The races of the ancient Eastern world, or, at any rate, that portion of

them which helped to make its history, either existed no longer or had

sunk into their dotage. They had worn each other out in the centuries

of their prime, Chaldæans and Assyrians fighting against Cossæans or

Elamites, Egyptians against Ethiopians and against Hittites, Urartians,

Armæans, the peoples of Lebanon and of Damascus, the Phoenicians,

Canaanites and Jews, until at last, with impoverished blood and flagging

energies, they were thrown into conflict with younger and more vigorous

nations. The Medes had swept away all that still remained of Assyria

and Urartu; the Persians had overthrown the Medes, the Lydians, and the

Chaldæans, till Egypt alone remained and was struck down by them in her

turn. What had become of these conquered nations during the period

of nearly two hundred years that the Achæmenians had ruled over them?

First, as regards Elam, one of the oldest and formerly the most powerful

of them all. She had been rent into two halves, each of them destined

to have a different fate. In the mountains, the Uxians, Mardians,

Elymasans, and Cossæans--tribes who had formerly been the backbone of

the nation--had relapsed into a semi-barbarous condition, or rather,

while the rest of the world had progressed in civilization and

refinement, they had remained in a state of stagnation, adhering

obstinately to the customs of their palmy days: just as they had harried

the Chaldæans or Assyrians in the olden times, so now they harried the

Persians; then, taking refuge in their rocky fastnesses, they lived on

the proceeds of their forays, successfully resisting all attempts made

to dislodge them. The people of the plains, on the other hand, kept in

check from the outset by the presence of the court at Susa, not only

promptly resigned themselves to their fate, but even took pleasure in

it, and came to look upon themselves as in some sort the masters of

Asia. Was it not to their country, to the very spot occupied by the

palace of their king, that, for nearly two hundred years, satraps,

vassal kings, the legates of foreign races, ambassadors of Greek

republics--in a word, all the great ones of this world--came every year

to render homage, and had not the treasures which these visitors brought

with them been expended, in part at any rate, on their country? The

memory of their former prosperity paled before the splendours of their

new destiny, and the glory of their ancestors suffered eclipse. The

names of the national kings, the story of their Chaldæan and Syrian

conquests, the trophies of their victories over the great generals

of Nineveh, the horrors of their latest discords and of the final

catastrophe were all forgotten; even the documents which might have

helped to recall them lay buried in the heart of the mound which served

as a foundation for the palace of the Achgernenides. Beyond the vague

consciousness of a splendid past, the memory of the common people was

a blank, and when questioned by strangers they could tell them nothing

save legends of the gods or the exploits of mythical heroes; and from

them the Greeks borrowed their Memnon, that son of Tithonus and Eôs

who rushed to the aid of Priam with his band of Ethiopians, and whose

prowess had failed to retard by a single day the downfall of Troy.

Further northwards, the Urartians and peoples of ancient Naîri, less

favoured by fortune, lost ground with each successive generation,

yielding to the steady pressure of the Armenians. In the time of

Herodotus they were still in possession of the upper basins of the

Euphrates and Araxus, and, in conjunction with the Matieni and Saspires,

formed a satrapy--the eighteenth--the boundaries of which coincided

pretty closely with those of the kingdom ruled over by the last kings

of Van in the days of Assur-bani-pal; the Armenians, on their side,

constituted the thirteenth satrapy, between Mount Taurus and the Lower

Arsanias.

[Illustration: 325.jpg COINS OF THE SATRAPS WITH ARAMAEAN INSCRIPTIONS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from coins in the _Cabinet des

Médailles_

The whole face of their country had undergone a profound change since

that time: the Urartians, driven northwards, became intermingled with

the tribes on the slopes of the Caucasus, while the Armenians, carried

along towards the east, as though by some resistless current, were

now scaling the mountainous bulwark of Ararat, and slowly but surely

encroaching on the lower plains of the Araxes. These political

changes had been almost completed by the time of Ochus, and Urartu had

disappeared from the scene, but an Armenia now flourished in the very

region where Urartu had once ruled, and its princes, who were related

to the family of the Achæmenides, wielded an authority little short of

regal under the modest name of satraps. Thanks to their influence, the

religions and customs of Iran were introduced into the eastern borders

of Asia Minor. They made their way into the valleys of the Iris and the

Halys, into Cappadocia and the country round Mount Taurus, and thither

they brought with them the official script of the empire, the Persian

and Aramaean cuneiform which was employed in public documents, in

inscriptions, and on coins. The centre of the peninsula remained very

much the same as it had been in the period of the Phrygian supremacy,

but further westward Hellenic influences gradually made themselves felt.

[Illustration: 326.jpg A LYCIAN TOMB]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a woodcut in Bonndorff.

The arts of Greece, its manners, religious ideals, and modes of thought,

were slowly displacing civilisations of the Asianic type, and even in

places like Lycia, where the language successfully withstood the Greek

invasion, the life of the nations, and especially of their rulers,

became so deeply impregnated with Hellenism as to differ but little from

that in the cities on the Ionic, Æolian, or Doric seaboard. The Lycians

still adhered to the ancient forms which characterised their funerary

architecture, but it was to Greek sculptors, or pupils from the Grecian

schools, that they entrusted the decoration of the sides of their

sarcophagi and of their tombs.

