The Ancient East
D. G. Hogarth
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THE ANCIENT EAST
BY
D. G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.B.A., F.S.A.
KEEPER OF THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD;
AUTHOR OF "IONIA AND THE EAST,"
"THE NEARER EAST," ETC.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
I THE EAST IN 1000 B.C.
II THE EAST IN 800 B.C.
III THE EAST IN 600 B.C.
IV THE EAST IN 400 B.C.
V THE VICTORY OF THE WEST
VI EPILOGUE
NOTE ON BOOKS
LIST OF MAPS
1. THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS
2. ASIATIC EMPIRE OF EGYPT. TEMP. AMENHETEP III
3. HATTI EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY 13TH CENTURY B.C.
4. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. EARLY YEARS OF ASHURBANIPAL
5. PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS HYSTASPIS
6. HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C.
THE ANCIENT EAST
INTRODUCTORY
The title of this book needs a word of explanation, since each of its
terms can legitimately be used to denote more than one conception both
of time and place. "The East" is understood widely and vaguely nowadays
to include all the continent and islands of Asia, some part of
Africa--the northern part where society and conditions of life are most
like the Asiatic--and some regions also of South-Eastern and Eastern
Europe. Therefore it may appear arbitrary to restrict it in the present
book to Western Asia. But the qualifying term in my title must be
invoked in justification. It is the East not of to-day but of antiquity
with which I have to deal, and, therefore, I plead that it is not
unreasonable to understand by "The East" what in antiquity European
historians understood by that term. To Herodotus and his contemporary
Greeks Egypt, Arabia and India were the South; Thrace and Scythia were
the North; and Hither Asia was the East: for they conceived nothing
beyond except the fabled stream of Ocean. It can be pleaded also that my
restriction, while not in itself arbitrary, does, in fact, obviate an
otherwise inevitable obligation to fix arbitrary bounds to the East. For
the term, as used in modern times, implies a geographical area
characterized by society of a certain general type, and according to his
opinion of this type, each person, who thinks or writes of the East,
expands or contracts its geographical area.
It is more difficult to justify the restriction which will be imposed in
the following chapters on the word Ancient. This term is used even more
vaguely and variously than the other. If generally it connotes the
converse of "Modern," in some connections and particularly in the study
of history the Modern is not usually understood to begin where the
Ancient ended but to stand only for the comparatively Recent. For
example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark
Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of
retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least)
we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish
commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the
Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which
human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at
least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. At the same time it
is not implied that we can have no knowledge at all of the Prehistoric
province. It may even be better known to us than parts of the Historic,
through sure deduction from archaeological evidence. But what we learn
from archaeological records is annalistic not historic, since such
records have not passed through the transforming crucible of a human
intelligence which reasons on events as effects of causes. The boundary
between Prehistoric and Historic, however, depends too much on the
subjectivity of individual historians and is too apt to vary with the
progress of research to be a fixed moment. Nor can it be the same for
all civilizations. As regards Egypt, for example, we have a body of
literary tradition which can reasonably be called Historic, relating to
a time much earlier than is reached by respectable literary tradition of
Elam and Babylonia, though their civilizations were probably older than
the Egyptian.
For the Ancient East as here understood, we possess two bodies of
historic literary tradition and two only, the Greek and the Hebrew; and
as it happens, both (though each is independent of the other) lose
consistency and credibility when they deal with history before 1000 B.C.
Moreover, Prof. Myres has covered the prehistoric period in the East in
his brilliant _Dawn of History_. Therefore, on all accounts, in treating
of the historic period, I am absolved from looking back more than a
thousand years before our era.
It is not so obvious where I may stop. The overthrow of Persia by
Alexander, consummating a long stage in a secular contest, which it is
my main business to describe, marks an epoch more sharply than any other
single event in the history of the Ancient East. But there are grave
objections to breaking off abruptly at that date. The reader can hardly
close a book which ends then, with any other impression than that since
the Greek has put the East under his feet, the history of the centuries,
which have still to elapse before Rome shall take over Asia, will simply
be Greek history writ large--the history of a Greater Greece which has
expanded over the ancient East and caused it to lose its distinction
from the ancient West. Yet this impression does not by any means
coincide with historical truth. The Macedonian conquest of Hither Asia
was a victory won by men of Greek civilization, but only to a very
partial extent a victory of that civilization. The West did not
assimilate the East except in very small measure then, and has not
assimilated it in any very large measure to this day. For certain
reasons, among which some geographical facts--the large proportion of
steppe-desert and of the human type which such country breeds--are
perhaps the most powerful, the East is obstinately unreceptive of
western influences, and more than once it has taken its captors captive.
Therefore, while, for the sake of convenience and to avoid entanglement
in the very ill-known maze of what is called "Hellenistic" history, I
shall not attempt to follow the consecutive course of events after 330
B.C., I propose to add an epilogue which may prepare readers for what
was destined to come out of Western Asia after the Christian era, and
enable them to understand in particular the religious conquest of the
West by the East. This has been a more momentous fact in the history of
the world than any political conquest of the East by the West.
