thelagoons breed infini te swarms of flies . But here

,

too, as on the Nile, there are human beings living

in miserable huts of some sort near the banks of

the river , pushing their coracles among the reeds ,and gathering the dates from the palms .

IV

THE DAWN IN EGYPT

IF we made the same j ourney again some fivethousand years later—Viz . , about 5000 B .C .

—weshould not see much that wa s different in Europe

,

nor probably in the Land of the Two Rivers ; butin the Nile Valley we should di scover that something new was beginning to happen in this breed ofhuman creatures . The men here—perhaps belonging to some race which has found its way into thecountry from the south since we were last there

THE DAWN IN EGYPT 17

have learnt to build houses of the river-mud,the

mud mixed with chopped straw formed into bricksand dried in the sun ; they have learnt to sow seedin the damp , rich , alluvial soil, and gather thegrain that grows of it to make bread ; they havelearnt that the Oopper found in the border hills ,especially when mixed with tin, makes betterweapons and tools than can be made of stone ; andwith their new tools they have learnt to shapelarger blocks of stone brought down from the hills

,

so that they can be used for building or for preserving carved signs from generation to generation .

These carved signs are the great discovery that,

after thousands of years , is going to bring man intothe light of history ; they are the beginning of

writing . The men we see in the Nile Valley arenow building their houses of mud brick in compactassemblages at intervals along the river—in towns .Each town has its own territory of fields stretchedout on this or that side of the river, to touch theterritory of the next town . Each town has itsown ruler and its own god or goddess , to whomsome animal is sacred, and whose temple is builtin its midst or close at hand . Sometimes one townis at war with another . There is no one ruler ofthe whole long valley . And where the hills ceaseon either side , and the river spreads out in itsdelta towards the sea , the country it waters is stillla rgely a vast extent of wild papyrus swamp .

We return two thousand years later , in 3000and find that the civilization has made progress .

Men arose in one or other of the towns strong2


enough or successful enough to hold, not their owntown only

,but many of the neighbouring towns

under their rule . Under the dominion of kingslarger masses of men were drawn together toco-operate , for war or for construction . At lastthere was one who became king of the wholecountry

,all the way from the Delta as far as the

settlements of this race extended up the River , tothe lands inhabited by black men . And now thekings of the Upper and the Lower Country havea command of material and human labour such asno man has had before . They can rear greatbuildings of stone as their sepulchres and memorials .In a hundred years or so from now King Kufu willbuild the pyramid which was still at the beginn ingof our own nineteenth century the highest thingbuilt by man upon the face of the earth . And thewriting ofwhich we saw the beginnings in 5000 B .C'.

has been elaborated . There are now not onlyinscriptions carved in stone everywhere upontemples or monuments , but the fibre of the papyrusreed is woven into paper , and men paint and writeupon it , and make rolls in which the thoughts andthe knowledge of one man may be transmitted toother men far separated from him by space ortime . The towns still go on having their ownrulers , under the paramount lord of the land ; theystill go on worshipping their own special gods , andperhaps quarrelling with their neighbours whosesacred animal is different from their own (indeed,they will still go ondoing so more than four thousandyears later , as is told us by the Roman satirist) ;

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the soil to full account . And , again , the Land of

the Two Rivers is much less shut Off from the surrounding world than the Nile Valley is , between itslong ranges of desert hills . It is always Open toinvasion from the nomads of the steppe on thewest or the highland peoples to the north and east .For civili zation to grow a long period was needed ,in which it could be shielded from di sturbance fromoutside . Perhaps it was because in both theseways the Land of the Two Rivers was less favourably situated than the Land of the One River

,

that the men on the Nile started before the menon the Euphrates and Tigris .Yet in 3000 we find that they

,also , have

made a start . They have dug canals and builtcities of brick . And here , too , each city has itsown ruler and its own god, though there is generallyone ruler stronger than the rest who claims a kindof authority over the whole land . The principalcities are in the country between the lower reachesof the two rivers : Nippur (whose god, Ellil, isvenerated by the people of all the cities ) , Ki sh ,Lagash , Uruk , Ur , Eridu , Larsa ; higher up theTigris on the confines of the alluvial country isUpi (Opis ) . In the Nile Valley all the people wereof one nation and Speech ; here in the alluvial Landof the Two Rivers , which our Old Testament callsthe land of Shinar (it ought probably to be readSha na a r) we find the country divided between tworaces , speaking wholly different languages . Thenorthern part of the country

,called Akkad

,is

inhabited by a people of the Semitic group,di stant

THE DAWN IN SHINAR 2 1

cousins of the Arabs , the Hebrews , the Phoeniciansand Syrians , men with long black crinkled beards ,whose ancestors no doubt had migrated at sometime into this country from Arabia . The southernpart

,towards the mouth of the rivers , called Sumer ,

is inhabited by a race which has no affinity withany other race we know on earth , men with cleanshaven faces and bald shorn heads , with ratherpointed prominent noses and thin fine lips . Whichrace had come first into the country we do notknow . But although the two peoples are distinctthey have learnt from each other ; both pay homageand send offerings to the great gods of the land

,

such as Elli l of Nippur . The Sumerians depicttheir gods as in appearance Akkadi an , and theAkkadians have learnt from the Sumerians theinvention which this people made in the Land ofthe Two Rivers (like that which the men in theNile Valley had made some two thousand yearsearli er ) , writing—a script less picturesque than theEgyptian hieroglyphics with their little figures ofmen and beasts and vultures , a script which consists of groups of short wedge-shaped lines

,and

which we therefore know to-day as cuneiform .

”

Like the men in the Nile Valley, the men on theTwo Rivers cut words on slabs of stone , thoughstone is much more precious here than in Egypt

,

since the hills whence it has to be brought are muchfarther away . But whereas for commoner use theEgyptians have their paper of papyrus fibre , themen of the Two Rivers have a far more lastingmaterial—little bricks and cylinders and tablets of


clay . Thousands of these documents in clay havebeen got out of the ground in the country of theTwo Rivers in our own day , with the writing asclear a s when the clay was first baked ; thousandsmore are still there in the ground waiting for futureexcavators . By means of what was written on

stone or clay , we can trace in a fragmentary waythe Shifting of power from the ruling house of onecity to the ruling house Of another city, fromSumerian to Semite , and from Semite to Sumerian ,

over the centuries from about 2 800 onwards .But this is not the place to give lists of the kingswho reigned in the land Of Shinar thousands of

years ago- names many of which look strangeenough in our modern script : Luga lsha gengur ,

Ensha gkushanna , Luga lkigubnidudu. One can onlytry to bring home to the imagination how far inthose days Shinar

, like Egypt , had advancedbeyond the life of primitive man . There were nowtwo regions in the earth

,among the vast barbarian

darkness , where men were living that life of greaterknowledge , of greater command over Nature , of

greater complexity,which we term civili zed .

Here are cities which would not compare un

favourably with modern cities of the East—menliving together in great masses , in labyrinths of

streets among houses of sun" dried brick . Theirtransactions are ordered by written deeds—contracts , sales , loans . The stamp of the seal uponthe moist clay—the seal which a man wore uponhis person , and which it was hard to imitate withoutdetection—takes the place which a man’ s autograph

THE DAWN IN SHINAR 23

has with us . There is a fixed system of law—howfar written down before Hammurabi

, how farpreserved in oral tradi tion only , we cannot sayadministered to the people by judges . There arealso those artificial social di stinctions which civili zation has always implied—the privileged position ofthe Son ofa man , in the phrase ofthe Babylonianlaw code , as against the poor .

” There are alsoSlaves in the cities beside free men .

Outside the city gates the soft dusty roads go ata dead level between the fields or the groves fedby irrigation from the two rivers . The country isalready covered by a network ofIcanals, the workof many generations , by which much that had beenswamp and waste has been changed into cornlandor luxuriant garden . TO repair canals or to dignew ones was the work upon which every ruler inShinar prided himself beyond everything else . Andwherever the water was brought in due measure

,

the fertility of the land was such that it seemed tostrangers almost miraculous .“ It is so bountiful in its yield of those fruits

which men call cereal ,” wrote someone who saw

the land in the fifth century B .C . , that it returnsfor the most part two—hundred—fold, and, at thebest

,even three-hundred-fold . The breadth of the

blades of wheat and barley there easily reaches fourfingers . And of millet and of sesame what thesize is—as it were that of a tree—though I knowwell

,I will not mention , being sure that , for those

who have never Visited Babylonia , even so muchas I have said already as to its fruits will have gone


far beyond the measure of belief (Herodotus ,

It has, of course , to be remembered that, rich

as the soil ofBabylonia is , the amount of its surfacewhich can be irrigated is limited . The volume of

water brought down by the two rivers is limited .

It has been calculated that the maximum areawhich was cultivated in antiquity was between

and square kilometres ; the remainingsquare ki lometres of the alluvial country

must have always remained in its primitivedesolation .

*

Wherever the man of Shinar passed beyond thearea of cultivation , wherever he got a View , un

obstructed by palm—groves or poplars or willows ,he saw the plain stretching flat as far as his eyecould reach . The mountains far away to the eastwhich buttress the tableland ofPersia were beyondthe horizon

,and the plain stretched everywhere to

the horizon , level lik e the sea . He had to travelfar to see anything like a hill . Perhaps it was forthis reason that the people of Shinar were so fondof erecting great structures ofbrick , platform aboveplatform

,till from the chamber at the top you

could look down upon city and fields and grovesspread out below like a map . Their temples

According to Wi llco cks , the wa ter of the two r iverswoul d not suffice for irriga ting m ore than squa rekilom etres . Thi s , howe ver , is a llowing for enough wa terto rem a in in the Tigris to m a ke steam er naviga tion possib le.

I f the whole volum e of wa ter were used for irriga tion, a

la rger a rea could be cul ti v a ted . Thi s would im ply tha tcommuni ca tion by steam er wa s repla ced by ra ilway m

androa d communi ca tion.

THE DAWN IN SHINAR 25

regularly took this form . And from the top in thewarm cloudless nights your eye could take in thewhole moving dome of stars . The men of Shinarobserved the stars more methodically than menhad ever done before , and , because their observations could be written down , the traditional body ofastronomical knowledge could grow from generation to generation . It was indeed a small body of

knowledge compared even with tha t which theGreeks possessed later on in this field, and the bulkof the astrology which was passed Off under theRoman Empire , and in later ages , as ancient doctrineof the Babylonian sages was , as a matter of fact

,

elaborated by the Greeks . But it is true that themen of Shinar gazed at the expanse of the nightskies in the belief that the fortunes of men somehowdepended upon signs in the heavens

,and conferred

upon certain of the constellations , which theycame to di stinguish as stable groups among thebewildering multitude of stars , those im aginaryfigures which have been tradi tional in astronomyever since—the Scorpion , the Archer , half man halfbeast

,the He—goat with a fish ’s tail. There was

especial significance for the Sumerians in the planetwe still call Venus , and which they associated withthe great goddess of love and procreation , Nanai ,whose worship was centred in the city ofUruk .


EARLY K INGS OF SUMER AND AKKAD

WHEN the whole land of Shinar—both the land of

Sumer and the land of Akkad—was held togetheras a unity under the hand of a single king , it constituted an agglomeration of power which mightassert itself over the neighbouring less civilizedlands . Such an agglomeration of power , such aconcentration of the efforts of a great number of

men,seemed possible in those days only under a

monarch . There was more individual freedom,we

must think,in the primitive tribes than in the

cities of Shinar or Egypt ; man in order to advancein co-ordinated power had had to sacrifice somethingof his original rude liberty . But a King of Sumerand Akkad was in a position to entertain imperialistic ambitions . About 2500 B .C .

, it is calculated,King Sargon ofAkkad carried his arms beyond thelimits of Shinar east and west and north and south .

On the east he subjugated the people of Elam inthe upland country now called Khuzistan (the partof the present kingdom ofPersia which falls on thesouth-west to the lower end of the alluvial plainwhere the two rivers now meet ) , inhabited in thosedays by a race speaking a tongue of their own

,akin

neither to the Semitic languages nor to Sumerian,

with Susa (the modern Shuster ) for their chief city—a race sometimes subj ect to Sumerian or "Akkadian


Shirfa r did not think of the barbarian da rknessbeyond the range of their knowledge as worthreckoning . This world that Sargon conquered inthe middle Of the third millennium before Christ isto-day a field for the operations of armies come inpart from an island far away beyond the sunset ,and in part from the land of India , far beyond thehills ofElam on the east .The Akkadian empire of Sargon did not last .

About two centuries later the chief power has againpassed to the Sumerians . It is the turn of the cityof Ur Ur of the Chaldees to furni sh theparamount dynasty . And the provinces whichSargon had conquered outside Shinar fell away .

The last King of Ur was carried away captive byElamite invaders . It would seem that after thisShinar fell again for a time into separate kingdoms .When we look over what we can trace of the historyof Shinar as a whole , one thing that strikes us isthe inability of its inhabitants to found one singlestrong and durable State . It is only for a timethat now and again a dynasty arises in one or otherof the Sumerian or Akkadi an cities strong enoughto concentrate the forces of the country . Thebroken history of Shinar contrasts in this way withthe history of Egypt

,which remained

,with rela

tively brief intervals , a single independent kingdomfor some four thousand years . This may be duein part to the fact that two distinct races with twodi stinct languages occupy the plain of the TwoRivers , whereas in the Valley of the Nile there isone homogeneous people, speaking the same lan

EARLY KINGS OF SUMER AND AKKAD 29

guage , in part to the fact that , while the NileValley is fenced Off from the outside world by thebordering hills and deserts , Shinar is open to invasionfrom all sides .The political history of Shinar is broken

,but

through all changes of dynasty and shiftings of thepolitical centre the culture of the country remainedthe same . The fields were irrigated and tilled

,men

bought and sold and registered their transactionson tablets of clay , and worshipped the gods in theold way . People of steppe and mountain cominginto the land of Shinar, amongst its groves a nd

gardens , still marvelled at an earthly paradi se , suchas they saw no parallel to elsewhere . They saw

high walls of brick and towers built , it seemed, toreach unto heaven . They saw the images of menand animals and fantastic monsters , delineated byan old traditional art which had its home in thisland, carved in stone or composed in bright-colouredenamels under the dazzling sunlight . They saw

markets and bazaars,where crowds of men trafficked ,

in long robes,whose feet , bare or sandalled , made

no sound in the soft thick dust ofthe streets . Theysaw wares displayed, rich embroidered stuffs such asnone save the people of Shinar knew how to make ,or goods brought in from neighbouring countrieson the backs of swaying camels or of asses . Butthey saw no horses in the days of King Sargon of

Akkad,because the tribes wandering somewhere

far away to the north,who had made the horse their

servant and companion,had not yet found their

way as far south as the Land of the Two Rivers .


Neither had the Pharaoh of Egypt any horses yetto draw his chariot , nor the nomad Arabs anyhorses to ride .

VII

INFLUENCE ON OTHER LANDS

IT could not but be that , from realms such as thatof Shinar and that of Egypt , an influence and lightshould go forth all over the surrounding countries .The life of ruder peoples was raised in the scale bytwo main ways of contact . Partly the mere sightof the life lived along the Nile and in the Land of

the Two Rivers , the report of it carried home toother lands by those who had seen , the productsof its art , carved work or weapon or goodly garment ,suggested ideas Of dignity and splendour to peopleswho were susceptible of suggestion . The King ofAkkad or of Ur set a standard, which kinglets faraway were stirred to imitate according to theirpower , j ust as the Roman Empire long after imposedupon the imagination of Northern Chieftains . Andpeoples with original artistic faculty would bestirred by the movement propagated from land toland or overseas to elaborate their life along theirown lines . Even before the days of King Sargona certain type of civilization distinct in characterhad come to exist in the coasts and islands Of theEastern Mediterranean , whose products dug out ofthe ground in Crete are termed by Sir Arthur EvansEarlyMinoan .