[Illustration: 327b.jpg STATUE OF MAUSOLUS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph of the original in

the British Museum.

[Illustration: 327a.jpg COIN OF A LYCIAN KING]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a silver stater in the _Cabinet

des Médailles._ The king in question was named Deneveles,

and is only known by the coins bearing his superscription.

He flourished about 395 B.C.

Their kings minted coins many of which are reckoned among the

masterpieces of antique engraving; and if we pass from Lycia to the

petty states of Caria, we come upon one of the greatest triumphs of

Greek art--that huge mausoleum in which the inconsolable Artemisia

enclosed the ashes and erected the statue of her husband. The Asia Minor

of Egyptian times, with its old-world dynasties, its old-world names,

and old-world races, had come to be nothing more than an historic

memory; even that martial world, in which the Assyrian conquerors fought

so many battles from the Euphrates to the Black Sea, was now no more,

and its neighbours and enemies of former days had, for the most part,

disappeared from the land of the living.

[Illustration: 328.jpg LYCIAN SARCOPHAGUS DECORATED WITH GREEK CARVINGS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photogravure published by

Hamdy-Beg and Th. Reinach.

The Lotanu were gone, the Khâti were gone, and gone, too, were

Carchemish, Arpad, and Qodshu, much of th§ir domain having been

swallowed up again by the desert for want of hands to water and till it;

even Assyria itself seemed but a shadow half shrouded in the mists of

oblivion. Sangara, Nisibis, Resaina, and Edessa still showed some signs

of vigour, but on quitting the slopes of the Masios and proceeding

southwards, piles of ruins alone marked the sites of those wealthy

cities through which the Ninevite monarchs had passed in their

journeyings towards Syria. Here wide tracts of arid and treeless

country were now to be seen covered with aromatic herbage, where the

Scenite Arabs were wont to pursue the lion, wild ass, ostrich, bustard,

antelope, and gazelle; a few abandoned forts, such as Korsortê, Anatho,

and Is (Hit) marked the halting-places of armies on the banks of the

Euphrates. In the region of the Tigris, the descendants of Assyrian

captives who, like the Jews, had been set free by Cyrus, had rebuilt

Assur, and had there grown wealthy by husbandry and commerce,* but in

the district of the Zab solitude reigned supreme.** Calah and Nineveh

were alike deserted, and though their ruins still littered the sites

where they had stood, their names were unknown in the neighbouring

villages. Xenophon, relying on his guides, calls the former place

Larissa, the second Mespila.***

* This seems to be indicated by a mutilated passage in the

_Cylinder of Gyrus_, where Assur is mentioned in the list of

towns and countries whose inhabitants were sent back to

their homes by Cyrus after the capture of Babylon. Xenophon

calls it Esense, this being, possibly, a translation of the

name given to it by its inhabitants. Nothing could be more

natural than for exiles to call the villages founded by them

on their return “new.” The town seems to have been a large

and wealthy one.

** Xenophon calls this country Media, a desert region which

the Ten Thousand took six days to cross.

*** The name Larissa is, possibly, a corruption of some name

similar to that of the city of Larsam in Chaldæa; Mespila

may be a generic term. [Mespila is Muspula, “the low ground”

at the foot of Kouyunjik; Larissa probably Al Resen or

Res-eni, between Kouyunjik and Nebi Yunus.--Ed.]

Already there were historians who took the ziggurât at Nineveh to be

the burial-place of Sardanapalus. They declared that Cyrus had pulled it

down in order to strengthen his camp during the siege of the town, and

that formerly it had borne an epitaph afterwards put into verse by the

poet Choerilus of Iassus: “I reigned, and so long as I beheld the light

of the sun, I ate, I drank, I loved, well knowing how brief is the

life of man, and to how many vicissitudes it is liable.” Many writers,

remembering the Assyrian monument at Anchialê in Cilicia, were inclined

to place the king’s tomb there. It was surmounted by the statue of a

man--according to one account, with his hands crossed upon his breast,

according to another, in the act of snapping his fingers--and bore the

following inscription in Chaldaic letters: “I, Sardanapalus, son of

Anakyndaraxes, founded Anchialê and Tarsus in one day, but now am dead.”

Thus ten centuries of conquests and massacre had passed away like a

vapour, leaving nothing but a meagre residue of old men’s tales and

moral axioms.

