The Ancient East | Page 2

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