” In a place like Cyprus,influences

THE RISE OF BABYLON 31

from Shinar crossed with influences from Egypt .

In these countries , too , the old implements of stonehad been superseded by bronze .

VIII

THE RISE OF BABYLON

THERE was also another way in which Shinar wasa school for the neighbouring peoples—by beingconquered . When from time to time some warliketribe from hill or steppe broke into the land andset up a kingdom there

,they took on the forms of

the higher civilization . They paid homage to thegreat gods of the cities of Shinar in the traditionalway ; they adopted the languages of Sumer andAkkad and the style of native kings . An instanceof this are the Amorites , who infiltrated or sweptinto the country at the end Of the third mi llenniumbefore Christ

,about five centur ies after King

Sargon . Towards 2000 an Amorite Chieftain,

Sumua bu ,carved out a kingdom for himself in the

land of Shinar with a new centre . This was atown on the Euphrates , not hitherto importantamong the cities of the land, Bab -ilu, Gate of theGods

,which the Hebrews knew afterwards as

Babel, and the Greeks as Babylon . A king of thisdynasty a hundred years later , Hammurabi , wasone Of the great rulers in the history of Shinar .Once more the country was united under a singlemonarch . The graven chronicle of Hammurabi still


tells us how he gathered his host and went againstthe King of Ur

,and conquered the city ofUr and

the city of Larsa,and brought the spoil of them

to Babylon . He waged war with the Ela mites,

and occupied the frontier di stricts which barredtheir incursions . He extended his rule outsideShinar

,up the Tigris

,and incorporated the Assyrian

country. The Assyrian country was higher up theTigris , within sight of the mountain ramparts of

Iran . It was the continuation eastwards of thegrassy steppe lands of Mesopotamia , less enervatingin climate than the hot lands of Shinar. Itsinhabitants were Semites

,like the Akkadians and

Amorites , and their language was closely akin toAkkadi an . Their chief city had first been Asshuron the Tigris , from which the name of Asshur wasextended to the country and the people and the

god of the people ; but before the time ofHammurabithe Assyrians had built another city farther up theriver, destined to eclipse Asshur ,

the city ofNineveh .

The Assyrians had the same civili zation , andworshipped the same gods and used the samewriting , as the people Of Shinar ; but their temperseems to have been more warlike : whereas thegreat goddess , the Ishtar (Astarte ) of the peopleof Shinar , was a goddess of voluptuousness , theI shtar of the men of Asshur was a goddess of war .Under Hammurabi of Babylon , Assyria came to beregarded as an integral part of the kingdom ofSumer and Akkad .

But Hammurabi was not only a conquerer . Theletters he wrote to the royal officials in the s outhern

THE RISE OF BABYLON 33

cities of the kingdom haVe been discovered,and

show him as a careful supervisor of the administration . He seems to have directed especial attentionto the irrigation upon which the life of the countrydepended—repairing or maintaining the old canals

,

digging new ones .His code of laws , rediscovered some years ago ,

is a docum ent ofpeculiar interest . The comparisonwith the law ofMoses was one which immediatelysuggested itself , and ha s been a topic for scholars .It shows a punitive system adapted to class di stinctions within society If a man ha s causedthe loss of a gentleman’s eye , his eye also shall beput out . If he has shattered a gentleman’s limb

,

his own limb shall be shattered .

” On the otherhand, if he has caused a poor man to lose hiseye or shattered a poor man’s limb , he shall payone mina of silver Justice is still rough andready . If the doctor has treated a gentleman fora severe wound with a lancet of bronze , and hascaused that gentleman to di e , or ha s opened anabscess on the eye for a gentleman with a bronzelancet

,and has caused the loss of the gentleman’s

eye,that doctor ’s hands shall be cut off.” If a

builder has built a house for a man , and has notmade strong his work , and the house he built hasfallen

,and he has caused the death of the owner

of the house , that builder shall be put to death .

”

The code of Hammurabi , no doubt , representsnot so much the ideas of a single man as the ethicaland legal conceptions prevalent in Shinar in thetwentieth century It must always henceforth

3


be a standard document for those who study thedevelopment of the ideas of good and evil among

men .

After the tim e of this Babyloni an dynasty theSemite element in Shinar finally absorbed theSumerian . The old Sumerian language became adead language which was still preserved alongsideof Akkadian , for religious purposes , as Latin wasin the Middle Ages , but the living speech of Shinarwas henceforth Semitic .

The Amorite dynasty Of Babylon , like others inShinar , had its day and perished . The last successor of Hammurabi known from the monumentsseems to belong to the earlier half of the eighteenthcentury . Then once more foreign peoples sweptover the land . The Hittites , of Asia Minor

, of

whom we now first hear , raided Babylon , andcarried away the image ofthe special god Of Babylon ,Marduk (called by the generi c title Bel " Baal

,

Lord A people from the mountains betweenBabylonia and Persia , the Ka sshu (Cossaea ns ) ,broke in from the east , and set a king of their ownupon the throne of Babylon . We can trace theirdynasty for a century, and then a darkness of

about two centuries comes down upon the historyof Shinar .


because our common ancestors in their Old forgottenhome called their mothers matar

,

”or something

like it , that the Englishman says mother,

” andthe Indian matara , to-day . We do not knowwhat name that people gave themselves when theywere all living together as one . Learned men nowcommonly refer to them as Indo-Europeans

,Ger

mans naturally like to call them Indogermanen .

”

Later on, when one branch of them split away andtook possession of Persia and Northern India , thepeople of that branch called themselves Arya

(the Noble ) ; and it was the fashion a little while ago ,and is still common in popular writings , to call thewhole family of Indo-European peoples and languages Aryan This is a much more convenientand pleasant-sounding name than the cumbersomeIndo-European but , unfortunately, it is wantedas the special name of the Persian-Indian branch

,

and it tends to confusion if we apply it to thewhole family . So , although it seems an outrageto apply to a primitive pastoral people a namewhich so suggests dry scholastic classification asIndo-European ,

” there is no better name whichoffers .We do not know what this people called itself

in its old home , but we know something about itsmanner of life from the words which have come downfrom the original common stock . We know it wasa pastoral people with flocks and herds , and weknow that it had among its domestic animals oneunknown to Egypt and the land of Shinar till thesecond millennium B .C .

—the horse, forwhich it had

THE ORIGINAL INDO-EUROPEANS 37

a name that sounded like ekVO or ekwo . Itused implements of bronze

,which metal it called

“ ayas (the Latin aes It knew how toplough the ground and sow seed and grind corn .

It worshipped the great Sky—god, Dyaus , whom theGreeks later on called Father Zeus

,

” and theRomans Father Jove . From its old homeoffshoots of this people pushed out gradually overthe whole Of Europe , and across Persia into India .

The area covered by these Indo-European peopleswas thus much more extensive than the areacovered by the Semites—Shinar and Syria andArabia . Of course , when the Indo—Europeans cameinto new lands they di d not exterminate the earlierinhabitants : they intermingled with them andabsorbed them in various degrees ; so that , althoughall the peoples Of Europe to—day (except the Basques ,the Firms , and the Magyars) speak Indo-Europeanlanguages , we are far from being of pure IndoEuropean blood . Often , it may be , the IndoEuropean conquerers were a minority who imposedtheir languages and their ideas upon a subj ectpopulation—411 Europe as in India . The Basquesin the Pyrenees are the last relic of the earlierinhabitants of Europe who still keep their oldlanguage .

It was in the second millennium that IndoEuropean peoples began to come within the purviewof the Old civilization in the Land of the TwoRivers . Probably it was dur ing the centuriesbetween Sargon of Akkad and Hammurabi ofBabylon (between 2500 and 1900 that the


Aryan branch of the Indo-Europeans were establishing themselves on the Iranian tableland (the presentPersia ) , and conquering the dark

—Skinned aborigines

of the Panjab . The Oldest monument of IndoEuropean literature

,the hymns of the Indian

Rigveda,is assigned conj ecturally to somewhere

about 2000 BC . The Cossaeans who invaded Shinarin the eighteenth century , although not themselvesAryans

,must have been in contact with the Aryans ,

since they knew the name of Shuria sh for theSun-god

,which is plainly the Aryan surya .

”

Soon after 1900 B .C . we find a horse mentioned forthe first time in a legal cuneiform document , delightfully described as an “ ass of the hill country .

TWO centuries later we find a people akin to theHittites not themselves Indo—European) powerful on the Upper Euphrates

,the Mi tani , whose

reigning dynasty seems by its names to have beenAryan.

THE FIR ST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

DURING the thousand years which go roughly from1600 to 600 B .C . the centre of power is no longer inShinar (Babylonia ) , but with the kindred Semiticpeople fa rther up the Tigris—the Assyrians .Babylon sees itself outshone by its rivals Asshuror Nineveh . The Assyrian kingdom presents theaspect of a strongly organized monarchy w ith arestless appetite for conquest . Its culture . its

THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 39

writing , its art , its religion , are still those of Shinar ,but it is animated by a new aggressive spirit . And

yet for Assyria to maintain its position requireda continued effort , and it could not but be that itsperiods of supremacy should alternate with periodswhen its arm failed against the pressure fromoutside . For on its eastern and northern frontiersAssyria adj oined a mountain country whose raceswere not easily held under , and were always readyto attack the conqueror ; and if it strove to extendits power across Mesopotamia to the west , it againcame into contact with the peoples of NorthernSyria and ofthe mountains which separate NorthernSyria from Asia Minor . The first empire constitutedby Assyria broke up ; after an interval of weaknessit put forth a new effort , succeeded in creating anempire more extensive than any yet uni ted underone man, and then, within a generation from theheight Qf

,_

il3$ power , Assyria had perished, as akingdom , for ever .It was part of the ambition of the kings of

Assyria to dominate the land of Shinar . The old

cities and temples of that land, the cradle of theirculture , had for their imagination a prestige towhich

,with a ll their military predominance , they

must bow . And , besides , the riches of the alluvialcountry continued to make it in one way the centreof the world . In Shinar , since the days of Hammura bi, the city of Babylon held its place as thecapital city, and the cities lower down , which hadbeen great before Babylon was heard of

,decayed

or fell to a subordinate grade . And the kings of


Babylon di d not read ily submit to the supremacyof the king of Assyria . The history of thesethousand years are , therefore , full Of wars betweenthe Assyrians and their Babylonian cousins . Sometim es the king of Assyria succeeded in combiningwith his title of “King of Assyria ” the title of

King of Sumer and Akkad sometimes thekings of Babylon were able to drive back theAssyrian armies and assert their independence .

The imperialism of the Assyrian kings had astrong religious complexion . Their Assyrian god,who personified his people , and whose name wasthe same as that of the country , Asshur, was theLord in whose service and at whose behest theywent forth to trample down the earth . Theirconquests were marked by a ruthlessness andferocity which shows well how they conceived thecharacter of their god :Asshur my Lord commanded me to go forth .

I covered the regions of Sa ra ush and ofAmm a ush

with ruins . I proved myself against theirarmies at the mountain ofAruma , I chastised them ,

I strawed the earth with their bodies , as they hadbeen beasts of the field ; I took their cities in possession

,I carried away their gods , I led them away

captive,them and their goods and their treasures ;

I burned the cities with fire , I destroyed them , Imade them even with the ground , I made of themheaps and a desolation ; I laid upon them thegrievous yoke ofmy dominion , and in their presenceI gave thanks unto Asshur my Lord .

”

I slew two hundred and sixty fighting men ;

THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 41

I cut off their heads and made pyramidsthereof .”

I Slew one Of every two . I built a wall beforethe great gates of the city ; I flayed the chief menof the rebels

,and I covered the wall with their

skins . Some of them were enclosed alive in thebricks of the wall , some of them were crucified on

stakes along the wall ; I caused a great multitudeof them to be flayed in my presence , and I coveredthe wall with their skins . I gathered together theheads in the form of crowns , and their piercedbodies in the form ofgarlands .

”

The inhabitants forsook their strongholds andtheir castles ; they fled for safety towards Matui , astrong country ; I rushed after them in pursuit ;I strawed a thousand bodies of the warriors uponthe mountain ; I covered the mountain with theirdead bodies ; I filled the valleys therewith . AS fortwo hundred that I had taken alive , I pierced theirwrists .”

My face rej oiceth over ruins In the satisfyingof my wrath I have my pleasure .

The Assyrian war-bulletins , it is to be noticed,never Show anything but victories .The first expansion of the Assyrian power took

place in the twelfth century . King Tigla th—pileser

(Tugultipa lesha rra ) I . conquered on the west theMoschia ns and the Comm a genia ns in the hillcountry of the Upper Euphrates between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor

,marched Victoriously east

wards into the mountains ofKurdi stan , penetratedinto what is now Armenia to the north , subjugated


the petty kingdoms ofNorthern Syria,crossed over

Lebanon to the Phoenician coast,and looked upon

the Medi terranean Sea . The king of Egypt ,alarmed at his approach

,sent him presents

,amongst

them crocodiles and hippopotami for the royalmenagerie on the Tigris . Tigla th

-

pileser on anothercampaign marched down the Tigris and subjugatedthe land of Shinar

,but here the king of Babylon

succeeded in inflicting bloody reverses upon theAssyrian armies and driving them back to theirown land . The son of Tigla th—pileser took revengeand we hear of Baghdad (not yet of great importanceamong the towns of Shinar ) being captured by theAssyrians . But within a few reigns the empireof Tigla th-

pileser had broken up , and the peoplesof Syria and Palestine did not know again theAssyrian terror for many generations to come .

ISRAEL

THE Palestine which had trembled at Tigla th

pileser I . was not the Holy Land which we thinkof in connection with the name . It was the landof the Amorites , Canaanites , Hivites , Perizzites ,and Jebusites, which had not yet seen Joshua andhis bands . It was during the temporary occultationof the Assyrian power that all that earlier Israelitehistory which we know from our Bibles—the conquest of the land

,the time of the Judges , Saul and


All through the earlier history Of Israel in Canaan ,we hear nothing about Asshur . The enemies of

Israel are the neighbouring petty kingdoms—thePhili stines , the Moabites , the Syrians of Hamathor Damascus . The great kingdom near them wasEgypt

,and their imaginations were possessed by

the splendour and power of Pharaoh . Once wehear Of an Egyptian army raiding the land andspoiling Jerusalem . Then in the middle of theeighth century we witness dramatically the reappearance of the great Power on the Tigris abovethe Jerusalem horizon . In the days ofAhaz , kingof Judah , Jerusalem is threatened by a coalitionof Northern Israel with the Syrians . That is theimmediate danger . And suddenly a greater Powerlooms up behind the enemies of the north . Assyriahas grown strong again , is again reaching westwards , and in that black shadow soon all otherenmities and terrors are lost .Those were the days in which one individual

figure stands out , still living and real for us—theprophet and statesman of Jerusalem , Isaiah , theson of Amoz . The first policy of king Ahaz wasto get the support of the more di stant AssyrianPower against the nearer enemies , Northern Israeland Damascus . At that moment Isaiah foresawthe Assyrian sweeping over the whole land like adevastating deluge , over Northern Israel andDamascus—yes , and over his own Judah , overImmanuel’s land

,as well .

The Northern Israelites had already,before

Isaiah ’s time,had some dealing with the Assyrians .