In one respect only does the civilisation of the Euphrates seem to have

fairly held its own. Cossæa, though it had lost its independence, had

lost but little of its wealth; its former rebellions had done it no

great injury, and its ancient cities were still left standing, though

shorn of their early splendour. Uru, it is true, numbered but few

citizens round its tottering sanctuaries, but Uruk maintained a school

of theologians and astronomers no less famous throughout the East than

those of Borsippa. The swamps, however, which surrounded it possessed

few attractions, and Greek travellers rarely ventured thither. They

generally stopped at Babylon, or if they ventured off the beaten track,

it was only to visit the monuments of Nebuchadrezzar, or the tombs of

the early kings in its immediate neighbourhood. Babylon was, indeed, one

of the capitals of the empire--nay, for more than half a century, during

the closing years of Artaxerxes I., in the reign of Darius II., and

in the early days of Artaxerxes IL, it had been the real capital; even

under Ochus, the court spent the winter months there, and resorted

thither in quest of those resources of industry and commerce which Susa

lacked. The material benefits due to the presence of the sovereign seem

to have reconciled the city to its subject condition; there had been no

seditious movement there since the ill-starred rising of Shamasherîb,

which Xerxes had quelled with ruthless severity. The Greek mercenaries

or traders who visited it, though prepared for its huge size by general

report, could not repress a feeling of astonishment as they approached

it. First of all there was the triple wall of Nebuchadrezzar, with its

moats, its rows of towers, and its colossal gateways. Unlike the Greek

cities, it had been laid out according to a regular plan, and formed a

perfect square, inside which the streets crossed one another at right

angles, some parallel to the Euphrates, others at right angles to it;

every one of the latter terminated in a brazen gate opening through the

masonry of the quay, and giving access to the river. The passengers who

crowded the streets included representatives of all the Asiatic races,

the native Babylonians being recognisable by their graceful dress,

consisting of a linen tunic falling to the feet, a fringed shawl, round

cap, and heavy staff terminating in a knob. From this ever-changing

background stood out many novel features calculated to stimulate Greek

curiosity, such as the sick persons exposed at street-corners in

order that they might beg the passers-by to prescribe for them, the

prostitution of her votaries within the courts of the goddess Mylitta,

and the disposal of marriageable girls by auction: Herodotus, however,

regretted that this latter custom had fallen into abeyance. And yet to

the attentive eye of a close observer even Babylon must have furnished

many unmistakable symptoms of decay. The huge boundary wall enclosed

too large an area for the population sheltered behind it; whole quarters

were crumbling into heaps of ruins, and the flower and vegetable gardens

were steadily encroaching on spaces formerly covered with houses. Public

buildings had suffered quite as much as private dwellings from the

Persian wars. Xerxes had despoiled the temples, and no restoration

had been attempted since his time. The ziggurât of Bel lay half buried

already beneath piles of rubbish; the golden statues which had once

stood within its chambers had disappeared, and the priests no longer

carried on their astronomical observations on its platform.*

* Herodotus merely mentions that Xerxes had despoiled the

temple; Strabo tells us that Alexander wished to restore it,

but that it was in such a state of dilapidation that it

would have taken ten thousand men two months merely to

remove the rubbish.

The palaces of the ancient kings were falling to pieces from lack of

repairs, though the famous hanging gardens in the citadel were still

shown to strangers. The guides, of course, gave them out to be a device

of Semiramis, but the well-informed knew that they had been constructed

by Nebuchadrezzar for one of his wives the daughter of Oyaxares, who

pined for the verdure of her native mountains. “They were square in

shape, each side being four hundred feet long; one approached them by

steps leading to terraces placed one above the other, the arrangement

of the whole, resembling that of an amphitheatre. Each terrace rested on

pillars which, gradually increasing in size, supported the weight of

the soil and its produce. The loftiest pillar attained a height of fifty

feet; it reached to the upper part of the garden, its capital being on

a level with the balustrades of the boundary wall. The terraces were

covered with a layer of soil of sufficient depth for the roots of the

largest trees; plants of all kinds that delight the eye by their shape

or beauty were grown there. One of the columns was hollowed from top

to bottom; it contained hydraulic engines which pumped up quantities of

water, no part of the mechanism being visible from the outside.”

Many travellers were content to note down only such marvels as they

considered likely to make their narratives more amusing, but others took

pains to collect information of a more solid character, and before

they had carried their researches very far, were at once astounded and

delighted with the glimpses they obtained of Chaldæan genius. No doubt,

they exaggerated when they went so far as to maintain that all their

learning came to them originally from Babylon, and that the most famous

scholars of Greece, Pherecydes of Scyros, Democritus of Abdera, and

Pythagoras,* owed the rudiments of philosophy, mathematics, physics, and

astrology to the school of the _Magi_.

* The story which asserts that Pythagoras served under

Nergilos, King of Assyria, is probably based on some

similarity of names: thus among the Greek kings of Cyprus,

and in the time of Assur-bani-pal, we find one whose name

would recall that of Pythagoras, if the accuracy of the

reading were beyond question.

Yet it is not surprising that they should have believed this to be the

case, when increasing familiarity with the priestly seminaries revealed

to them the existence of those libraries of clay tablets in which, side

by side with theoretic treatises dating from two thousand years back

and more, were to be found examples of applied mechanics, observations,

reckonings, and novel solutions of problems, which generations

of scribes had accumulated in the course of centuries. The Greek

astronomers took full advantage of these documents, but it was their

astrologers and soothsayers who were specially indebted to them. The

latter acknowledged their own inferiority the moment they came into

contact with their Euphratean colleagues, and endeavoured to make good

their deficiencies by taking lessons from the latter or persuading them

to migrate to Greece. A hundred years later saw the Babylonian Berosus

opening at Cos a public school of divination by the stars. From

thenceforward “Chaldæan” came to be synonymous with “astrologer” or

“sorcerer,” and Chaldæan magic became supreme throughout the world at

the very moment when Chaldæa itself was in its death-throes.

