The Ancient East Part 3

About the east and north a different story would certainly have to be told, if we could tell it in full. But though Greek traditions come to our aid, they have much less to say about these remote regions than the inscribed annals of that empire, which had just come to its end, have had hitherto: and unfortunately the Median inheritors of a.s.syria have left no epigraphic records of their own--at least none have been found.

If, as seems probable, the main element of Kyaxares' war strength was Scythian, we can hardly expect to find records either of his conquest or the subsequent career of the Medes, even though Ecbatana should be laid bare below the site of modern Hamadan; for the predatory Scyth, like the mediaeval Mongol, halted too short a time to desire to carve stones, and probably lacked skill to inscribe them. To complete our discomfiture, the only other possible source of light, the Babylonian annals, sheds none henceforward on the north country and very little on any country.

Nebuchadnezzar--so far as his records have been found and read--did not adopt the a.s.syrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures, we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have const.i.tuted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.

We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service.

First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides overrunning all a.s.syria and the northern part of Babylonia after the fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as a.s.syria, formed part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552 B.C.

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

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

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

SECTION 6. ASIA MINOR

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

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

SECTION 7. CILICIA

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

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

SECTION 8. PHRYGIA

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

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

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

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

SECTION 9. LYDIA

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

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

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

as coming from a people and a land of which their master and his forbears had not so much as heard. As the excavation of Sardes and of other sites in Lydia proceeds, we shall perhaps find that the higher civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an influence of the h.e.l.lenic cities which began not much earlier than 600 B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date.

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

SECTION 10. THE GREEK CITIES

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

If, however, the brilliant culture of the Asiatic Greeks about the opening of the sixth century admits no shadow of doubt, singularly few material things, which their arts produced, have been recovered for us to see to-day. Miletus has been excavated by Germans to a very considerable extent, without yielding anything really worthy of its great period, or, indeed, much that can be referred to that period at all, except sherds of a fine painted ware. It looks as if the city at the mouth of the greatest and largest valley, which penetrates Asia Minor from the west coast, was too important in subsequent ages and suffered chastis.e.m.e.nts too drastic and reconstructions too thorough for remains of its earlier greatness to survive except in holes and corners.

Ephesus has given us more archaic treasures, from the deposits bedded down under the later reconstructions of its great shrine of Artemis; but here again the site of the city itself, though long explored by Austrians, has not added to the store. The ruins of the great Roman buildings which overlie its earlier strata have proved, perhaps, too serious an impediment to the excavators and too seductive a prize.

Branchidae, with its temple of Apollo and Sacred Way, has preserved for us a little archaic statuary, as have also Samos and Chios. We have archaic gold work and painted vases from Rhodes, painted sarcophagi from Clazomenae, and painted pottery made there and at other places in Asia Minor, although found mostly abroad. But all this amounts to a very poor representation of the Asiatic Greek civilization of 600 B.C. Fortunately the soil still holds far more than has been got out of it. With those two exceptions, Miletus and Ephesus, the sites of the elder h.e.l.lenic cities on or near the Anatolian coast still await excavators who will go to the bottom of all things and dig systematically over a large area; while some sites await any excavation whatsoever, except such as is practised by plundering peasants.

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

THE EAST IN 400 B.C.

As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men, military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these, Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians, Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus of Halicarna.s.sus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, and with him had marched more than ten thousand Greeks. Not only have works by these three men of letters survived, wholly or in part, to our time, but also many notes on the East as it was before 400 B.C. have been preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we still have some archaeological doc.u.ments to fall back upon. If the cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of the later a.s.syrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform us of local society and life.

SECTION 1. EASTWARD MOVEMENT OF THE GREEKS

The Greek had been pus.h.i.+ng eastward for a long time. More than three hundred years ago, as has been shown in the last chapter, he had become a terror in the farthest Levant. Before another century had pa.s.sed he found his way into Egypt also. Originally hired as mercenaries to support a native revolt against a.s.syria, the Greeks remained in the Nile valley not only to fight but to trade. The first introduction of them to the Saite Pharaoh, Psammetichus, was promoted by Gyges the Lydian to further his own ends, but the first development of their social influence in Egypt was due to the enterprise of Miletus in establis.h.i.+ng a factory on the lowest course of the Canopic Nile. This post and two standing camps of Greek mercenaries, one at Tahpanhes watching the approach from Asia, the other at Memphis overawing the capital and keeping the road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce Ionian civilization to the Delta in the seventh century. Indeed, to this day our knowledge of the earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia and Caria depends largely on the fragments of their vases imported into Egypt which have been found at Tahpanhes, Memphis and another Greek colony, Naukratis, founded a little later (as will be told presently) to supersede the original Milesian factory. Though those foreign vases themselves, with their decoration of nude figure subjects which revolted vulgar Egyptian sentiment, did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion of h.e.l.lenic culture.