ISRAEL 45

By 860 Assyrian armies had again crossed theLebanon and compelled the homage ofthe Phoenicianseaboard . In 854 soldiers Of Ahab

,king of Israel

,

had fought side by side with the Syria ns againstthe forces of Shalmaneser II . of Assyria . In 842

,

after Hazael , king of Syria , had been bloodilydefeated by an Assyrian army , Jehu , king ofIsrael , had thought it prudent to send presents tothe king of Assyria . But for the hundred yearswhich had followed this battle the Assyrian menacehad again receded from the land of Israel . TheAssyrian royal house had been weakened by di ssensions , and the Assyrians had had their handstoo full with wars in other directions to push forward in Palestine . Now, however , in the days ofAhaz , king of Judah , a strong man was once moreon the throne of Nineveh , Tigla th

-

pileser III .

( 7 45-7 2 7 What Isaiah had foreseen happened .

Assyrian armies overran Northern Israel and carriedoff its people into regions far away . They sweptaway the Syrian kingdom , and in 732 the king of

Assyria held a durbar in conquered Damascus .When Tigla th—pileser III . di ed, Hoshea , the manwho still kept up the style of Israelite king inSamaria

,with diminished territory and population ,

wa s a vassal to Assyria . Then Hoshea tried toshake off the yoke by

"

intrigues with Egypt , butTigla th

-

pileser’

s son, Shalmaneser IV ., put him to

death and laid siege to Samaria . Shalmaneser didnot live to see its capture . Samaria fell inafter the Assyrian throne had passed to Sargon ,one of Sha lm a neser

’

s great generals . The kingdom


ofNorthern Israel was finally extinguished . Judahremained alone to represent the chosen people of

the Lord .

THE SECOND AS SYRIAN EMPIRE

ALL this time , as we have said, the Assyrians werewaging wars elsewhere . They were , as it were ,permanently fighting on many fronts at once ; andoperations had continually to be suspended in one

direction , because rumours Of trouble came fromthe opposite extremity of the empire . On thewest the ambition of the Assyrians was to crossthe Taurus and establish themselves in Asia Minor .

The highland peoples who inhabited the countryround about the modern Marash and Zeitun wereattacked and slaughtered, and the way Opened forthe Officers of the king of Assyria to the centre ofthe Asia Minor tableland . Sometimes the Cilicianplain with the town of Tarsus was subj ect to Assyr ia .

On the north they had a formidable enemy in thekingdom which consolida ted itself in the countrynow known as Armenia , the region ofLake Van andLake Urum iya h , but was then called Ararat .

* TheArmeni ans , who are an IndO-European people , hadnot yet come into this country , and the ethnologicalaffini ties of this ancient people of Ararat seem to

Ara ra t , in the Old Testam ent , is the nam e of a country ,

not of a mountain. The a rk rests on the m ounta ins of

Ara ra t,"

THE SECOND ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 47

have been with the Georgians of to-day . It tookits culture , its writing and style of art , in anycase

,from the south , and inscriptions in cunei

form,similar in appearance to the monuments

of Shinar , are still found in these regions ofArmenia .

On the east , the Assyrian armies climbed throughthe mountains on to the borders of the tablelandof Iran . Iran is the Persian name for the countrycovered by the present kingdom of Persia . Wesaw how before 2000 the Aryans were takingthis country in possession . Iran , in fact , meansetymologically the Aryan country . At the timewe have now come to , the Aryans of Iran were stillliving for the most part a primitive pastoral existence round the strongholds of different independentchiefs . But already one powerful kingdom hadbeen formed amongst the Iranians , there whereIran wa s in the closest connection , by the mountaintracks , with the Babylonian-Assyrian country—thekingdom of the Medes , with its centre at Ecbatana

(modern Hamadan) . Perhaps already the Medi ankings had left the Old simple native tradition , andtaken to rich trailing robes , and fashioned theircourt in emulation of the Semitic despots whoreigned on the Euphrates and Tigris .On the south , of course , the constant endeavour

of the Assyrian kings was to maintain theirsupremacy “

OVGI‘ the land of Shinar . Again and

again Babylon rose in rebellion under its ownkings and beat back the Assyrians , and again anda gain the Assyrians came back and entered Babylon


as conquerors . They put the king of Babylon, if

they caught him , to an atrocious death , but theypaid ostentatious homage to the Babylonian gods .It can hardly have been but that in those troubleddays the old prosperity of Shinar went down

,that

the canals fell into di srepair , and the wildernessgained upon cultivation . Aramaeans—that is

,

Syrians—from the west seem to have drifted inlarge numbers into the country, and at this timeprobably Aramaic was already beginning to supersede the other Semitic languages all across thecountry between Persia and the Mediterranean .

A few centuries later it was the lingua.fra nca of allthis part Of the world .

AS SYRIA AND EGYPT

UNDER Sargon , who bore the name Of the OldAkkadian conqueror two thousand years before

,

the Assyrian Power made new progress . Thepower of the kingdom ofArarat , to the north , wasbroken

,and the country , if not made tributary,

was at any rate made too weak to be dangerous .Assyrian garrisons were established in Media . InAsia Minor the authority of the king of Assyriareached to the Ha lys (modern Kizil Irmak) .Merodach-Baladan , the king of Babylon

,was

hunted out , and Sa rgonzwa s installed in Baby lon

ASSYRIA AND EGYPT 49

as King of Sumer and Akkad . The alternationof rebellion and conquest goes on under Sargon’sson Sennacherib ( 7 05 to 6 8 1 His name isfamiliar to us because the Assyrian Power was nowadvancing step by step along the bridge constitutedby Palestine between sea and desert towards theother great kingdom of the world in the Valley ofthe Nile . Egypt had been newly consolidatedafresh . High up the Nile , in the region of what isnowKhartum , a region then called Kush , or by theGreeks ZEthiopia , a dynasty of Egyptian origin andculture reigned over an independent kingdom .

Presently the king of Ethiopia had come down theNile as conqueror into the land of his ancestors

,

and knit Ethiopia and Egypt together as a singlerealm . It might seem that the great shock of thetwo civili zations—that which had grown up on theNile and that which had grown up on the Euphratesand Tigris—was imminent . Already , under Sargon,the Phili stine cities had been forced to accept theoverlordship of Assyria . In 7 01 Sennacheribcame down the coast at the head Of an army, hisface towards Egypt . The first encounter ofAssyrian and Egyptian forces took place in thePhilistine plain . The Egyptians were badly defeated, and it seemed that the moment was comewhen the Assyrians could penetrate into the Valleyof the Nile . But that hope was not yet destinedto be realized .

The petty king Of Judah , because Jerusalemwas situated on the hills close by the main road ofarmies along the coast Of Palestine, was involved

4


in these movements . That is why they are tod aymore Vivid to us than any other part of Assyrianhistory .

Sennacherib after his Victory in the Philistineplain laid siege to the Jewish town Of La chish (acontemporary ha s-relief depicting the siege is inthe British Museum ) , and sent two Officers Of highrank to intimidate Jerusalem by great words .“Where are the gods Of Hamath and Arpad "Where are the gods of Sepharvaim , Hena h , andIvah Have its gods at all delivered Samaria out

ofmy hand 2 Which be they , amongst all the godsof these countries, that have delivered their countryout of my hand , that Yahweh should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand Sennacherib could notspare the time at present to attack Jerusalem .

According to the reports received,the king of

Ethiopia and Egypt was already stirring again .

Sennacherib must hasten to Egypt . He sentanother message to the king of Judah warning himnot to mistake the temporary respite for finalsafety . And then on the borders of the desertbetween Palestine and Egyp t the Assyrian armywas mowed down by a sudden pestilence . Theremnant had to take the homeward road as bestit could . Long after

,in Egypt

,Herodotus was told

the story how Sennacherib had come against Egypt ,and how Pharaoh prayed to the god Ptah and ahorde of rats had attacked the Assyrian army andgnawed through their straps and bow—strings so

that they had to flee home . He was shown a statueof the Ethiopian Pharaoh holding a rat in his hand .


the wall,the rampart , the sanctuaries of the gods ,

the pyramids in brick and in earth , I razed themto the ground , I choked the great canal with theirrubbish .

” For ten years the site of Babylon laya field of ruins . At the end of that time a newking was on the throne of Assyria , Sennacherib

’s

son Ez a rha ddon (68 1-66 7 BC ) , under whom theAssyrian Empire pushed still farther in conquest .

E z a rha ddon set about the rebuilding of Babylon

(his mother was a Babylonian ) , making bricks ,clearing the choked canals . He also chastised thenomad Arabs of the steppe between Babyloni a andSyria

,making the roads safe for the caravans . In

the north there had been fresh movements of

peoples : Scyt hian hordes had come down fromCentral Asia and established themselves in thecountry which is now Azerbaijan ; hordes of apeople called Cimmerians (remembered in Greektradition ) , coming round the west of the Black Sea ,had swept over As ia Minor . In that direction thearmies of E z a rha ddon had been occupied in holdingagainst the Cimmerians the provinces west of theArmenian hills .The lure of Egypt persisted . The Jews , looking

down from their hills , saw once more Assyr ianarmies marching along the coast , intent to crossthe desert between Palestine and Egypt . Andtwice the old luck ofAssyria , trouble at the oppositeextremities of the empire , postponed the blow .

One Assyrian force which found an Egyptian armyin its path seems to have met with a reverse . Atlast in 670 the chance came . The Assyrians passed

ASSYRIA AND.EGYPT 53

Raphia (Rafa ) on the edge of the desert . Theydefeated the Egyptian armies on the frontier in twobloody battles , and four days later entered Memphis .The Assyrians were in the Valley of the Nile Itwas the people ofthe most ancient civili zation in theworld, cities of immemorial riches , which now hadexperience of Assyrian frightfulness . Memphis wassacked . Assyrian Residents were installed in theprovincial chief-towns of Lower Egypt . Ezarhaddon added to his other titles that of “King ofEgypt and Ethiopia .

” A new palace of imposingsplendour , with an avenue of sphinxes , suggestedby those the Assyrians had seen in Egypt , wasreared in Nineveh .

It was under the son of Ez a rha ddon,Asshur

banipa l (667 -625 that the Assyrian Empirereached its greatest extension . In Egypt there wasstill trouble . The Ethiopian royal house hadretired up the Nile to its original dominions , outof reach of the Assyrians , who under E z a rha ddonhad not conquered more than Lower Egypt ; andfrom its capital of Na pa ta in the Sudan it couldgo on fomenting unrest in Egypt , or come downto reconquer the whole country , whenever occasionoffered . It was in the course of this struggle thatthe Assyrians

,under Asshurba nipa l, pushed farther

up the Nile . Thebes , the great capital of UpperEgypt (the site of which is now partially occupiedby Luxor and Karnak ) , was sacked and the population carried away into captivity . The destructionof the great city of the god Amon was the sort ofthing which would profoundly impress the imagina


tion of the whole Eastern world Of the timeNO-Amon , that was situate among the rivers , thathad the waters round about her ; whose rampartwas the Nile , and her wall was of the Nile . Kushand Egypt were her strength , and it was infinite ;Put and Lubim [the Libya ns"were her helpers .Yet was she carried away . She went into captivity ;her young children were dashed to pieces at thetop of all the streets : and they cast lots for herhonourable men , and all her great men were boundin chains (Nah .

THE GLORY AND FALL OF AS SYRIA

UNDER Asshurba nipa l another country of ancientcivilization and renown was conquered— the landof Elam . Rival candidates to the Elamite thronewere always intriguing against and murdering eachother , and this enabled the king of Assyria to setup and pluck down kings . Asshurbanipa l enteredSusa as conqueror .

“ By the will of Asshur andIshtar , I entered into the palaces thereof , and tookmy rest in them with pride . I opened theirtreasur ies , I took the gold and the silver , theirriches , all the goodly things which the first kingof Elam and the kings after him had gatheredtogether , and whereon no enemy hitherto hadstretched out his hand

,I took them for a spoil .

The Assyrians had at their disposal a number of

THE GLORY AND FALL OF ASSYRIA 55

ex-kings of Elam , and these Asshurba nipa l causedto be harnessed to his chariot , doing as Timur issaid to have done long afterwards with captivekings .The Assyrian Empire , when it included Babylon

and Egypt and Elam , was larger than any realmwhich had been united under one man up to thattime . But the record was soon destined to besurpassed . Before Asshurba nipa l died, the powerof Media , on the confines Of Assyria , had grownmenacingly great , and the advantage began to passfrom the Semite to the Aryan . In Egypt a strongman arose , Psa mm etichus, who drove out theAssyrian garrisons and made Egypt free againunder a Pharaoh of Egyptian blood . His successwa s largely due to foreign soldiers he hired fromoverseas , men of a people who lived about thecoasts of the ZEgea n, and wore metal armour of amore perfect pattern . They , too , belonged to theIndo-European group of nations which had comeinto these parts , as we saw , some two thousandyears before . The tribe of this particular IndoEuropean nation with which the Orientals firstcame into contact called themselves I a ones ; so theSemites knew them as Yawa nim , or collectivelyYawan . Our Bible transcribes the word Javan .

The name used in the tongue of this people todesignate the whole nation , of which the I a onesformed a part

,was H ellenes . We shall hear more

of them presently .

We have seen how the ancient civilizations ,occupying only a small area on the earth ’s surface

,


were perpetually in danger of irruptions from thevast barbarian wilderness outside . One of suchVisitations took place in the later years of Asshurba nipa l. Scythian hordes came down through themountains south of the Caspian , overran Medi a andAssyria , and swept onwards across Syria and alongthe coast of Palestine till they reached the desertdividing Pa lestine from Egypt . That was theirlimit . King Psamm etichus saved Egypt by payingsubstantia l blackmail . It is thought that theearlier chapters Of Jeremiah , relating to a peoplefrom the north ,

” were written under the stress ofthe Scythian peril , and that the memory of itsuggested to Ezekiel the form of terror whoseimage he throws upon the clouds of the futureunder the name of Gog . The curious thing aboutthese invasions is that for a time they seem tosubmerge all countries and obliterate all frontiers

,

and in a little while the invaders have vani shed andthe old shapes of the kingdoms are there as before .

The explanation probably is that they were mereraids for loot , which aimed at no stable conquest ;that the Open country and smaller towns fell a preyto them , but that the walls of the larger townswithstood their waves . Thus , when the delugeebbed

,and men came out again from behind their

walls into the ravished lands,the Old relations

between the different settled nations were resumed .

Sooner or later these wild bands became scatteredand demoralized with indulgence

,and then the

settled peoples they had harried could turn uponthem and destroy them in detail.

THE GLORY AND FALL OF ASSYRIA 57

The chief glory for the extermination of theScythians was won by king Cya xa res Of Media .

Media arose stronger from the catastrophe thanAssyria was able to do . The Scythians were gone ,but in the prostration ofAssyria the effect Of theirtwenty years of ravage remained . It was beforea combined attack by Media and Babylon thatthe Assyrian Empire fell— fell and perished utterlyfrom the earth within the lifetime ofmen who hadseen it at its greatest power .

A few years after the destruction ofthe Scythians ,Babylon renounced its allegiance to Assyria . Thistime the national rising was led by a Chaldaean ,called Na bOpola ssa r . The Chaldaeans were one of

those peoples of Aramaean origin who had comeeast some centuries before , and had founded anindependent kingdom adjoining Balkgylonia , on theother side of the Euphrate .s Frcfm here Chaldaeanshad more M ore penetrated Babylonia itself;they had flowed into it in such large numbers thatlater on the name of Chaldaean came to mean thesame as Babyloni an .

NO doubt the assimilation of the Chaldaeans andthe older population of Shinar was facilitatedwhen a Chaldaean dynasty reigned in Babylon .

Each people learnt something from the other .

The old gods of the land were worshipped withthe Old sacred forms

,and the Old cuneiform

writing used for the various businesses of life ; butthe Chaldaeans on their side brought with them amore elaborate star—lore , which was amalgamatedhenceforth with the religion of Shinar . Chal


d aea n in Greco-Roman times was Often used in thesense ofNa bOpola ssa r the Chaldaean made an alliance

against Assyria with the king ofMedia,and his son

Nebuchadnezzar was given a Median princess inmarriage . In 608 Nineveh was taken by the Medes .The Aryan conqueror utterly destroyed thesanctuaries of the gods of Asshur ; he destroyedtheir holy books , and suffered not one to remain ;he ravaged their cities , and laid them waste as ifthey had never been .