Nor was its unquestioned supremacy in the black art the sole legacy that

Chaldæa bequeathed to the coming generations: its language survived, and

reigned for centuries afterwards in the regions subjugated by its arms.

The cultivated tongue employed by the scribes of Nineve and Babylon

in the palmy days of their race, had long become a sort of literary

dialect, used in writings of a lofty character and understood by a

select few, but unintelligible to the common people. The populace in

town or country talked an Aramaic jargon, clumsier and more prolix

than Assyrian, but easier to understand. We know how successfully the

Aramæans had managed to push their way along the Euphrates and into

Syria towards the close of the Hittite supremacy: their successive

encroachments had been favoured, first by the Assyrian, later by the

Chaldæan conquests, and now they had become sole possessors of the

ancient Naharaîna, the plains of Cilicia, the basin of the Orontes, and

the country round Damascus; but the true home of the Aramæans was in

Syria rather than in the districts of the Lower Euphrates. Even in the

time of the Sargonids their alphabet had made so much headway that at

Nineveh itself and at Calah it had come into everyday use; when Chaldæan

supremacy gave way to that of the Persians, its triumph--in the western

provinces, at any rate--was complete, and it became the recognised

vehicle of the royal decrees: we come upon it in every direction, on

the coins issued by the satraps of Asia Minor, on the seals of local

governors or dynasts, on inscriptions or stelæ in Egypt, in the letters

of the scribes, and in the rescripts of the great king. From Nisib

to Baphia, between the Tigris and the Mediterranean, it gradually

supplanted most of the other dialects--Semitic or otherwise--which had

hitherto prevailed. Phoenician held its ground in the seaports, but

Hebrew gave way before it, and ended by being restricted to religious

purposes, as a literary and liturgical language. It was in the

neighbourhood of Babylon itself that the Judæan exiles had, during the

Captivity, adopted the Aramaic language, and their return to Canaan

failed to restore either the purity of their own language or the dignity

and independence of their religious life. Their colony at Jerusalem

possessed few resources; the wealthier Hebrews had, for the most part,

remained in Chaldæa, leaving the privilege of repopulating the holy city

to those of their brethren who were less plenteously endowed with this

world’s goods. These latter soon learned to their cost that Zion was not

the ideal city whose “gates shall be open continually; they shall not

be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the wealth of

the nations;” far from “sucking the milk of nations and the breast of

kings,” * their fields produced barely sufficient to satisfy the more

pressing needs of daily life. “Ye have sown much, and bring in little,”

as Jahveh declared to them “ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink,

but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none

warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with

holes.” **

* An anonymous prophet in Isa. lx. 11-16.

** Hagg. i. 6.

They quickly relinquished the work of restoration, finding themselves

forgotten by all--their Babylonian brethren included--in the midst of

the great events which were then agitating the world, the preparations

for the conquest of Egypt, the usurpation of the pseudo-Smerdis, the

accession of Darius, the Babylonian and Median insurrections. Possibly

they believed that the Achæmenides had had their day, and that a new

Chaldæan empire, with a second Nebuchadrezzar at its head, was about to

regain the ascendency. It would seem that the downfall of Nadintav-bel

inspired them with new faith in the future and encouraged them to

complete their task: in the second year of Darius, two prophets, Haggai

and Zechariah, arose in their midst and lifted up their voices.

[Illustration: 337.jpg CHALDEAN SEAL WITH ARAMAIC INSCRIPTION]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photogravure published in

Menant.

Zerubbabel, a prince of the royal line, governed Judah in the Persian

interest, and with him was associated the high priest Joshua, who looked

after the spiritual interests of the community: the reproaches of the

two prophets aroused the people from their inaction, and induced them to

resume their interrupted building operations. Darius, duly informed of

what was going on by the governor of Syria, gave orders that they were

not to be interfered with, and four years later the building of the

temple was completed.*

* Ezra iv.-vi.; the account given by Josephus of the two

expeditions of Zerubbabel seems to have been borrowed partly

from the canonical book, partly from the Apocryphal writing

known as the _1st Book of Esdras_.

For nearly a century after this the little Jewish republic remained

quiescent. It had slowly developed until it had gradually won back

a portion of the former territories of Benjamin and Judah, but its

expansion southwards was checked by the Idumæans, to whom Nebuchadrezzar

had years before handed over Hebron and Acrabattenê (Akrabbim) as a

reward for the services they had rendered.

On the north its neighbours were the descendants of those Aramaean

exiles whom Sargon, Sennacherib, and Esar-haddon, kings of Assyria,

had, on various occasions, installed around Samaria in Mount Ephraim. At

first these people paid no reverence to the “God of the land,” so that

Jahveh, in order to punish them, sent lions, which spread carnage in

their ranks. Then the King of Assyria allotted them an Israelitish

priest from among his prisoners, who taught them “the law” of Jahveh,

and appointed other priests chosen from the people, and showed them how

to offer up sacrifices on the ancient high places.*

* Kings xvii. 24-40. There do not seem to have been the

continual disputes between the inhabitants of Judaea and

Samaria before the return of Nehemiah, which the compilers

of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah seem to have believed.