So useful or so dangerous--at any rate so numerous--did the Greeks become in Lower Egypt by the opening of the sixth century that a reservation was a.s.signed to them beside the Egyptian town of Piemro, and to this alone, according to Herodotus, newcomers from the sea were allowed to make their way. This foreign suburb of Piemro was named Naukratis, and nine cities of the Asiatic Greeks founded a common sanctuary there. Other maritime communities of the same race (probably the more powerful, since Miletus is named among them) had their particular sanctuaries also and their proper places. The Greeks had come to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that throughout the Persian domination, which superseded the Saitic before the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other h.e.l.lenic centres was maintained.

The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the land, enthroned h.e.l.lenism at Alexandria on the sea itself.

SECTION 2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERS

Nor was it only through Greek sea-rovers and settlers in Cilicia, and through Greek mercenaries, merchants and courtesans in the Nile-Delta, that the East and the West had been making mutual acquaintance. Other agencies of communication had been active in bringing Mesopotamian models to the artists of the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor, and Ionian models to Mesopotamia and Syria. The results are plain to see, on the one hand in the fabric and design of early ivories, jewellery and other objects found in the archaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in the decoration of painted pottery produced at Miletus; on the other hand, in the carved ivories of the ninth century found at Calah on the Tigris.

But the processes which produced these results are not so clear. If the agents or carriers of those mutual influences were certainly the Phoenicians and the Lydians, we cannot yet apportion with confidence to each of these peoples the responsibility for the results, or be sure that they were the only agents, or independent of other middlemen more directly in contact with one party or the other.

The Phoenicians have pushed far afield since we looked at them last. By founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours, beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western Mediterranean basin. By means of secondary settlements in west Sicily, Sardinia and Spain, she proceeded to convert this sea for a while into something like a Phoenician lake. No serious rival had forestalled her there or was to arise to dispute her monopoly till she herself, long after our date, would provoke Rome. The Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy, which looked westward, failed to make head against her at the first, and soon dropped out of the running; nor did the one or two isolated centres of h.e.l.lenism on other sh.o.r.es do better. On the other hand, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, although it was her own home-sea, Tyre never succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng commercial supremacy, and indeed, so far as we know, she never seriously tried to establish it. It was the sphere of the Aegean mariners and had been so as far back as Phoenician memory ran. The Late Minoan Cretans and men of Argolis, the Achaean rovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armed merchantmen had successively turned away from it all but isolated and peaceful s.h.i.+ps of Sidon and Tyre, and even so near a coast as Cyprus remained foreign to the Phoenicians for centuries after Tyre had grown to full estate. In the Homeric stories s.h.i.+ps of the Sidonians, though not unknown, make rare appearances, and other early legends of the Greeks, which make mention of Phoenician visits to h.e.l.lenic coasts, imply that they were unusual phenomena, which aroused much local curiosity and were long remembered. The strangeness of the Phoenician mariners, the unfamiliar charm of their cargoes--such were the impressions left on Greek story by the early visits of Phoenician s.h.i.+ps.

That they did pay such visits, however, from time to time is certain.

The little Egyptian trinkets, which occur frequently in h.e.l.lenic strata of the eighth to the sixth centuries, are sufficient witness of the fact. They are most numerous in Rhodes, in Caria and Ionia, and in the Peloponnese. But the main stream of Tyrian commerce hugged the south rather than the north coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Phoenician sailors were essentially southerners--men who, if they would brave now and again the cold winds of the Aegean and Adriatic, refused to do so oftener than was necessary--men to whom African sh.o.r.es and a climate softened by the breath of the Ocean were more congenial.

If, however, the Phoenicians were undoubtedly agents who introduced the Egyptian culture to the early h.e.l.lenes of both Asia and Europe, did they also introduce the Mesopotamian? Not to anything like the same extent, if we may judge by the products of excavations. Indeed, wherever Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often either certain or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician. We find the nearest affinities to archaic Cypriote art (where this was indebted to Asiatic art at all) in Cilician and in Hitt.i.te Syrian art. Early Ionian and Carian strata contain very little that is of Egyptian character, but much whose inspiration can be traced ultimately to Mesopotamia; and research in inner Asia Minor, imperfect though its results are yet, has brought to light on the plateau so much parallelism to Ionian Orientalizing art, and so many examples of prior stages in its development, that we must a.s.sume Mesopotamian influence to have reached westernmost Asia chiefly by overland ways. As for the European sites, since their Orientalism appears to have been drawn from Ionia, it also had come through Asia overland.

Therefore on the whole, though Herodotus a.s.serts that the Phoenician mariners carried a.s.syrian cargoes, there is remarkably little evidence that those cargoes reached the West, and equally little that Phoenicians had any considerable direct trade with Mesopotamia. They may have been responsible for the small Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects which have been found by the excavators of Carchemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of the ninth and eighth centuries; but the carrying of similar objects eastward across the Euphrates was more probably in Hitt.i.te hands than theirs. The strongest Nilotic influence which affected Mesopotamian art is to be noticed during the latter half of the New a.s.syrian Kingdom, when there was no need for alien intermediaries to keep Nineveh in communication with its own province of Egypt.

Apparently, therefore, it was not through the Phoenicians that the Greeks had learned most of what they knew about the East in 400 B.C.