”

MEDES AND ARMENIANS

THE Old Assyrian Empire was divided between theAryan and the Babylonian . The northern part ofit was taken over by Cya xa res . The Medes crossedthe hills of Ararat into those regions ofAsia Minorwhich had once been Assyrian , and here came intocollision with the kingdom which was in processof subjugating the western half of the penin sula,the kingdom of Lydia . The Lydi ans were anotherIndo-European people who had come , with the tideof Indo-European migra tion , into Asia Minor byway of the Balkans , centuries before , when theAryan branch was taking possession of Iran and

So ,for instance , in the Book of Daniel . Where used

in other books ofthe Old Testam ent , the term Cha ldaeanis equi v a lent to Ba byloni an.

”


Egypt,Pharaoh Necho , had conquered Palestine

and Syria as far as the Euphrates , brushing asideJosiah

,king of Judah , who had tried to bar his

path near Megiddo (Armageddon) , and settinganother Jewi sh prince , a nominee Of his own , uponthe throne of Jerusalem . The Babylonian crownprince

,Nebuchadnezzar , took the field, rescued

Mesopotamia , and drove the Egyptians out of

Palestine . He had already crossed the desert andoccupied Pelusium , the frontier town Of Egypt ,when the news came that his father had died .

Nebuchadnezzar had to give up the invasion of

Egypt and hurry back to Babylon .

Under Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 B .C . ) Babylonagain had a spell of power and glory . For morethan a thousand years

,Babylon after its first two

centuries ofpre—eminence had been either a subj ectcity or had maintained only a painful and precariousindependence . And this brief spell Of Babylonianglory was the last blaze up of the old culture ofShinar before its final sinking . This brief spell

,

which might have been embraced in the lifetimeof a single man , seems a mere moment when compared wi th the vast stretches Of time which wehave been disposing Of in a few sentences . And

yet this moment happened to coincide in time witha phase in the experience of two other peopleswhich were destined , more than any other twopeoples then existing

,to determine the future

thoughts and imaginations ofmankind"—the Greeksand the Jews . Because the doomed civilization of

Shinar , before it di sappeared, impressed, in its las t

THE NEW BABYLONIAN KINGDOM 6 1

manifestation , the minds of these two peoples , thename of Babylon has for subsequent generations ofmen embodied the ideas of worldly magnificenceand luxury .

In extent the Babylonian realm under Nebucha dnez z a r di d not even include all the southern partof the old Assyrian Empire under Asshurbanipa lElam seems to have passed into the possession ofan Aryan people , akin to the Medes , whose seatwas in the mountainous region to the south-east .This people had established a little kingdom tributary to the king Of Medi a in what is still called

,

after them , the province of Fars , and had annexedElam

,broken a s the native dynasty of that country

had been in the last days Of the Assyrian Empire .

We shall hear of them again . They called themselves Parsa ; their name in English , coming to usthrough the Greek , is Persian .

On the west,Nebuchadnezzar was unable to get

into the Valley Of the Nile , but he succeeded indominating the bridge that led to it— Syria andPalestine . For a time he allowed a king of thehouse of David to reign in Judaea as his vassal ;but the intrigues between Jerusalem and Egyptwere so recurrent that , when the Babylonian armieshad taken Jerusalem the second time , after anattempt of king Zedekiah

’s to defy his overlord ,the city was laid waste , the temple built by Solomondemolished, and the population , together with thelast representative of the old royal line , carriedaway captive to Babylon .

To the restoration of Shinar , to the repairing


of its canals and the furtherance of its prosperity ,to the amplification and beautifying of Babylon ,Nebuchadnezzar devoted strenuous activity . Thefallen temples were reared up to the sky , andinscriptions in the old tongue and the old characterof the land decla red that there was Once more a

mighty king of Babylon , who was the devotedservant of Bel and Nebo . Babylon itself wa senclosed in a rectangular space of about two anda half by three miles , surrounded by an inner andouter wall . These huge walls—one of them so

broad that two chariots might pass each other onthe tOp of it— through which travellers had to go ,one after the other , when they entered the city , impressed their imagination as the walls Of Pekin dothat of travellers to-day . The river Euphratesflowed through the midst of this rectangular space ;the brick buildings of the great city filled up onlypart of it ; part was left for gardens and corn-fields ,which might help to nourish the city , if it ever hadto stand a siege . Above the low expanse Of commonhouses rose the towering temples , platform aboveplatform

,and the new buildings of Nebuchadnezzar .

One of these was the complex of buildings whichformed the royal palace

,part on this side and part

on that side of the river , connected by a subter

ra nea n passage,a little city in itself , its walls

decorated with pictures of animals in bright-colouredenamel tiles , according to the national artistictradition , and its gilded dome blazing far off underthe unmitigated Babylonian sun . Connected, nodoubt , with the royal palace was the artificial

THE NEW BABYLONIAN KINGDOM 63

mountain which the Greeks describe to us underthe term Hanging Gardens . The Median queenof Nebuchadnezzar pined, it is said, for somethingin this flat country to bring back to her the hillsof her home . And Nebuchadnezzar made for hera mountain Of brick platforms on arches , with soildeep enough to bear great trees

,with fountains

and streams , and, shrouded in its green profusion ,dark delicious caves . The Book Of Daniel depictsNebuchadnezzar walking upon his palace roof , andsaying , as he looked over the roofs Of the city :I s not this great Babylon which I have builtfor the royal dwelling-place , by the might Of

my power , and for the glory of my maj esty "”

(Dan . iv .

Even when politically subject,Babylon had, no

doubt , been the economic capital of this rich andcentral country

,in which lines Of traffic from the

north and from Arabia,from India and from the

Mediterranean west , united . Here always men Of

many races and tongues met and mingled—a

veritable Ba bel. In one quarter of Babylon ,traversed by the Royal Street ,

” the big comm ercia l firms had their houses of business and theirwarehouses alongside the Pikudu Canal . Somethree or four thousand clay tablets , which are nowin the hands of our scholars , are the books of thegreat firm of Egibi and Sons , which dealt in landedproperty

,the produce Of Babylonia , and slaves .

We can trace their business Operations and thegrowth of their wealth from the days of Nabo

pola ssa r, over a hundred years .


Within thirty years after the death Of Nebucha d

nez z a r, the sceptre had passed from the Old civili zation of Shinar for ever .

XVII

AN EPOCH IN HISTORY

THE sixth century B .C . is one of the great dividingtimes in human history . It was the end Of a worldthousands of years old , and the beginning of a newworld . In our survey we have seen change in theLand of the Two Rivers , and in the land Of theNile

,but through a ll change the old culture has

still been dominant . And now altogether newpowers are to have dominion . In Western Asiathe Indo-European is to supersede the Semite asruler for centuries to come . All over the knownearth that century was one Of great new beginnings .In China it was the time of Confucius , in Indiathe time of Buddha ; in Europe it was the timewhen the Hellenic people had come to full con

sciousness of itself , and its genius first stood outas the distinct thing it was .If an Observer had looked round the world as it

was about 550 B .C . , he could not have guessedwhich

,out of its multitude of races and peoples

,

were to have the greatest share in determining thefuture of mankind . We , looking back to—day, canpoint to four peoples

,but how disparate in import

ance they seemed then " One Of the four; the

AN EPOCH IN HISTORY 65

Aryan people of Iran , was already great and powerful , and yet all the other three would count formore in the long-run .

The one Of whom the Central Man of humanhistory was to come seemed then to count foralmost nothing at all—a small community draggedfrom their Judaean hills , to be di scerned in littleclusters beside the Babylonian canals in the shadeof the willow—trees , keening strange mournful songsin memory of their home . Scribes amongst themwere writing on parchment rolls the laws of theirpeople , given them , they said, long ago by someone called Moses . Outside this insignificant community , no one in those days through the lengthand breadth of Nearer Asia had ever heard of

Moses .Another of the four races was settled in a large

number of separate self-governing cities in thesouthern part of the Balkan Peninsula and alongthe pleasant western coasts ofAsia Minor , also in theislands and at other points round about theMedi ter

ra nea n, in Italy and Sicily , in Southern Gaul andSpain, in Northern Africa and the Black Sea . Theycertainly had more importance than the littleexiled community in Babylonia ; but they couldhardly come into consideration, scattered anddivided as they were in minute city-states , as apower to be set beside the great kingdoms of Media ,or Lydi a , or Babylon , or Egypt . The peoples ofthe East knew them

,as we saw , under the name

of Yawanim ,or

, in Persia , Ya va na , and thoughtof them , not as people possessing any particula r

5


pre—eminence of intellect but as mercenary soldi ers ,a s the best fighting men that could be got . Thereigning dynasty in Egypt had come to rely moreupon its Greek mercenary troops than upon thenative soldiery , and Plta ra oh Necho sent the corslethe wore at the battle of Megiddo

,where he over

threw the Jewish king Josia h,as a n Offering to the

Greek Apollo ofMiletus . We ca n point out amongthe foreign troops Of Nebuchadnezzar a man OfJavan , who distinguished himself in some war bykilling a man of gigantic stature in single combat .The Babylonian king gave him in recompense asword with an ivory hilt to carry home . His homewas in the island of Lesbos , now called Mitylene ,and he is especially interesting to us because hehas a brother Alcaeus , who makes poetry (of courseNebuchadnezzar knows nothing about that ) , andboys at English schools in the twentieth century A .D .

read bits Of that poetry , or at any rate imitationsof it composed later on by the Roman poetIIora ce .

The fourth race was the Arab people away tothe south in its hot , dry land—primitive nomadsof whom nothing great could be expected . It wasnot , indeed, for more than a thousand years tocome that the Arabs would play any conspicuousrOle in human history .

6 8 THE LAND OF THE TWO RIVERS

had seized the Median throne,had become king of

the Medes as well as king of the Persians and kingof Elam, he found himself possessed Of an empirewhi ch by the standard of previous empires was alarge one . The rest Of his life was Spent in makingit larger . It was in 550, as schola rs reckon , thatCyrus took his seat as king of the Medes andPersians at Ecbatana . The other Powers of theworld felt themselves menaced by the growth of

the Iranian Power and formed an entente against it—Lydia and Egypt and Babylon . In 546 Cyrustook Sardi s and put an end to the Lydian kingdom .

The Persian Empire now extended the whole lengthof Asia Minor right up to the Ionian coast, withits fringe of Greek cities . After thi s Cyrus turnedeastwards , and from 545 to 539 he was fightingand conquering in what are now the Russian provinces of Bokhara and Merv and Transca Spia , inAfghani stan and Beluchista n. The inhabitants of

these countries were largely of kindred Irani anstock . Then Cyrus descended upon Babyloni a .

Na buna id , who, although not apparently of thefamily of Nebuchadnezzar, now sat upon the throneof Babylon, was taken prisoner, and the land ofShinar became a Persian province (538 BC ) . Egyptwas left as the last great Power of the old world ;but before Cyrus had his hands free for attackingEgyp t, he was involved in fresh wars in CentralAsia, and di ed, or fell fighting against a people ofthe wilderness, somewhere near the banks of theSyr—darya (529Hi s son Cambyses in his short reign (529-52 1

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE UNDER DARIUS 6 9

carried out the conquest of Egyp t . Then , afterthe brief usurpation of an impostor supported bythe Medi an priesthood, the Persian crown passedto another branch of the Achaemenian family—toDarius, the son ofHysta spes (521-48 5

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE UNDER DARIUS

IF Cyrus had been the creator of the Persian Empire,

Darius was its organi zer . He had hard work formany years to beat down the rebellious nationalchiefs or ambitious Iranian princes over the vastextent of territory newly brought under the PersianKing Of kings . The system of imperial government

,the division into provinces

,the apportion

ment of tribute , was afterwards regarded as thework ofDarius . In one direction Darius attempteda notable extension of the frontiers of the Empire .

His armies crossed the Bosporus into Europe ,made Macedoni a tributary, and pressed northwardthrough what is now Bulgaria and Roumania ,across the Danube , into the plains of SouthernRussia . But this expedi tion was a failure , and thePersian armies had to retreat south again with loss .Darius retained, however, his hold on Thrace andMacedonia .

So now there was a single monarchy in the earthwhich at one extremity touched the Balkan Mountains

,and at the other extremity the banks of the


Indus ; at one extremity the cataract of the Nile ,and at the other extremity the Syr-darya—an

aggregation of power such as no previous age haddreamed Of under the hand of one man . Underhis Supremacy the subject peoples were allowed

,

so long as they complied with his demand fortribute and supplied their prescribed quota ofmento his armies, to live very much their own life andmanage their own affairs . Indeed, in days whencommunications were so primitive, the centralizationwhich would be possible to a modern empire wasout of the question, even though the Persiangovernment established a system of couriers alongthe main roads of the Empire to keep the outlyingparts in continuous communi cation with thecapitals . A country like Asia Minor was left tobe governed partly by native chiefs, partly byIranian governors who had their own castles in thecountry

,and reigned within their own spheres

almost as independent kings . The ordinary principle Of the Persian government was not to interferedirectly in the internal affairs of the subject communi ties ; it was satisfied as long as the persons inpower there were nominees of its own or of assuredloyalty . The Greek cities , for instance , on thecoast of Asia Minor were largely under Greektyrants approved by the Persian government

,

and replaced by others if their loyalty provedunstable .

We can see an instance of the same thing inJud aea . For, when Babylonia passed under Cyrus,permission was given to any who would of the

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE UNDER DARIUS 7 1

Jewish exiles to go home again and build a newtemple to Yahweh . Some part of the communitytook advantage of this . A temple rose again on

the Old site, and gradually a new Jewish city gatheredaround it . It had its own elders to admini ster itsaffairs , and when the Persian king sent a governor,or imperial commi ssioner, to Jud aea , he chose aman from among the Babyloni an Jews

,Nehemiah .

The burden of the Persian rule was felt by thesubject peoples only as they were squeezed fortribute, in money or kind, by the imperial officials,or saw their young men haled away to fight, perhaps to die, for the Great King in far-Off countries ,or had to support an imperial garrison . In theLand of the Two Rivers a great deal of the Old lifewent on unchanged . Men still transacted theircommercial and legal affairs by means of claytablets inscribed with the old cuneiform script, themanufacture of goodly Babyloni sh garments stilloccupied hundreds of brown hands , and the oldtemples were left to the native priesthoods . Undera king of a different religion, who might occasionallyeven lay hands on the treasures of the god, and apriesthood which sometimes thought more of theirindividual profit than the god ’s honour, one gathersthat the Babylonian temples wore a somewhatdecayed aspect under Achaemenian rule ; but theold religion went on , and the sacred lore Of mythand ritual

,of magic and astrology, was handed on

from generation to generation . Babylon still wasa great centre of commerce , the hive of a greatermultitude of men than could be seen elsewhere


the dimensions of a nation, wrote"

“

a Greekphilosopher,

“more than Of a city full of in

dustry and tra fli c and religion and sensuality .

Babylon was still , in a way, the capital of the world .

The alluvial Land Of the Two Rivers,so rich, so

populous , so central, could not lose its prerogativesimply because the government of the world hadpassed to another people . Babylon was, as a matterof fact , the winter capital Of the Persian Empire .

It was in the palace ofNebuchadnezzar, beside hisHanging Gardens

,that the Persian court resided

during the winter months , and it was to Babylonthat the envoys from all lands came , who wouldhave audience at that season of the King of kings .We are told that the regular practice Of the Achaem eni an court was to remove in spring to the Old

capital of Elam , to Susa Shushan the palaceand then, when the hot season came, to go stillhigher up to its native Iranian tableland, to Persepolis in Fars, or to the Median capital, Ecbatana ,wi th its splendid palace of cedar .