* * * * *
In the further hope of enabling readers to retain a clear idea of the
evolution of the history, I have adopted the plan of looking out over
the area which is here called the East, at certain intervals, rather
than the alternative and more usual plan of considering events
consecutively in each several part of that area. Thus, without
repetition and overlapping, one may expect to convey a sense of the
history of the whole East as the sum of the histories of particular
parts. The occasions on which the surveys will be taken are purely
arbitrary chronological points two centuries apart. The years 1000, 800,
600, 400 B.C. are not, any of them, distinguished by known events of the
kind that is called epoch-making; nor have round numbers been chosen for
any peculiar historic significance. They might just as well have been
1001, 801 and so forth, or any other dates divided by equal intervals.
Least of all is any mysterious virtue to be attached to the millenary
date with which I begin. But it is a convenient starting-point, not only
for the reason already stated, that Greek literary memory--the only
literary memory of antiquity worth anything for early history--goes back
to about that date; but also because the year 1000 B.C. falls within a
period of disturbance during which certain racial elements and groups,
destined to exert predominant influence on subsequent history, were
settling down into their historic homes.
A westward and southward movement of peoples, caused by some obscure
pressure from the north-west and north-east, which had been disturbing
eastern and central Asia Minor for more than a century and apparently
had brought to an end the supremacy of the Cappadocian Hatti, was
quieting down, leaving the western peninsula broken up into small
principalities. Indirectly the same movement had brought about a like
result in northern Syria. A still more important movement of Iranian
peoples from the farther East had ended in the coalescence of two
considerable social groups, each containing the germs of higher
development, on the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the old
Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian.
A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts,
marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western
fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all
parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from
Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there
is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic
East much behind 1000 B.C.--that nothing like a sure chronological basis
of it exists before that date. Precision in the dating of events in West
Asia begins near the end of the tenth century with the Assyrian Eponym
lists, that is, lists of annual chief officials; while for Babylonia
there is no certain chronology till nearly two hundred years later. In
Hebrew history sure chronological ground is not reached till the
Assyrian records themselves begin to touch upon it during the reign of
Ahab over Israel. For all the other social groups and states of Western
Asia we have to depend on more or less loose and inferential
synchronisms with Assyrian, Babylonian or Hebrew chronology, except for
some rare events whose dates may be inferred from the alien histories of
Egypt and Greece.
* * * * *
The area, whose social state we shall survey in 1000 B.C. and re-survey
at intervals, contains Western Asia bounded eastwards by an imaginary
line drawn from the head of the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. This
line, however, is not to be drawn rigidly straight, but rather should
describe a shallow outward curve, so as to include in the Ancient East
all Asia situated on this side of the salt deserts of central Persia.
This area is marked off by seas on three sides and by desert on the
fourth side. Internally it is distinguished into some six divisions
either by unusually strong geographical boundaries or by large
differences of geographical character. These divisions are as follows--
(1) A western peninsular projection, bounded by seas on three sides and
divided from the rest of the continent by high and very broad mountain
masses, which has been named, not inappropriately, _Asia Minor_, since
it displays, in many respects, an epitome of the general characteristics
of the continent. (2) A tangled mountainous region filling almost all
the rest of the northern part of the area and sharply distinct in
character not only from the plateau land of Asia Minor to the west but
also from the great plain lands of steppe character lying to the south,
north and east. This has perhaps never had a single name, though the
bulk of it has been included in "Urartu" (Ararat), "Armenia" or
"Kurdistan" at various epochs; but for convenience we shall call it
_Armenia_. (3) A narrow belt running south from both the former
divisions and distinguished from them by much lower general elevation.
Bounded on the west by the sea and on the south and east by broad tracts
of desert, it has, since Greek times at least, been generally known as
_Syria_. (4) A great southern peninsula largely desert, lying high and
fringed by sands on the land side, which has been called, ever since
antiquity, _Arabia_. (5) A broad tract stretching into the continent
between Armenia and Arabia and containing the middle and lower basins of
the twin rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, which, rising in Armenia, drain
the greater part of the whole area. It is of diversified surface,
ranging from sheer desert in the west and centre, to great fertility in
its eastern parts; but, until it begins to rise northward towards the
frontier of "Armenia" and eastward towards that of the sixth division,
about to be described, it maintains a generally low elevation. No common
name has ever included all its parts, both the interfluvial region and
the districts beyond Tigris; but since the term _Mesopotamia_, though
obviously incorrect, is generally understood nowadays to designate it,
this name may be used for want of a better. (6) A high plateau, walled
off from Mesopotamia and Armenia by high mountain chains, and extending
back to the desert limits of the Ancient East. To this region, although
it comprises only the western part of what should be understood by
_Iran_, this name may be appropriated "without prejudice."
[Plate 1: THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS]
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