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The Ancient East
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]