Thus another Israel began to rise up again, and, at first, the new

Judah seems to have been on tolerably friendly terms with it: the two

communities traded and intermarried with one another, the Samaritans

took part in the religious ceremonies, and certain of their leaders

occupied a court in the temple at Jerusalem. The alliance, however,

proved dangerous to the purity of the faith, for the proselytes, while

they adopted Jahveh and gave Him that supreme place in their devotions

which was due to “the God of the land,” had by no means entirely

forsworn their national superstitions, and Adrammelek, Nergal, Tartak,

Anammelek, and other deities still found worshippers among them. Judah,

which in the days of its independence had so often turned aside after

the gods of Canaan and Moab, was in danger of being led away by the

idolatrous practices of its new neighbours; intermarriage with the

daughters of Moab and Ammon, of Philistia and Samaria, was producing

a gradual degeneracy: the national language was giving way before the

Aramaean; unless some one could be found to stem the tide of decadence

and help the people to remount the slope which they were descending,

the fate of Judah was certain. A prophet--the last of those whose

predictions have survived to our time--stood forth amid the general

laxity and called the people to account for their transgressions, in

the name of the Eternal, but his single voice, which seemed but a

feeble echo of the great prophets of former ages, did not meet with

a favourable hearing. Salvation came at length from the Jews outside

Judah, the naturalised citizens of Babylon, a well-informed and wealthy

body, occupying high places in the administration of the empire, and

sometimes in the favour of the sovereign also, yet possessed by an

ardent zeal for the religion of their fathers and a steadfast faith

in the vitality of their race. One of these, a certain Nehemiah, was

employed as cupbearer to Artaxerxes II. He was visited at Susa by some

men of Judah whose business had brought them to that city and inquired

of them how matters fared in Jerusalem. Hanani, one of his visitors,

replied that “the remnant that are left of the captivity there in the

province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem

also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire.”

Nehemiah took advantage of a moment when the king seemed in a jovial

mood to describe the wretched state of his native land in moving terms:

he obtained leave to quit Susa and authority to administer the city in

which his fathers had dwelt.*

* Nehemiah i., ii.

This took place in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, about 385 B.C.

Nehemiah at once made his way to Jerusalem with such escort as

befitted his dignity, and the news of his mission, and, apparently,

the sentiments of rigid orthodoxy professed by him from the beginning,

provoked the resentment of the neighbouring potentates against him:

Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, chief of the Samaritans,

and Geshem the Bedâwin did their best to thwart him in the execution of

his plans. He baffled their intrigues by his promptitude in rebuilding

the walls, and when once he had rendered himself safe from any sudden

attack, he proceeded with the reforms which he deemed urgent. His tenure

of office lasted twelve years--from 384 to 373 B.C.--and during the

whole of that time he refused to accept any of the dues to which he was

entitled, and which his predecessors had received without scruple. Ever

since their return from exile, the common people had been impoverished

and paralysed by usury. The poor had been compelled to mortgage their

fields and their vineyards in order to pay the king’s taxes; then, when

their land was gone, they had pledged their sons and their daughters;

the moneyed classes of the new Israel thus absorbed the property of

their poorer brethren, and reduced the latter to slavery. Nehemiah

called the usurers before him and severely rebuking them for their

covetousness, bade them surrender the interest and capital of existing

debts, and restore the properties which had fallen into their hands

owing to their shameful abuse of wealth, and release all those of their

co-religionists whom they had enslaved in default of payment of their

debts.* His high place in the royal favour doubtless had its effect

on those whose cupidity suffered from his zeal, and prevented external

enemies from too openly interfering in the affairs of the community:

by the time he returned to the court, in 372 B.C., after an absence of

twelve years, Jerusalem and its environs had to some extent regained

the material prosperity of former days. The part played by Nehemiah was,

however, mainly political, and the religious problem remained in very

much the same state as before. The high priests, who alone possessed the

power of solving it, had fallen in with the current that was carrying

away the people, and--latterly, at any rate--had become disqualified

through intermarriage with aliens: what was wanted was a scribe deeply

versed in sacred things to direct them in the right way, and such a man

could be found only in Babylonia, the one country in which the study of

the ancient traditions still flourished. A certain Ezra, son of Seraiah,

presented himself in 369 B.C., and, as he was a man of some standing,

Artaxerxes not only authorised him to go himself, but to take with him

a whole company of priests and Lévites and families formerly attached to

the service of the temple.** The books containing the Law of God and

the history of His people had, since the beginning of the captivity,

undergone alterations which had profoundly modified their text and

changed their spirit.

* Neh. v.

** Neh. xiii. 6: “in the two and thirtieth year of

Artaxerxes, King of Babylon, I went unto the king.”

This work of revision, begun under the influence of Ezekiel, and perhaps

by his own followers, had, since his time, been carried on without

interruption, and by mingling the juridical texts with narratives of

the early ages collected from different sources, a lengthy work had been

produced, very similar in composition and wording to the five Books

of Moses and the Book of Joshua as we now possess them.* It was this

version of the Revelation of Jahveh that Ezra brought with him from

Babylon in order to instruct the people of Judah, and the first

impressions received by him at the end of his journey convinced him that

his task would be no light one, for the number of mixed marriages had

been so great as to demoralise not only the common people, but even

the priests and leading nobles as well. Nevertheless, at a general

assembly** of the people he succeeded in persuading them to consent to

the repudiation of alien wives.