THE RELIGION OF Z OROASTER

WHAT exactly the religion of Cyrus and of theAchaemenian kings from Darius onwards was isnot quite certain . The Babylonian cylinder inscribed for Cyrus after his capture of Babylonrepresents him as a devoted servant of Bel . But

THE RELIGION OF ZOROASTER 73

although in the inscription Cyrus speaks himself inthe first person , it was no doubt drawn up by theBabylonian priests, and perhaps Cyrus , as a matterof policy, allowed them to represent him as aworshipper of their god . We do not know howmuch he understood himself Of what was on thecylinder in the Old Akkadian tongue .

fiZGenera tions before , the prophet Z a ra thushtra(in the Greek form of the name

,Zoroaster) ha d

arisen in Iran and taught a new religion . It wasnearer to the religion of Israel than anything elsewe have outside Israel . It knew only of one God,and laid stress on truth and righteousness . It sawa war always going on in the world between Goodand Evil, between God and the Lie . And it taughta li fe to come when men would be rewarded orpuni shed according to their works . Pre-eminentamong good works was honest agriculture, rescuingland from desolation (which in that country isalways so close at hand) , and redeeming it forfrui tfulness , taking good care of the stocks of cattle ,driving back the marauding tribes of the wilderness ,the servants of Evil . The Iranians, to whomZ a ra thushtra came , already, it would seem , knewAhura Mazda

,the Great Spirit, as the supreme

God ; but they had besides a mass of primitivepagan worships

,gods and goddesses , the Old Aryan

god Mithra amongst them . Z a ra thushtra’

s teaching purged out all this ; it gave , instead . of it, asimple

,purified

,strongly moral religion for a

patriarchal society Of farmers . But when Zarathushtra was dead, and his religion spread through


the land, it began to absorb the pagani sm he haddi scarded, and became adulterated with a ll sortsof baser elements . It took in not only gods likeMithra , but the Sumerian-Semitic goddess ofsensuality, Ishtar, whom the Iranians namedAnahita . This amalgam of the original doctrine ofthe prophet and Old pagani sm itself later on underwent a process of theological reform and dogmaticschematization, long after the Achaemenian time ,and this is the form of the religion shown to us inthe sacred books of the Parsees . It seems madeout that the Achaemenian kings—a t any rate fromDarius onwards—were Zoroastrians of a sort . Buttheir religion was plainly neither the pure doctrineof Z a ra thushtra nor the later Zoroastrianism . Wehave not material for determining the preciseamount Of the prophet ’s doctrine and the preciseamount of old Irani an paganism which went tocompose it .But even if the Zoroastriani sm ofthe Achaemenian

court and the Persian aristocracy was of an adultera ted quality, there was apparently enough Ofthe Zoroastrian principle in it to make it morallyand Spiritually superior to the polytheistic religionsof Asia . For Darius , to judge by hi s inscriptions ,the one figure of Ahura Mazda, the Great Spirit,fills the sky

—a God of Righteousness—and Dariusis Hi s servant in fighting the Lie, wherever it raisesits head . The Iranian aristocracy, at home on thetableland of Iran or in those eastern hills of Bactriaand Sogdiana

,where they had rock-built ancestral

castles , or scattered over the western provi nces of


each several city-state ought to be an absolutelysovereign community , with no superior over it butits gods and its civic law . They had an inextin

guisha ble will to rebel . And across on the otherside of the ZEgea n were their kinsmen in the Ba lkanPeninsula , in the mother-country Of the race

,

called in an especial sense Hellas ; and the AsiaticGreeks were a lways encouraged and strengthenedin rebellion by help sent from one or more Of theGreek cities over the water . From the outset themeeting Of these long—separated cousins , the Irani a nconquerors and the republican Ya va na of theMediterranean

,had meant antagonism . Cyrus

,

a fter‘

the overthrow Of Lydia , with half the knownworld at his feet , had been met by a message froma little Ya va na town west of the ZEgea n,

calledSparta , and told not to lay his hands on any Greekcity , as the Spartans would not suffer it . Cyrusinquired who these Spartans were , and decided thatthey were not formidable . Darius and his son

Xerxes thought , quite naturally , that the only wa yof quelling the unrest at this extremity Of theEmpire was to crush the Greeks Of the mother-land—a comparatively easy task , surely , for an Empiresuch as theirs . But the expeditions sent by Dariusmiscarried ; one force which landed on the coast ofAttica was beaten back to its ships by the peopleof a particularly Obnoxious Ya va na city calledAthens (490 and when Xerxes himself led amuch larger army round into Greece by way ofThrace and Macedonia

,it met with hideous disaste r .

Amongst the dead bodi es left lying on the field O f

THE HELLENES 7 7

Plataea (4 7 9 B .C . ) were some from as far away asIndia , men dragged across half Asia by the King

’sofficers from hills whose waters ran down to theIndus , to end their marching for ever by the banksof the Greek Asopus .

After this the Persian kings made no moreattempts to conquer European Hellas . They hadeven to resign themselves for a generation or twoafter the failure of Xerxes to see the Greek citiesof the Asiatic seaboard break away from theirEmpire under the protection of the maritime leagueled by Athens . Presently they discovered a wayof frustrating the hostility Of the Ya va na s ofGreece ,and that wa s by fomenting the mutual j ealousiesand enmities Of the Greek cities

,playing Off , accord

ing to the age- long methods of Oriental di plomacy ,one against the other

,j udiciously supporting with

Persian gold the antagonist of any Greek statewhich proved troublesome . Greek envoys mightbe seen intriguing against each other in Babylonor Susa . By such means the Persian kings ultimately brought the Asiatic Greeks again under theirdominion

,again compelled them to pay tribute

and lodged garrisons in their cities . Yet even sothese coast-lands were not safe from being raided,if occasion offered , by the leaders Of Greek armies ,and rebellious Persian satraps in the west couldalways get the use of Greek mercenaries . Thebrother of Artaxerxes II . almost got possession of

the throne by means Of an army of Greek m ercen

aries with which he came down the Euphrates asfar as a point opposite Baghdad (401 The


Ya vana s were , in fact , a continual irritation andelement of unrest on the western fringe of theEmpire

,worse even than the Central-Asiatic hordes

who gave trouble on the extreme east , or contum a cious hill-peoples like the Cossaeans , to whomthe Great King himself had to pay blackmail whenhe went through their mountain country on his wayup from Babylonia to Persepolis .We to-day , who look back upon the life of those

little Hellenic states , which seemed so troublesomefrom the standpoint of Babylon and Susa , knowthat something was going on there in the minds Ofmen destined to be Of greater significance for thefuture of mankind than anything going on anywhere else in the Great King ’ s dominions , exceptin the little community clustered round its templeon the grey Judaean hills . Men in these Greekcities were beginning new trains of thought , Ofwhich what we call Western civilization tod ay ,with its vast command over material Nature , is thecontinuation . They were beginning to emancipatetheir minds , as no people had hitherto done , fromtradition and custom , and apply to things a new

standa rd Of rational criticism . Thales,Of Miletus ,

one of the Greek cities of the Asiatic coast,a little

time before Cyrus , had set out to get a physical,

instead of the traditional mythological,explanation

of the origin of the world ; and he said it was allreally made of water more or less condensed—a

rather blind first shot , Of course , but it was thestarting-point from which the whole of modernscience QQIEQQA The Greeks began thinking , too ,

THE HELLENES 7 9

about the ideas people had of good and bad in thematter of conduct and in the organization of states :it wa s not enough any longer to say simply

,This

is the tradition Of Our fathers they raised thequestion , What really, from the point of View of

reason,is the best 2” This way of thinking had in

it the promise of continuous improvement andprogress . The Greeks , besides , were beginning , a sartists , to look at Nature with different eyes , to beable to represent things , and especially the humanform , more truly and yet more ideally . Within itslimited sphere Greek art attained a perfection whichremains unsurpassable . And from the combinationOf their perception of reality

,their intellectual

activity, and their sense Of beauty , the Greeks wereproducing , dur ing the days of the Persian Empire,the best things in that great literature which is thefoundation of our own . All these activities of

mind had their basis in a moral temper characteristic Of the citizens Of the Greek states—a moraltemper to some extent associated with a narrowand jealous patriotism , which abhorred the idea of

its own little state having its sovereign independencerestricted by any inclusion in a larger whole

,but

which at the same time gave the Greeks a sense ofdignity as free men

,and made them feel themselves

superior to the Asiatics , whom they saw prostratingthemselves on the ground before their human rulers

,

a thing which the Greeks would never do exceptbefore the images of the gods .*

It wa s no doubt due to the Greek a ssocia tions with theform of prostra tion tha t the Greeks got the idea tha t the


All this that made up Greek life— its moral outlook, its new rationalism ,

its art and literaturewe include in the term Hellenism . And we maysay that on the d a y when the envoy from Spa rtastood before Cyrus in Sardis a long conflict wasopened for the possession ofWestern Asia , a confli ctdestined to last for more than a thousand years ,between the two principles which these two menrepresented, between Hellas and Iran . The Persiankings of the Achaemeni an house cannot, Of course ,have realized, till qui te the end of the dynasty,that Helleni sm would ever di spute their possessionOf Asia . Troublesome as the Ya vana s were, theywere too far off and too di sunited . They could atmost tear away some outlying provinces from thehuge body of the Empire

,but they could not be

put on the same footing,as a Power, with the

Iranian rulers Of the world .

To some extent the Persians did recognize a specialvalue in the culture of the Ya va na . Greek physicians were retained by ha ndsome fees at the Persiancourt . It wa s especially among the Iranian nobles ,who had castles in Asia Minor and were in closercontact wi th the Greeks , that interest was createdin the new ideas current among this people . Wehear of a Mithridates who presented the Platoni cschool at Athens with a statue of the master, and

Persi an king wa s worshipped by his subjects a s a god .

The Persian kings ne ver cl a im ed to be m ore tha n the

ser v ants of Ahura Ma z da . I t wa s the degenera te Greeksthem sel ves who introduced into Hellenistic Asia the pra cticeof deifying kings.

THE HELLENES 1

he is probably the same man who received by voteof the Athenian people, together with his fatherArioba rz anes, the citizenship Of Athens . But thisdi d not mean that the Persians thought of theGreeks as a Power which would challenge theirsupremacy in Asia . In Greece

,in the earlier half

of the fourth century B .C ., the idea began to be in

the air that it was only the disunion of the Greekswhich prevented their superiority in quality fromgiving them the empire Of the world . A definitePanhelleni c propaganda came into existence for thepurpose of uniting a ll the Greeks in a national waragainst Persia . The pamphleteer Isocrates pointedto the king of Macedoni a as the man obviouslyfitted to be the head of the league . Macedoniawas a monarchy whose people were akin to theGreeks in blood, and whose ruling class to a largeextent had been Helleni zed .

XXII

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

BETWEEN 334 and 323 more than Isocrates canever have dreamed ofwas realized . A Macedoni anking at the head ofhi s own Macedonians and of theforces of the Greek states conquered the wholeAchaemenian Empire . He even went beyond it byconquering the Panjab and Sind . Towards the end

of his reign Alexander seemed to have determinedto give his Empire a mixed Helleni stic and Iranian

6


character . He showed Special favour to the Iranianaristocracy, and by a system Of mi xed marriagestried to fuse Irani a ns and Macedoni ans . He himself chose for his queen a princess from EasternIran (Afghani stan ) . On some sta te occasions hewore a Persian dress . But , pupil ofAristotle as hewas , he continued to set a high value upon Hellenicscience and art, and he designed at the criticalpoints of the ways of communication all over theEmpire a system of new cities of Helleni stic typewith a predominant population Of Macedonians orGreeks . The capital Of the Empire was still a ppa rently to be Babylon ; the alluvial Land of theTwo Rivers seemed its natural centre . It was herethat in 323

,after his return from India, Alexander

was planning vast new schemes of conquest anddevelopment, which included the digging of newbasins to improve the irrigation system of Babylonia and the clearing of the Tigris for navigation .

It was here that in the midst ofhis schemes he wasstruck down, still young, by the hand of death,beside the Euphrates, in the enamelled palace ofNebuchadnezzar .

XXIII

HELLENISM UNDER THE SELEUCIDS

IN the first pha se of the conflict between Hellenismand Ira nia nism ,

under the Achaemenian kings ,Ira ni ani sm is in possession of the whole of Western


Babylon ; or, if you like to put it so , he shifted itto another site sixty- three miles a way . He builta new city on the Tigris , called after him Seleucia .

There were ma ny Seleucia s all over his dominions .

This one was the greatest ; it was di stingui shed asSeleucia-on—the-Tigris . It was the capital of theeastern half of the Empire , in closer communicationthan the Syrian Antioch could be with the Iraniantableland . Of course

,population drifted away from

the old Babylon to the new city . Amidst increasingdesolation , no doubt, little communi ties of priestskept up the Old ritual at the tower- temples whi chhad overlooked the city Of Nebuchadnezzar

,and

whi ch were left to a slow decay . Seleucia prideditself on being a Greek city ; three hundred yearsafter its foundation , when it had long passed underParthian rule , a Roman writer speaks of it asproof against barbarian influences and mindfulOf its founder .

” From it the light of a new civilization radi ated out over the canals and gardens ofthe old land of Shinar . One of the principal Stobfljwriters , Diogenes , head Of the Stoic school at Athensin 156 B .C . , was a Babyloni an ” a citizen ofSeleucia—on-the—Tigris . Native Babylonians

,too

,

got Hellenistic education ; one , a Babylonia n priestcalled Berossus , wrote a history of his country inGreek for Antiochus I . , the son of Seleucus . Acelebrated mathematicia n and astronomer

,Seleucus

,

who taught , before Copernicus , that the ea rth andother planets moved round the sun

, wa s probablya native Babylonian .

If in the last two centuries we had taken

HELLENISM UNDER THE SELEUCIDS 8 5

the road from Seleucia to Media or Fars , we shouldhave passed through city after city with a populationin pa rt Greek , with Greek as its official language ,with public buildings in the Greek style, Greekschools and gymnasia and theatres . We still havea decree passed about 206 B .C . ,

by the city of

Antioch in the south-western hills of Persia , whichshows all the normal political machinery of a Greekcity in the working . We see these Greek cities

,

outposts of Hellenism,carrying on a brisk diplo

matic intercourse with each other,and sending

their athletes to compete in the great games of

Greece . One may notice , among the Greek citiesOf Babylonia , Artem ita , in the now forlorn countrytraversed by British forces between Baghdad andKhanikin , from which the historian Apollodoruscame , who was the standard authority for Parthianhistory at the time Of the Christian era .

Of course , if Helleni sm after Alexander hadgained enormously in extent , it had lost a greatdeal in quality . The life of these Greek citiesscattered over Asia was , no doubt, a very poorshadow of

fi

the life Of Athens in the days of Plato ,and the great creative epoch Of Hellenism was over .Still, the Greek language and literature contained,if it did not increase or expand

,a body of ideas , of

standards Of j udgment,Of intellectual interests ,

which the Asiatic peoples generally felt as something higher than what they had in their nativetraditions .


XXIV

DIS INTEGRATION OF THE SELEUCID EMPIRE , AND

THE RISE OF THE PARTHIANS

THE break-up of the Seleucid Empire , as has beensaid

,took the best part of three centuries . On the

east,Seleucus

,the founder , had to cede Alexander

’sIndian provinces to the Indi an king Chandragupta

,

who was himself the builder Of a new Empire inIndi a , with its centre at Patna on the Ganges .There Chandragupta built a palace in the style

,

as we know by recent excavations , of the PersianGreat Kings . The farther provinces of Iran

(Bactria and Sogdiana , covering what is nowNorthern Afghani stan and Bokhara ) broke awayabout 255 B .C . under Greek kings of their own .