* This is the priestly revision presupposed by recent

critics; here again, in order to keep within the prescribed

limits of space, I have been compelled to omit much that I

should have liked to add in regard to the nature of this

work and the spirit in which it was carried out.

** Ezra, vii.-xi., where the dates given do not form part of

the work as written by Ezra, but have been introduced later

by the editor of the book as it now stands.

But this preliminary success would have led to nothing unless he

could secure formal recognition of the rigorous code of which he had

constituted himself the champion, and protracted negotiations were

necessary before he could claim a victory on this point as well as

on the other. At length, about 367 B.C., more than a year after his

arrival, he gained his point, and the covenant between Jahveh and His

people was sealed with ceremonies modelled on those which had attended

the promulgation of Deuteronomy in the time of Josiah. On the first day

of the seventh month, a little before the autumn festival, the people

assembled at Jerusalem in “the broad place which was before the water

gate.” Ezra mounted a wooden pulpit, and the chief among the priests sat

beside him. He “opened the book in the sight of all the people... and...

all the people stood up: and Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God.

And all the people answered ‘Amen, amen!’ with the lifting up of their

hands; and they bowed their heads and worshipped the Lord with their

faces to the ground.” Then began the reading of the sacred text. As each

clause was read, the Lévites stationed here and there among the people

interpreted and explained its provisions in the vulgar tongue, so as

to make their meaning clear to all. The prolix enumeration of sins and

their expiation, and threats expressed in certain chapters, produced

among the crowd the same effect of nervous terror as had once before

been called forth by the precepts and maledictions of Deuteronomy. The

people burst into tears, and so vehement were their manifestations of

despair, that all the efforts of Ezra and his colleagues were needed to

calm them. Ezra took advantage of this state of fervour to demand the

immediate application of the divine ordinances. And first of all, it was

“found written in the law, how that the Lord had commanded by Moses

that the children of Israel should dwell in booths.” For, seven days

Jerusalem was decked with leaves; tabernacles of olive, myrtle, and palm

branches rose up on all sides, on the roofs of houses, in courtyards,

in the courts of the temple, at the gates of the city. Then, on the 27th

day of the same month, the people put on mourning in order to confess

their own sins and the sins of their fathers. Finally, to crown the

whole, Ezra and his followers required the assembly to swear a solemn

oath that they would respect “the law of Moses,” and regulate their

conduct by it.* After the first enthusiasm was passed, a reaction

speedily set in. Many even among the priests thought that Ezra had gone

too far in forbidding marriage with strangers, and that the increase of

the tithes and sacrifices would lay too heavy a burden on the nation.

The Gentile women reappeared, the Sabbath was no longer observed either

by the Israelites or aliens; Eliashîb, son of the high priest Joiakim,

did not even deprive Tobiah the Ammonite of the chamber in the

temple which he had formerly prepared for him, and things were

almost imperceptibly drifting back into the same state as before the

reformation, when Nehemiah returned from Susa towards the close of the

reign of Artaxerxes. He lost no time in re-establishing respect for the

law, and from henceforward opposition, if it did not entirely die out,

ceased to manifest itself in Jerusalem.**

* Neh. viii., ix., with an interpolation in ver. 9 of chap,

viii., inserted in order to identify Nehemiah with the

representative of the Persian government.

** Neh. xiii.

Elsewhere, however, among the Samaritans, Indumæans, and Philistines, it

continued as keen as ever, and the Jews themselves were imprudent enough

to take part in the political revolutions that were happening around

them in their corner of the empire. Their traditions tell how they

were mixed up in the rising of the Phoenician cities against Ochus, and

suffered the penalty; when Sidon capitulated, they were punished with

the other rebels, the more recalcitrant among them being deported into

Hyrcania.

Assyria was nothing more than a name, Babylon and Phoenicia were growing

weaker every day; the Jews, absorbed in questions of religious ethics,

were deficient in material power, and had not as yet attained sufficient

moral authority to exercise an influence over the eastern world: the

Egypt indestructible had alone escaped the general shipwreck, and

seemed fated to survive her rivals for a long time. Of all these ancient

nations it was she who appealed most strongly to the imagination of the

Greeks: Greek traders, mercenaries, scholars, and even tourists wandered

freely within her borders, and accounts of the strange and marvellous

things to be found there were published far and wide in the writings

of Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and Hellanicus of

Lesbos. As a rule, they entered the country from the west, as European

tourists and merchants still do; but Eakôtis, the first port at which

they touched, was a mere village, and its rocky Pharos had no claim to

distinction beyond the fact that it had been mentioned by Homer.