(This Hellenism Of the Far East maintained itselfamid barbaria n races , almost entirely cut off

from the main body of Hellenism , for more thantwo centuries . The last traces of it are the coinsbelonging to about the time of the Christian era .

It had established a momentary predominance inthe interval over a great part of Northern India

,

where the Ya va na s got a name in Sanskrit literature as “ viciously fighting Yonas .” The Greekking Menander became a Buddhist , and figures inBuddhist sacred literature as king Millinda . ) In248 the province ofParthia (modern Khorassan )was invaded by a people Of the steppe

,akin in race

to the Iranians , and their leader Arsa ces Set up an

THE SELEUCID EMPIRE 8 7

independent dynasty which kept on growing atthe expense both of Seleucids and Bactrian Greeks .The dynasty professed some form Of Zoroastrianism

,

and thus sought to present itself to the people of

Iran as representing the national cause against theEuropeans ; but the Persians never looked upon theArsacids , with their nomad blood, as true Persiankings . The Arsacid kingdom in Parthia firstabsorbed the neighbouring Hyrcania , the forestcountry on the northern slopes Of the Elburz rangetowards the Caspian (modern Ma z a ndera n) ; then ,under its king Mithridates I . (about 1 7 0-138it won most of Eastern Iran from the BactrianGreeks . Under the same king it pushed back theSeleucid power from Media . For Babylonia in thefollowing years the struggle swayed to and fro . Itwas still Seleucid in 144 B .C .

,before 140 it had

apparently been occupied by the Parthia ns . Inthat year it was recovered by a Seleucid king .

But two years later an inscription written in theold cuneiform script gives i ts m a ster as Arsa ces .

*

It was recovered a second time by the last strongSeleucid king , Antiochus Sidetes , in 130, who evenfollowed up the Pa rthia ns and dr ove them out OfWestern Iran . There the following yea r he wasdefeated and killed

,and the Pa rthia ns returned for

good to Babylonia . They took fearful vengeanceon the city of Seleucia

,which had naturally espoused

the cause Of the Greek royal house .

From now for four centuries the Parthian king

Al l the P a rthi an kings used Arsa ces a s a roya l nam e

beside their own persona l nam e .


dom,possessed of Irai n and Babylonia , was the

great Power Of the East . The regions it had conquered had been covered , as we saw, with Greekcities

,and in this way Hellenism survived for many

generations in the lost provinces under barbarianrule . We may believe that the trade ofthe Pa rthiankingdom was largely in Greek ha nds

,and the later

Pa rthian kings showed their sense Of the importa nceof the Greek element by regularly adopting ( oraccepting ) the surname of Philhellene . But however much the Arsacids might try by such meansto gain the hearts Of their Greek subj ects , theHellenes of the East were always ready to welcom .

a European invader .

XXV

ARMENIA

NORTH of Mesopotamia was the mountain land of

Armenia . It had been one Of the provinces OfAlexander ’s Empire . Under the earlier Seleucidswe find it ruled by a local Persian dynasty , independent Or tributary to the Seleucid king a ccordingto the circumstances of the moment . After thisdynasty had come to an end somewhere about200 B .C . , the country wa s ruled for a time on

behalf of the Seleucid king by two governors withIra nian names . They must have been either Off

shoots Of the Iranian aristocracy or nativeArmenians . In 190, the Seleucid Empire havingsustained in its encounter with Rome the shattering

ARMENIA 89

reverse of Magnesia,the two governors ofArmenia ,

Arta xia s and Z a ria dris , di vided the country betweenthem as independent kings . Arta xia s built himselfa new capital

, Arta xa ta ,in the valley of the Araxes

(modern Aras ), which had been laid out for him ,

according to the story, by the great Hannibal, thena wandering fugitive . From now, except for onebrief moment

,when Antiochus Epiphanes made

Arta xia s pay tribute , Armeni a was lost to theSeleucids . In 83B .0 . the king of the line ofArta xi a swas Tigranes . He suppressed the neighbouringdynasty of Z a ria dris, and united under hissovereignty all that had been the original Persianprovince of Armenia . Thence he went on to conquerMesopotamia from the Parthians .

XXVI

DYNASTIES IN ASIA MINOR

IN Asia Minor, as we saw, di fferent Persian noblefamilies had established themselves in domains oftheir own under the Achaemenian kings . In thedays of confusion after the death Of Alexander

,

two Of these families carved kingdoms for themselves Out of the territory which had been a fewyears before organized as a Macedonian province .

One of the dynasties was that whose princes borethe name Of Aria ra thes ; they became kings inthe inland plain of Cappadocia, south of the Irisvalley . This region

,as we have seen

,had once

been under Assyria . Its inhabitants then belonged


to the two races called in our Bibles Meshech andTubal (Moschi and Tiba reni in Greek) . Under thePersian Empire they had become a race Of serfs ,tilling the lands of the Iranian nobles , priestly andlay , who had divided up Cappadocia into greatestates and built their burgs and castles in theland . The other dynasty established itself innorthern mountainous Cappadocia, the countrylater on called Pontus

,because it lay along the

coast Of the Black Sea . The founder Of this dynastybore the name of Mithridates ; he was the son ,

apparently, of the Mi thridates who, in the days Of

the Persian Empire,had given a statue of Plato

to the Athenian Academy . His power in thenorthern valleys was solidly established wi thinforty years ofAlexander ’s death .

The establishment of these two Persian dynastiesin A sia Minor no doubt represents a certain reassertion of the Iranian element against the Greek .

Yet the relations between the Seleucid court andthe courts of Pontus and Cappadocia were usuallyfriendly . With both houses the Seleucids con

tracted marriage alli ances . The two Persian dynasties ou their side largely took on the colour of thepredominant culture

,and conformed in their

externals to the usual typ e of the Hellenistic courtsofthe time . The Pontic court was the first to admitHelleni sm in large measure ; it was in closer contactwith the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast, suchas Trapezus , Sinope , and Heraclea . The Cappadocian court was more out of the world and primitive ; the full opening of it to Hellenistic culture


centre . The Pergamene kings are as a rule onterms of hostility with the Seleucids . Their powerexpa nds in the peninsula , or contracts , accordingas the Seleucid king is wea k or strong . Their aimis to Show at Pergamon a Hellenism of a purer, amore Attic type than could be seen at semi -OrientalAntioch . When the Roman power bega n to reachto Asia

,Pergamon ranged itself stoutly with Rome .

After the battle of Magnesia ( 1 90 when theSeleucid king

,Antiochus III . (

“ the Grea t wascompelled to give up the whole Of his domini onsin Asia Minor , except Cili cia , the Romans madethem over to the Atta lids . The last Attalid king

,

Attalus III .,died in 1 53B .C .

, and left his kingdomby testament to the Roman people ; it became aRoman province under the name of

“Asia .

” Inthis way Rome began to be an Asiatic as well as aEuropean Power .

Along the southern part of the peninsula of AsiaMinor runs the chain Of the Taurus Mountains .

These were inhabited by fighting highland peoples,

over whom the Seleucid king could never get morethan a precarious authority . What , therefore, theSeleucid Empire effectively possessed in Asia Minorfrom 280 to 1 90 was (not counting the Cili cianplain , which , being south ofthe Taurus , was regardedas belonging to Syria rather than to Asia Minor )never more than a strip through the middle , betweenthe Taurus Mountains on the south and the Cappadocian, Pontic , and Bithynian kingdoms on thenorth . Through this strip ran the great highwaywhich connected the Greek ports Of the western

DYNASTIES IN ASIA MINOR 93

coast with Syria and Mesopotamia by way of

Sardis , the capital of the Seleucid government inAsia Minor . The Seleucid king also exercised ashifting authority over more or fewer of the Greekcities of the coast , but here he ha d to competewith the sea -power of Egypt , as well as strugglewith the house of Attalus , and the cities

’

own

desires for independence .

All this makes the picture of Asia Minor in thedays of Seleucid rule rather complicated and changeful . The confusion is rendered worse by the greatirruption Of Gauls—or, as the Greeks called them ,

Galatians—who swept down over the Balkans intoGreece and Asia Minor in the years 2 80 to 2 7 7This was another of those waves Of invasion fromtheb a rba rian world outside , from which the ancientcivilizations suffered, as we have said, all throughtheir existence, an invasion like that Of the Cimmerians and Scythians centuries before, and that Ofthe Goths and Vandals centuries later . For atime a ll the Open country in Western Asia Minorwas overrun and pillaged by these Celts—greatstrapping men of the north , sometimes naked andsometimes cased in a strange garb , shirts andtrousers of many colours , plaids brooched at theshoulder , and straw—coloured hair stiflened withgrease till it stood up like the bristles of a satyr .

All the kings,princes

,and cities of Asia Minor

battled or parleyed with these hordes , till at lastthey were rounded up and driven together into theinterior , where they were allowed to settle overpart of what had been Phrygia, to make there a


new country of Galatia under native chiefs , roundabout the cities of Ancyra (modern Angora) andPessinus .

XXVII

SELEUCID AND PTOLEMY : THE QUESTION OFPALESTINE

TO the south the Seleucid dominion met that ofthe other great Macedonian dynasty whi ch hadarisen out of the break-up ofAlexander ’s empirethe realm Of Ptolemy . In the partition of theprovinces after Alexander ’s death , Ptolemy, one ofthe ablest and most sagacious of his Macedonianmarshals, had chosen Egypt . For one thing Egyp twas rich

,but for another thing the desert which

intervened between the Nile Delta and Palestinemade it singularly defensible. Thi s characteristicturned to Ptolemy ’s benefit in the days of confusion .

First,when Perdi cca s, the regent of the Empire, led

an army against Egyp t to crush him , he failedthree times to cross the easternmost arm of theNile, and was killed by a mutiny in his own army

(32 1 Again in 306 , Antigonus , at that timethe most powerful of the competing Macedonianchi efs, tried to invade Egypt from Palestine , andagain the attack failed on the frontiers . But itseemed, unfortunately, necessary to Ptolemy tohold Cyprus and Palestine too , as an appendix toEgypt . Partly, perhaps , because in that way hecould haVe his hand on the trade route which

SELEUCID AND PTOLEMY 95

went from the Persian Gulf to Gaza, but mainlybecause for his navy he needed big tim ber—" one ofthe things Egypt did not furnish, but in which theLebanon and Cyprus were rich in those days . Byoccupying Palestine he adventured himself, of

course, outside hi s Egyptian fastness . The firstPtolemy, cautious and tenacious as he was , occupiedthe country whenever a favourable moment offered inthe days of confusion, and evacuated it again swiftlywhenever there was a dangerous threat of attack .

On the occasion of one Of his forward moves hefound his way barred near the southern frontierof Palestine by an army under the young Demetrius

,

the brilliant son of Antigonus, and shattered it inthe momentous battle of Gaza (312 At thedeath of Seleucus (2 8 1 Ptolemy II . was inpossession ofPalestine . But it was claimed by thehouse of Seleucus , and the question of Palestinewas henceforth a permanent ground of antagoni smbetween the two Macedonian dynasties, j ust as ithad been between the old Pharaoni c Egypt and thekings ofAsshur and Babylon centuries before .

Throughout most of the third century B .C .

Palestine remained under the Ptolemi es . In twocampaigns (2 19 and 21 8 which we can stillfollow, thanks to Polybius , wi th a fair amount ofdetail, the young king , Antiochus III . theGreat wrested it from the forces ofPtolemy IV .

By the spring of 2 1 7 the Seleucid was in possessionof the frontier-towns Gaza and Raphia (modernRafa) . At this point , however, to the astonishmentoftheworld ,

‘

Ptolemy IV . , who was known as a hope


less degenerate and voluptuary, met the Seleucidarmy of inva sion about five miles from Ra phia

,on

the side Of the desert, with a well- trained army ofMa cedonians , Greeks , and native Egyp tians , andin the b a ttle of Ra phia (described for us by Polybius )Antiochus was thrown back in rout upon Gaza .

The evacuation of Palestine by the Seleucid forces,

and its recovery by Egypt , followed .

About 200 B .C . , after Ptolemy IV . had been suc

ceeded by his infant son, Ptolemy V. , Antiochus III .

renewed the attempt, and by 1 99 his forces wereaga in in possession of Palestine . And again at theend of 1 99 the province was recovered for Egyptby the Greek condottiere Scopas . In 1 98 Antiochusinvaded the country in person , and near the sourcesof the Jordan , at a place called the Pani on Templeof Pan the battle was fought which transferredPalestine finally from the Ptolemy to the Seleucid .

Amongst the various communi ties of Palestine,the

Jewish priestly state , occupying still only a smalltract of country round Jerusalem , received theSeleucid king with Open arms . On the other hand

,

the great Phili stine city of Gaza stood staunchlyby Ptolemy, and underwent a siege which endedin its being stormed by Antiochus . This siege of

Gaza was reckoned one of the notable sieges of thatage .

Thirty years later ( 1 70- 169 Egyp t, nowgoverned by eunuchs in the name of another boyking

,Ptolemy VI .

, sta rted to reconquer the lostprovince . But the son of Antiochus the Great

,

”

the eccentric Antiochus IV . (Epiphanes) , was before

THE GROWTH OF THE JEWISH STATE 9 7

with them, crossed the dividing desert while theEgyptian army wa s still mobilizing, and met itclose to Egypt . He defeated it signally and invaded Lower Egypt . Alexandria held out againstthe Seleucid, and at the end of the year ( 1 69 R C . )Antiochus withdrew his forces . Next year, however, he invaded the Egyptian Delta a second time,but again evacuated the country before the resolutecountenance of a Roman ambassador . Palestinehe retained .

XXVIII

THE GROWTH OF THE JEWISH STATE

WHILST,therefore

,east and north and west the

Seleucid Empire had been losing its outer provinces ,one by one

,to the south

,by the acquisition of

Palestine,it might register a gain . This gain , how

ever , was not destined to remain long to it . Butthe enemy who soon after threatened the Seleucidpossession of Palestine was

'

not Egypt ; it wasactually the communi ty Of Jews gathered roundtheir temple at Jerusalem . The policy of AntiochusEpiphanes, his attempt to Helleni ze Jerusalem witha strong hand

,and to convince the Jews that to

worship himself came really to much the samething as to worship Him whom they called theLORD ,

transformed this once pacific little communityinto a people of fierce warriors . The revolt of theJews under the priestly Hasmonaean family , called


also the Maccabees ,* began before the death ofAntiochus Epipha nes ( 165-164 BC ) , and the strugglebetween this new power and the Seleucid government went on with varying fortunes under thesucceeding reigns . The growing disorganization Ofthe Seleucid monarchy gave the Jews their chance .

In 152 one of the Hasmonaean brothers , Jonathan ,was installed a s High Priest—that is , as ruler of

the people—in Jerusalem . Before 143 the Jewshad acquired Joppa . In 142 king Demetrius II .

renounced all right to claim tax or tribute from theJewish state . In 14 1 the Seleucid garrison in thecitadel of Jerusalem was got rid of, an event whichfor the Jews marked the beginning of full inde

pendence . In the same year they acquired Gezer

(Gazara ), commanding the road between Jerusalemand the sea . Between 129 and 108 the Jewishstate pushed out its frontiers in all directions . Itconquered Samaria , which had been transformedinto a Greek city , and turned the water-courses overits Site ; and it got possession of Scythopolis (O ldTestament Beth—shan) which commanded the roadover the Jordan . It conquered from the NabataeanArabs a tract of territory on the other side of theJordan . TO the south it conquered the Edomites

(Idumaeans ) , compelled them to embrace Judaism ,

and incorporated them in the Jewish state . In 104the new Jewish High Priest , known as Judah athome , assumed in his dealings with foreign states

The nam e M a cca baeus (wha tever it m eans) strictly wa sa surnam e of Juda s only . I t wa s only in la ter tim es tha tthe name wa s used in the plura l for the whole family.


small measure,but the Pontic court , for instance , to

a very large degree . Nothing was left to the houseof Seleucus but Northern Syria and Cilicia , andover that last relic of their heritage a number ofrival princes were wrangling in perpetual broils .The western end of the peninsula Of Asia Minorhad become a province of Rome .

It was fairly clear that this divided world mightbecome the domain of some great Empire

,but

which Of the Powers ofthe day came into consideration as candidates We may say that they werefour : the Iranian Power of Parthia ; the IranianPower of Armenia ; the Iranian Power of Pontus ,then under a king of immense enterprise and energy ,Mithridates Eupa tor ; and Rome .

At first it seemed as if Pontus and Armenia wereto be the destined heirs Of the country west Of theEuphrates . Mithridates turned west . In 8 8

he occupied nearly the whole of Asia Minor . Heoverran the Roman province and put the residentRomans to the sword . The following year he flunghis armies upon Greece . The campaigns of theRoman general Sulla made Mi thridates give back ,but the peace signed in 84 was an unstablepeace , and left the Pontic king with great resourcesand in a position to renew the fight .Sim ultaneously Tigranes of Armenia turned south .

Before 83he had, as has been mentioned , conqueredMesopotamia from the Parthians . In 83 theArmenian armies overflowed Syria , sweeping frombefore them the miserable quarrelling Seleucidprinces . In Mesopotamia, Tigranes began to build

CANDIDATES FOR THE INHERITANCE 101

a vast new city to commemorate his name, to be apeer of Babylon and Nineveh , of Ecbatana andSeleucia . It was to be called Tigra nocerta , and hedragged into it the populations of the Greek citiesofCilicia . In 69 the Armenian advance southwards had almost reached the frontiers of theJewish kingdom . Tigranes was master of thePhoenician coast .

But now Rome had struck in powerfully . For250 years non-Hellenic elements in Asia Minor hadbeen winning back by a gradual and fluctuatingprocess what Alexander had won in ten years . Wemay regard 73 B .C .

—the year in which LuciusLucullus destroyed the Pontic army near Cyzicus ,On the Sea Of Marmora—as the year in which thisprocess of disintegration was definitely checked bythe advance ofRome . The following year Lucullusinvaded Pontus itself ; Mithridates took refuge inthe dominions ofTigranes . In 69 Lucullus attackedthe Armenian king . He directed his march on thenew city of Tigranocerta , and there won a brilliantVictory over an Armenian army many times largerthan his own . It was the end of the brief ArmenianEmpire .

Two years later Mi thridates temporarily recoveredPontus, but in 66 the command of the Romanarmies in the East was conferred upon Pompey .

Mithridates was driven again from Pontus , anddi ed a fugitive . Tigranes prostrated himself atPompey ’s feet

,and placed hi s diadem in the Roman ’s

hands . He was allowed to continue to reign inthe original petty kingdom of his ancestor Artaxia s.

[ 02 THE LAND OF THE TWO RIVERS

XXX

ROME DIVIDES THE HERITAGE WITH PARTHIA

POMPEY made a new settlement of the East in thename ofRome . Some of it wa s to be divided intoprovinces under Roman governors , like the Romanprovince of Asia,

” which had filled the place ofthe Attalid kingdom since 133 R C . Bithyni a ,j oined to the western half of Pontus , became aRoman province, and so di d Syria . Other regionswere left as principalities under cli ent kings , likethe Native States of Indi a to-day . In Comm a gene,

the highland country north of Syria between theTaurus Range and the Euphrates , with Sam osa ta

(modern Samsat) for its capital , one petty dynastyconnected with the house of Seleucus in the femaleline continued till A .D . 7 2 (when it was deposed bythe Roman Emperor) to bear the old famous namesofAntiochus Epiphanes and Mithridates .

Rome came to Asia as Alexander ’s heir , as thechampion and propagator of Helleni sm . Romecounts , as far as Asia goes , as a Helleni stic power ;Rome never tried to Latini ze its Eastern provinces .

As time went on , there were , of course, changes inthe frontiers and shapes of the di fferent divisions .

Native kingdoms tended to lapse under di rectRoman rule, as Galatia did, for instance, in 25 B .C . ,

Judaea in A .D . 6 (though for three years later on,

A .D . 4 1-44 , it was again transiently part of a nativestate under Herod Agrippa I .

—the Herod of


Sin ; now it had been transformed, like the othercities ofNearer Asia, into a Greek colony, and wascalled Ca rrhae.

The story of a ll the wars that followed this,

generation after generation , between the twoPowers would be too long to tell here, even as muchof them as is still known . Babylonia, the old landof Shinar, with its canals and gardens and fruitfulfields

,and its people now all speaking a form Of

Syriac,was regularly attached to Parthia . In fact

,

the capital of the Parthian kings was here ; theyhad chosen a place called Ctesiphon, a sort of

extension Of Seleucia on the op’

pOSIte (left) bank ofthe Tigris . Seleucia itself, a Gfé Ck city, wouldhardly have done for the residence of a court whichstill retained some of the manners of the CentralAsiatic steppe . Perhaps Ctesiphon, its suburb ,represented an Old town of Babylonian days . Thename is Greek, of course, but it is a Greek propername for a ma n, and is a s odd in the case of a townas James or George would be in English . It hasbeen thought that perhaps Ctesiphon was in thiscase the transformation of the Old native name

,

and its identification with the Casiphi a of Ezravi ii . 1 7 has been suggested . In any case Ctesiphonwas the seat of the Parthian court ; it was heft"

“

5531;the Arsacid “King ok IrTgs sat on his goldenthrone among his magnates, some of whom—theSuren

,the Karen—held Offices and titles heredi tary

in particular privileged families native to Iran or

the Chorasmian steppe beyond .

The standing cause of quarrel between Rome

WARS BETWEEN ROME AND PARTHIA 105

and Parthi a was Armeni a . That country wasalways under some dynasty or other of its own,

bearing Iranian names, and no doubt mainly Iranianin manners . But for the Roman Emperors it wasa permanent principle of state that they mustassert their suzerainty over Armenia

,and maintain

on the throne a prince upon whose fidelity tothemselves they could rely . On the other hand

,

the ties of Armenia with Iran were close , and thekings of Iran always wanted to have their handin the country . The different members of theprincely families of Armeni a were perpetuallyquarrelling amongst themselves , so that refugeeclaimants to the Armenian throne were not seldomfound soliciting patronage in Rome or Ctesiphon

,

and either Power could put in its Own ca nEid a te .

This state of things naturally led to incessantwars .Sometimes on one side or the other a leader

,

more able or more fortunate than the common,carried his arms far into the enemy ’s domain.

Between 41 and 39 B .0 . the Parthi ans overranSyria and a great part of Asia Minor . The EmperorTrajan in A .D . 1 1 5 took Mesopotamia from the

quered the following year the old Assyrian countryeast of the Tigris, and then marched down theTigris

,took possession of Seleucia and Ctesiphon

and the golden throne, and displayed the Romaneagles on the Persian Gulf . All the Land of theTwo Rivers he annexed to Rome, and declaredParthia itself to be a vassal state . But the next


Emperor,Hadrian (A .D . 1 17 gave up all

Trajan’s conquests,and withdrew to the former

frontier . Under Marcus Aurelius ( 16 1-180) theRomans again conqueredMesopotamia , took Seleuciaand Ctesiphon

,and penetrated into the Iranian

plateau . Yet of these conquests they retained onlyWestern Mesopotamia

,which became a Roman

province , Ca rrhae being made a free town underRoman protection (A .D . In the years A .D . 19 8

and 19 9 the Emperor Septim ius Severus a ga i‘

fifl édw

a Roman army through Mesopotamia , and tookSeleucia and Ctesiphon for the third time . Thewhole ofMesopotamia (not Babylonia ) as the resultof these campaigns became a Roman province .

XXXII

THE PERSIAN SASANIAN DYNASTY

SOME twenty-five years later a great change tookplace in Iran which intensified the estrangementbetween Iran and Rome . In the upland region tothe south-west of Iran in which the Achaemeniandynasty had taken its rise—the land of the Persiansproper (Fars) -a man arose to claim the throne ofCyrus and Darius . He bore or assumed the Old nameof Artaxerxes (changed in the Persian of the day toArdashir ) ; his house is known in history by thename Of his grandfather Sasan ; he founded thethird native dynasty which ruled over the Iranianplateau , the Sasanian . (It was probably in A .D . 223


ofMesopotamia in 2 96 , and this time the Romansnot only drove them out , but establi shed a fortifiedposition at Amida (Diarbekr ) on the Tigris , nearits source .

XXXIII

THE ROMAN EMPIRE BECOMES CHRISTIAN

SOON after this a change came over the RomanEmpire even more momentous than the changewhich had come over Iran by the rise Of the houseof Sasan . A society which had come forth fromamongst the Jewish people , a people which we havenever seen in our survey great among the nations ofthe world

,had been winning its way for the last two

and a half centuries both in the Roman Empireand in Iran . The Roman government had madespasmodic attempts to suppress Christianity asdangerous to the state ; the new Sasanian government persecuted the Christians as enemies of theZoroastrian religion . Yet in A .D . 306 a man of

Albanian stock , Constantine , was proclaimedEmperor in our British city of York , who madeChristianity the dominant religion of the Romanworld . The antagoni sm between Rome and Persianow became a religious antagonism on both sides .This did not mean that the Roman world ceased

to represent Helleni sm . The Greek tradi tion stilldetermined secular education . But Hellenism washenceforth fused wi th a new non-Hellenic element

,

whilst Chr istianity , on the other hand,had long

ROMAN EMPIRE BECOMES CHRISTIAN 109

been interpenetrated by Helleni sm . The dogmasof the Christian Church were expressed in termsborrowed from Greek philosophic phraseology . Thepeoples inhabiting the Nearer East before thecoming of Alexander the Great had been ignorantof the great names Of Ya va na philosophy, andignorant , outside the small Jewish community , ofthe name of Moses . But now from the [ Egea n tothe Tigris the names of Ar istotle and Moses wereequally familiar everywhere , as representing twosorts of wi sdom , the secular and the religious ; tothe name Of Jesus an increasing maj ority of peoplebowed the knee , and the names Of the Old godsbegan to be forgotten . Iran , j ealous for Zoroaster ,did not want either Jesus or Moses or Aristotle .

For the next three centuries the old Land of theTwo Rivers was a land dividing the world whichhad found God in Jesus Christ and revered Aristotleas a master of human wisdom from the world whichlooked for a divine-human saviour , Saoshyant , inthe age to come , and reverenced Zoroaster as thesupreme prophet and sage .Armenia

,the debatable region between these

two worlds,was won religiously for the Christian

Hellenistic civilization earlier than the RomanEmpire itself . Curiously

,the man who won Ar

meni a for Christ was a member of the Arsacid royalra ce ,Gregory the Illuminator ; a few years , probably ,before the accession Of Constantine , Gregory baptiz ed his kinsman king Tirida tes II . ofArmenia .

There was one respect,indeed , in which the

Spread ofChristianity through the Eastern provinces


Of the Roman Empire may seem to involve anassertion of the native element against Hellenismthat of la nguage . From the days of Alexanderthe Great till the Spread of Christiani ty

,Greek was

the only language in these countries which hadliterary prestige . In Asia Minor Greek seems tohave supplanted the native languages even amongthe humbler class , though Phrygian survived hereand there ; but in Armenia , in Syria , and in Egypt ,the Old languages were still the common speech ofthe poor . Yet a ll educated people who aspired toliterary di stinction e te in Greek . It was Christianity which brought back the native languagesinto wide use as literary languages ; there grew upa Christian literature in Armenian and Syriac andCoptic . This was principally , no doubt , becauseChristiani ty was bound to provide spiritually forthe poor

,and had to translate the Bible and other

religious works into the vernacular . But if in one

way it wa s an assertion of the digni ty of the nativelanguages against the proud worldly prerogativeofGreek , in another way it was an extension of theHellenistic Sphere . The works of theology whichwere translated into the vernaculars were

,after all

,

largely constituted by Greek thought, and carriedinto a new vehicle Greek philosophical conceptions .Also, it was not only works of Christian theologywhich were translated, but there was an industrioustranslation of Greek classical literature, especiallyworks of science, into Syriac . The school of Edessain Mesopotamia was a chief centre of Syriac literaryactivity .


any rate handed on . Amongst prominent namesOf Greek writers in the Roman age, a large proportion belong to the cities of Asia and Syria ; wemay mention Dio Chrysostom Of Prusa (modernBrusa) in Bithynia (A .D . 40 and Lucian ofSam osa ta (Samsat), on the Upper Euphrates , thewriter of the strongest original quality in laterGreek literature (A .D . 120 Lucian was anative Syrian , and did not learn Greek till he wasnearly grown up .

When the Roman Empire became Christian, theAsiatic provinces continued to make a notablecontribution to the products of the compositeHellenistic—Christian culture . Those of Syria andMesopotamia took , as we saw, to writing in Syriac ;but Asia Minor was the home Of a long roll ofChristian Fathers who used Greek as their mothertongue—such as the three great Cappadocians,Gregory of Na z ianz en (A .D . 329 Basil ofCaesarea (A .D . 329 and Gregory Of Nyssa

(A .D . 331 Asia Minor west of the Euphrateswas in those days an important part of Christendom ; the frontier which (in the cultural sense )divided Europe from Asia was not the Bosporus ,but the Euphrates or the Tigris . When EuropeanChristendom looks to-day at the desolation ofthese lands

,it is looking at a lost piece of itself .

CHRISTIAN ROME AGAINST PERSIA 1 13

XXXV

CHRISTIAN ROME AGAINST PERS IA

THERE were occasional wars between Persia andChristian Rome, though less frequent than thosebetween Persia and pagan Rome . Mesopotamiawas still Rome ’s frontier province ; those rollinggrasslands were held by ever new generations of theImperial army against the Eastern enemy of Christand of Rome . The idea of Rome, with its vastmili tary tradition, still helped to nerve the legionaries who stood guard in the frontier fortresses,scanning the horizon in case they might see theglint of Persian Spears coming on to invade . YetRome no longer meant for them the Old Latin cityon the Tiber, but the new Rome, the City of Constantine, on the Bosporus, where a court speakingGreek surrounded a Christian monarch who wascalled Emperor of the Romans .

Of these wars,perhaps especial interest for us

to-day attaches to the expedi tion Of Julian againstPersia in 363—Julian, in whom Paganism recapturedand held for one last moment the Imperial throne .

Charran in Mesopotami a remained a little islandof Pagani sm in the Christian East ; it could not giveup the worship of the Moon which had given itprestige a thousand years before ; and the lastpagan Roman Emperor did homage in passing tothis relic of a Paganism Older than Rome .

* Julian

It is interesting to note tha t the Paganism of Cha rransurvived not only the conversion of the Em pire to Christianity , but the com ing of Islam . The Cha rranites were sti ll

8


moved down the Euphrates , and then advancedacross Babylonia to the walls OfCtesiphon .

We may note that by this time there was noSeleucia any more . The Greek city had decayed outof existence under Sasanian kings . Where it had oncestood was only a collection of mean houses , whichwas known by the name of Coche, a sort of suburbof the royal city on the Opposite bank . ButBabylonia was still a marvel of rich frui tfulness .