From hence they followed the channel of the Canopic arm, and as

they gradually ascended, they had pointed out to them Anthylla,

Arkandrupolis, and Gyna> copolis, townships dependent on Naucratis,

lying along the banks, or situated some distance off on one of the minor

canals; then Naucratis itself, still a flourishing place, in spite

of the rebellions in the Delta and the suppressive measures of the

Persians. All this region seemed to them to be merely an extension of

Greece under the African sky: to their minds the real Egypt began at

Sais, a few miles further eastwards. Sais was full in memories of the

XXVIth dynasty; there they had pointed out to them the tombs of

the Pharaohs in the enclosure of Nit, the audience hall in which

Psammetichus II. received the deputation of the Eleians, the prison

where the unfortunate Apries had languished after his defeat. The

gateways of the temple of Nit seemed colossal to eyes accustomed to the

modest dimensions of most Greek sanctuaries; these were, moreover, the

first great monuments that the strangers had seen since they landed, and

the novelty of their appearance had a good deal to do with the keenness

of the impression produced. The goddess showed herself in hospitable

guise to the visitors; she welcomed them all, Greek or Persian, at her

festivals, and initiated them into several of her minor rites, without

demanding from them anything beyond tolerance on certain points of

doctrine.

[Illustration: 346.jpg FOUNTAIN AND SCHOOL OF THE MOTHER OF LITTLE

MOHAMAD]

Her dual attributes as wielder of the bow and shuttle had inspired the

Greeks with the belief that she was identical with that one of their own

goddesses who most nearly combined in her person this complex mingling

of war and industry: in her they Fountain and School of the Mother of

Little Mohammed worshipped the prototype of their own Pallas. On the

evening of the 17th day of Thoth, Herodotus saw the natives, rich and

poor, placing on the fronts of their dwellings large flat lamps filled

with a mixture of salt and oil which they kept alight all night in

honour of Osiris and of the dead.*

* In my opinion it is not the festivals of Athyr that are

here referred to, but those of the month of Thoth, when, as

the inscriptions show, it was the practice to _light the new

fire_, according to the ritual, after first extinguishing

the fire of the previous year, not only in the temple of the

god, but in all the houses of the city.

He made his way into the dwelling of the ineffable god, and there,

unobserved among the crowd, he witnessed scenes from the divine life

represented by the priests on the lake by the light of torches, episodes

of his passion, mourning, and resurrection. The priests did not disclose

their subtler mysteries before barbarian eyes, nor did they teach the

inner meaning of their dogmas, but the little they did allow him

to discern filled the traveller with respect and wonder, recalling

sometimes by their resemblance to them the mysteries in which he was

accustomed to take part in his own country. Then, as now, but little

attention was paid to the towns in the centre and east of the Delta;

travellers endeavoured to visit one or two of them as types, and

collected as much information as they could about the remainder.

Herodotus and his rivals attached little importance to those details of

landscape which possess so much attraction for the modern tourist. They

bestowed no more than a careless glance on the chapels scattered up and

down the country like the Mohammedan shrines at the present day, and the

waters extending on all sides beneath the acacias and palm trees during

the inundation, or the fellahin trotting along on their little asses

beside the pools, did not strike them as being of sufficient interest to

deserve passing mention in an account of their travels.

[Illustration: 348.jpg MODERN MOHAMMEDAN SHEKHS TOMBS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gautier.

They passed by the most picturesque villages with indifference, and

it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some

exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was

aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,*

and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the

veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants of

Atarbêkhis,** on the island of Prosopitis, gave themselves up to the

worship of the bull.

* Herodotus says that both the goats and the god were named

Mendes in Egyptian, but he is here confusing ordinary goats

with the special goat which was supposed to contain the soul

of Osiris. It was the latter that the Egyptians named after

the god himself, Baînibdîduît, i.e. _the soul of the master

of the city of Diduît_.

** The old explanation of this name as the _City of Hathor_

has been rightly rejected as inconsistent with one of the

elementary rules of hieroglyphic grammar. The name, when

properly divided into its three constituent parts, means

literally _the Castle of horus the Sparrow-hawk, or Hat-har-

baki_

When one of these animals died in the neighbourhood they buried it,

leaving one horn above the earth in order to mark the spot, and once

every year the boats of Atarbêkhis made a tour round the island to

collect the skeletons or decaying bodies, in order that they might be

interred in a common burying-place.

[Illustration: 349.jpg PART OF THE INUNDATION IN A PALM GROVE]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gautier.

The people of Busiris patronised a savage type of religion. During the

festival of Isis they gave themselves up to fierce conflicts, their

fanatical fury even infecting strangers who chanced to be present. The

Carians also had hit upon a means of outdoing the extravagance of the

natives themselves: like the Shiite Mohammedans of the present day

at the festival of the Hassanên, they slashed their faces with knives

amidst shrieks and yells. At Paprêmis a pitched battle formed part of

the religious observances: it took place, however, under certain special

conditions. On the evening of the festival of Anhurît, as the sun went

down, a number of priests performed a hasty sacrifice in the temple,

while the remainder of the local priesthood stationed themselves at

the gate armed with heavy cudgels. When the ceremony was over, the

celebrants placed the statue of the god on a four-wheeled car as though

about to take it away to some other locality, but their colleagues

at the gate opposed its departure and barred the way. It was at this

juncture that the faithful intervened; they burst in the door and set

upon the priests with staves, the latter offering a stout resistance.