One who went wi th Juli an tells us of the corn—fieldshe saw

,and the frui t-trees Of many kinds , and the

immense groves of palms reaching all the way tothe Persian Gulf (Ammianus Marcellinus ) .Julian did not stop to besiege Ctesiphon, butstruck into the country east of the Tigris , the fieldin which British armies were Operating in 1 9 1 7 afterthe fall ofBaghdad . There Julian di ed of a woundreceived in a skirmish with the Persians at a place

found to be sta r-worshippers under the Mohamm edankha lifs. They obta ined to lera tion in a curious wa y . The

Prophet , in a pa ssa ge of the Koran, h a d included with theJews and Christians (who were to be dea lt with m ore gentlythan the hea then ) a sect ca lled S a bians. It seem s to ha vebeen a sm a ll semi -Christian Gnostic sect whi ch soon a fterdisa ppea red . Before long nobody knew who the S a bianswere . Here, then, in the Koran wa s a n order of tolera tionwith no one to benefit by it . The Cha rrani tes saw thei ropportuni ty , a nd told the Mohamm edan go vernm ent tha tthey were the S a bi ans , and tha t the injuncti on in the Korana pplied to them . Hence in Mohamm edan tra dition the

S a bi ans cam e to m ea n the sta r-worshi ppers of Cha rran.

In m odern European books the nam e S a bi ans is oftenconfused with S a baea ns the inha bitants of SouthWest Ara bia , Sheb a , Yem en) , with whi ch it h a s no connection a t a ll. The ini tia l S is quite a di fferent sound a ndletter in the Sem iti c la nguages .


Minor ; they reached the Bosporus , and establisheda camp which only that narrow strip of waterseparated from the Imperial City on the Europeanside . All these lands , which the Persians had neverpossessed since the Achaemenian Empire fell beforeAlexander 950 years before , once more were subj ectto an Iranian Great King . When the confli ctbetween Hellas and Iran was Opened at the endof the sixth century B .C . , the Iranian had been inpossession of a ll Western Asia , and it seemed thatnow

,after eleven centuries of conflict , things had

come back ' to their starting-point . The WesternPower had been extruded, and the whole Empireof Cyrus and Darius recovered .

The counterstroke of Greek-Roman Christendomcame a few years later . The Emperor Heraclius ,*

while the Persians were still encamped on theAsiatic shore Opposite Constantinople , conveyed aforce to Alexandretta (for the Romans had command of the sea ) , and cut the Persian line of communica tions by marching over the Taurus acrossCappadocia to the Black Sea (A .D . In 624

he brought another force by sea to j oin the Romanarmy at Trebizond, and struck across Armeni a , byway of Tabriz

,for the heart of the Persian monarchy .

In 625 he threatened Ca sbin and Ispahan . ThePersians had to recall their forces from Egypt andthe Bosporus . In 626 Heraclius returned by way

How is this nam e to be pronounced “i Ifwe pronounceit a s an old Greek pronounced it , the i is long—Hera clius(Hera kleios ) ; i f we pronounce by a ccent , a s the m odernGreeks do , the a ccent is on the a , a nd the c

'

is shortHeracl ius.

CHRISTIAN ROME AGAINST PERSIA 1 17

of Mesopotamia and Cilicia to Cappadocia , andthence to the hills at the eastern end of the BlackSea , where he took up a strong position . He issuedforth for his third expedi tion in 627 , andwon a greatvictory over a Persian army near the site of Nineveh .

Thence he pushed down the Tigris to near Ctesiphon ,destroying on the way the great royal palace of

Da sta gerd (near Baghdad ) , and returned north toTabriz . Soon after this Chosra u was assassinatedby one of his sons , and a peace was concluded bywhich all the conquests of Chosra u returned toRome . Apparently , no triumphs on either sidecould really change the sta tus quo which had prevailed ever since Western Asia had been dividedbetween Iran and Rome

,with a frontier on the

Euphrates or Tigris .

XXXVI

ARAB IA INTERVENES

BUT now the new Power entered the field—Islam .

It came from Arabia , the mother-country of theSemi tes , from which in the dawn of history tribeshad gone forth to occupy Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Assyria . Since Cyrus had enteredBabylon as conqueror (or, perhaps one ought to sa y ,

since the fall of Carthage ) , it might have seemedthat the day of the Semite in the sphere Of worldlypower was over . From amongst one of theirpeoples

,indeed

,the religion had come forth which


ha d conquered the Roman Empire ; but the dominionof the world seemed to have passed into the ha ndsof Indo-Europeans

,to be divided between Hellas

Rome and Iran . And now suddenly , after thesecenturies of inferiority

,a Semitic people once more

comes out ofArabia to subjugate lands and empires ,differing in this from the Semitic invaders of longago , that it has got its strength from faith in a newmonotheistic creed .

The same Emperor Heraclius who had deliveredSyria from the Persians had to see , a few years later ,Syria taken from the Greek-Roman-Christian Empireby the Arab believers in the new Prophet (A .D . 632

In the next two years (639-640) Egypt waslost . Then it was the turn of Persia . The tideof Mohammedan invasion surged up on to theIranian plateau . Not only was an end put to theSasanian kingdom but the old tradi tionalreligion ofPersia was gradually suppressed . A fewfamilies faithful to the Zoroastrian creed still lingeron to this day in Persia ; a number later on founda refuge in India

,where their descendants form the

respectable commercial community of the Parsees .A new Mohammedan empire came into existence

of greater territorial reach even than that of Alexander ; it stretched from Central Asia over Persia ,

Syria , and Egypt , all along North Africa into Spain .

"a The Greek—Roman—Christian Empire di d notshare the fate of its Old rival Persia . It continuedto exist . Between 66 8 and 6 7 5

,and again between

7 16 and 7 18,the Mohammedan armies were under

the walls of Constantinople,but they failed on each


flourished there,has withered so utterly away, have

said : You see,a ll attempts to transfer Western

civilization to Asia necessarily fail ; the East doesnot really care about the values Of the West .

”

This is not only to ignore the great history of

Hellenism in Asia through all the centuries fromAlexander to the Arab conquest, but to ignore thehistory of the East between the Arab conquest andto-day .

When great masses of primitive peoples arethrown upon old civili zations , as happened morethan once in the time covered by this survey, thefirst effect is Often to smother those civili zations,apparently to extinguish them . But if the Oldtradition is not entirely destroyed , it may be likepiling fuel on a fire ; the first effect may be, a p

pa rently , to smother the fire and put it out , butin time the fire works through the new materialand the blaze is greater than before . That is whathappened in the West . The Goths and Vandalsand Franks and Saxons had no more use for thevalues of the Old classical civilization than theArabs had to start with ; but in the end, from thatapparent smothering , came the extraordinary developm ent in human history which we call Westerncivilization to-day . What people forget is thatthe peoples of the Nearer East, after the Mohammedan conquest, showed a quicker susceptibilityfor the old Helleni stic civili zation on its scientificside than the rude Northern races ofEurope . TheArab race itself, indeed, continued, generallySpeaking , to regard the civilizations of the lands

HELLENISM IN ISLAM 12 1

it had conquered with the ignorant contempt ofunlettered wa rriors ; but the Old populations ofthese lands , Syrian or Persian, after they hadaccepted Islam and learnt the Arabic Speech of

their masters , not only retained an interest in thethought and the science of Hellenism , but did neworiginal work along the lines started by the Greeks,in centuries when our Western world had fallen intobarbarian darkness .The old land of Shinar , now called Irak, was still

illustrious among the countries of men in the daysof the Abbasid Caliphate (founded A .D . 7 60) thegolden prime of good Haroun Alra schid (A .D . 7 86

After a ll the conquests and changes wehave seen pass over it, it was still a great focus ofpopulation . Its canals were still tended ; it wasstill a land of corn and palm-groves, and

High-wa ll’

d ga rdens, green and old .

Babylon was gone, and Seleucia was gone ; but ,under the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty, Baghdad,about thirty miles higher up the River Tigris thanSeleucia, had taken their place (refounded byMansur in A .D . And the realm of whichBaghdad was the capital was great, not only inriches and in power

,but in culture— in Hellenistic

culture . The people of the Land of the Two Riverscame to Speak the Arabic of their masters in placeofthe Aramaean Speech which , in one form or another ,had been the language of the country since thedays ofNebuchadnezzar . The old Greek books on


the different sciences—mathematics , astronomy ,geography, zoology, botany, chemistry, grammar ,logic—which had been translated into Syriac underthe Christian Roman Empire

,were retranslated into

Arabic under the Mohammedan Caliphate . Ar istotle, the Philosopher pa r excellence, j ust asMohammed was the Prophet , was reverenced andstudied in the Mohammedan lands from CentralAsia to the Atlantic—was probably better understood in Balkh or Samarkand in the ninth centuryA .D . than anywhere at that time in Europe . Thesuggestion got from Greek books gave rise to anArabic scientific and philosophical literature, muchmore advanced than anything which could befound in the West at that time , and nearer ircharacter to what we now describe as Western,

"

meaning rationalist and modern . This literaturewas, as has been said, produced for the most part ,not by men of Arab stock

,but by the Syrian or

Persian Arabic- speaking descendants of the oldpeople of the land . Yet it remains true that theconquest of the Syrian and Persian lands by theArabs was found not to mean , in the end, a smothering of its intellectual life . Although the reigningdynasties might be Arab

,and although the new

religion spread over these lands was of Arabianorigin, the Greek scientific interest did not perish ,but was transfused into a new medium . As late asthe eleventh century A .D . ,

the great Avicennaprosecuted his scientific studies in the large libraryat Bokhara

,and Biruni made researches into the

Specific weight of minerals at Khiva . Philosophic


the Land of the Two Rivers the invasions Of Hula guand Timur did more than temporarily break upsociety . (Taking of Baghdad by Hula gu,

A .D . 1258 ;

by Timur , A .D . They literally exterminateda la rge part of the population . We have followedfor thousands of years the process of generationsin this land . We have seen this people carry onits unbroken life through the ages . It has receivedfrom time to time accessions of new elements fromoutside ; the blood it derived from Sumerians andAkka dians has been mixed with Syrian , and alsoto some extent with Greek and Arab . We haveseen it change its speech more than once , and itsreligion and the name of its land . We have seendifferent alien masters bear rule over it . But alwaysit has been there ; the Land of the Two Rivers hasbeen full of men . But now our story comes to anend . The people is not there any more . Someremnants of it fled to the neighbour ing hills . Othersdoubtless remained in the few shrunken and decayedtowns till the Arabs , dr ifting in from outside ,absorbed them . Three—quarters Of the land whichhad been under cultivation went back to steppeand desert and swamp . There were no hands totill it . Outside the squalid towns and the smallstrips of country

,where a kind of cultivation still

went on, the land was empty except for such Arabtribes as might maintain a nomad or semi-nomadexistence in its monotonous spaces . The landseemed for the most pa rt to have gone back to itsprimitive condition of thousands of years before ,before ever the canals were dug by the men of

HELLENISM IN ISLAM 125

Sumer and Akkad . Only now in the midst of thedesolation there were great mounds here and there

,

where once there had been cities of men and towerspiled to heaven ; and by the Tigris , flowing stillfrom its northern hills , there stood on the siteof Ctesiphon that vast and solitary ruin whichhad once been the magnificent palace of Persian

In such condi tion the garden—land of Asia haslain for these latter centuries under Turkish rule .

Those who have seen it have Often,remembering its

past , pronounced bitter j udgments on that rule .

Corrupt and Slipshod, fraudulent and apathetic ,that rule ha s unquestionably been , and its Vices areperhaps inherent and incurable . Had a EuropeanPower

,instead ofa Turanian one, borne rule during

these centuries in Western Asia , the Land of theTwo Rivers , we may believe , would never have

come to be what it is to-day . Yet it must bei'em embered that if the Turkish government ha dhad the best will in the world, the enterprise ofrestoring the Land of the Two Rivers to its ancientproductiveness is one which the Turkish government had not the means to accomplish . For itwould have been no good to dig the old canalsunless sufficient hands had been found to sow andreap . In antiquity the land of Shinar had perhaps

(if one may argue from the analogy ofEgypt ) someseven million inhabitants ; the present Arab pOpulation

,of which a large part is semi-nomad, does not

reach a million and a half. The problem constitutedby the depopulation of the country- this lies


between us now and the Vision of a regeneratedBabylonia

,in which the ancient streams reflect once

more mighty structures of men and gardens likeParadi se , and in the streets Of whose cities traffickersfrom all the earth once more meet .

BILLING AND SONS , LTD. ,PRINTERS , GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

B Y THE SAME AUTHOR

THE METHOD IN THE MADNESSCloth, 53. net

Mr. Beva n’s book is in the m a in a study of Germa n Opinion. a nd it

j ustifies its c la im to be a fresh cons idera tion ofthe ca se between Germa nya nd ourse lve s . ’ It is extra ordina ri ly fa ir, a nd perha ps i ts grea test merit istha t Mr. Beva n, unlike too ma ny of the pa trio tic m en of letters who ‘ d o

their bit, ’ ha s rea l ly ta ken the tro uble to ma ster his ma teria l . The Tim es .

If there is a ny Germa n who ha s a pre ference for being po lite ly damnedto

.

be1ng vu lga rly execra ted, we wou ld certa inly recommend him to rea dth is book, but there is not m uch o ther comfort tha t he wil l extra ct from it .

”

Westm inster Ga z ette .

“The ca refu l rea der, with a sense of a rtistic fitness , wi l l de light in thecumu la tive effect of Mr Beva n’s method of giving the devil his due .

The book is fu l l ofgood th ings a bout the princip les ofGerma nMa chtpoliti/e,the fa l la cies invo lved in Germa n invective a ga inst Ma rinism ,

’the funda

menta l d ifliculty tha t G erma ny ’s view Of sa fety imp lies being strong enoughto defea t a coa lition of the world .

’ —The New Europe.

JERUSALEM UNDER THE H IGH PRIESTSDemy 8va . , 7s. 6d .

Mr. Beva n’s book m a y with perfect confidence be recommended a s a nintroduction to the st udy of the deep ly interesting prob lems of this grea tperiod . His exposition ofHe l lenism in its re la tion to j uda ism is ma s terly .

”

—A thenceum .

Mr. Beva n ha s fo l lowed up his scho la rly work on‘The House of

Se leucus with a n a dmira b le popu la r na rra tive ofJewish history during theperiod between Nehemia h a nd the New Testa ment . It is the work of a

scho la rly historia n, the brea dth of whose know ledge is evident on a lmostevery pa ge

,a nd of a writer ofexce l lent English . Mr. Beva n ’s pa ges a re fu l l

of striking pictures of the po l i tica l, socia l, a nd re ligious conflicts of thetime .

—Ma nchester Gua rd ia n .

“These lectures deserve ca refu l study by everyone interested in the

history of how He l lenism a nd Juda ism first ca me Into conta ct .Ca m bridge Review.

THE HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

With Portra its, Pla tes, a nd Maps . Two vols. Demy 8va . , 30s. net

It is se ldom tha t the critic we lcomes a work of so m uch a mbition a nd

a chievement from a new h istoria n a s‘The House of Se leucus . ’ The

first serious a ttempt ma de in modern times to trea t the S e leucid rea lma s a who le , a pa rt from the other Ma cedonia n kingdoms

.The resu l t is

a stonishingly successfu l . As a n a u thority on a uthorit ies Mr. Beva n’sbook wil l long reta in a very high va lue .

’ The Tim es .

“Mr. Beva n shows him self comp lete ma ster of his subject . S uchwriting a s this ma kes us ba i l in Mr. Beva n the a ppea ra nce of

.

a.

new

historia n fit to sta nd beside the best ofthe French or G erma n spec i a l i sts . ”—A thenceum .

The House ofS e leucus shou ld undoubtedly be rea d by a ll who ta kea n interest in a ncient history. "—S a turalay Review .

A R I) A R N O L D

the land of he two rivers - forgotten books

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