The cudgels were heavy, the arms that wielded them lusty, and the fight

lasted a long time, yet no one was ever killed in the fray--at least,

so the priests averred--and I am at a loss to understand why Herodotus,

who was not a native of Paprêmis, should have been so unkind as to doubt

their testimony.*

* The god whom the Greeks identified with their Ares was

Anhurît, as is proved by one of the Leyden Papyri. So, too,

in modern times at Cairo, it used to be affirmed that no

Mohammedan who submitted to the dôseh was ever seriously

injured by the hoofs of the horse which trampled over the

bodies extended on the ground.

[Illustration: 350.jpg EPHEMERAL HOVELS OF CLAY OR DRIED BRICKS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Haussoullier.

It is nearly always in connection with some temple or religious festival

that he refers to the towns of the Delta, and, indeed, in most of the

minor cities of Egypt, just as in those of modern Italy there is little

to interest visitors except the religious monuments or ceremonies.

Herodotus went to Tanis or Mendes as we go to Orvieto or Loretto, to

admire the buildings or pay our devotions at a famous shrine. More

often than not the place was nothing in itself, consisting merely of a

fortified enclosure, a few commonplace houses occupied by the wealthy

inhabitants or by government officials, and on mounds of ancient

_debris_, the accumulation of centuries, a number of ephemeral hovels

built of clay, or dried bricks, divided into irregular blocks by winding

alleys. The whole local interest was centred in the sanctuary and its

inmates, human and divine. The traveller made his way in as best he

could, went into ecstasies over the objects that were shown to him, and

as soon as he had duly gone the rounds, set out for the next place on

his list, deeming himself lucky if he happened to arrive during one

of the annual fairs, such as that of Bubastis, for instance. Bands

of pilgrims flocked in from all parts of Egypt; the river craft were

overflowing with men and women, who converted the journey into one long

carnival. Every time the vessel put in to land, the women rushed on

shore, amid the din of castanets and flutes, and ran hither and thither

challenging the women of the place with abuse to dance against them with

uplifted garments. To the foreigners there was little to distinguish the

festival of Bastît from many other Egyptian ceremonies of the kind; it

consisted of a solemn procession, accompanied by the singing of hymns

and playing of harps, dancing and sacrifices, but for weeks before and

after it the town was transformed into one vast pleasure-ground. The

people of Bubastis took a certain pride in declaring that more wine was

drunk in it during a single day than during the rest of the whole year.

Butô enjoyed exceptional popularity among the Greeks in Egypt. Its

patron goddess, the Isis who took refuge amid the pools in a moving

thicket of reeds and lotus, in order that she might protect her son

Horus from the jealousy of Typhon, reminded them of the story of Latona

and the cycle of the Delian legends; they, visited her in crowds,

and her oracle became to most of them what that of Delos was to their

brethren in Europe. At Butô they found a great temple, similar to all

Egyptian temples, a shrine in which the statues of the goddess continued

her mysterious existence, and, in the midst of the sacred lake, the

little island of Khemmis, which was said to float hither and thither

upon the waters. Herodotus did not venture to deny this absolutely,

but states that he had never seen it change its position or even stir:

perhaps his incredulity may have been quickened by the fact that this

miracle had already been inquired into by Hecatasus of Miletus, an

author who was his pet aversion. The priests of Butô declared that their

prophets had foretold everything that had happened for a long time past,

and for each event they had a version which redounded to the credit of

their goddess: she had shown Pheron how he might recover his sight,

had foretold how long the reign of Mykerinos would last, had informed

Psammetichus that he would be saved by men of brass rising out of the

sea, and had revealed to Cambyses that he should die in a town named

Ecbatana. Her priests had taken an active part in the revolt of

Khabbîsha against Darius, and had lost a goodly portion of their

treasure and endowments for their pains. They still retained their

prestige, however, in spite of the underhand rivalry of the oracle

of Zeus Ammon. The notaries of the Libyan deity could bring forward

miracles even more marvellous than those credited to the Egyptian

Latona, and in the case of many of the revolutions which had taken place

on the banks of the Nile, a version of the legend in his honour was

circulated side by side with the legends of Butô. The latter city lay

on the very outskirts of one of those regions which excited the greatest

curiosity among travellers, the almost inaccessible Bucolicum, where,

it was said, no rebel ever failed to find a safe refuge from his alien

pursuers. The Egyptians of the marshes were a very courageous race,

but savage, poor, and ill fed. They drank nothing but beer, and obtained

their oil not from the olive, but from the castor-oil plant,* and having

no corn, lived on the seeds or roots of the lotus, or even on the stalks

of the papyrus, which they roasted or boiled.

* It seems, moreover, that this custom was not confined to

the Delta; Herodotus, in contrasting the custom of Bucolicum

with that of the rest of Egypt, was evidently thinking of

Sais, Memphis, and other great cities in which he had

resided, where foreign olive oil obtained from Greece or

Syria was generally used.

Fish was their staple article of food, and this they obtained in

considerable quantity from Lake Menzaleh, the lagoons along the coast,

and the canals or pools left by the inundation. But little was known

of their villages or monuments, and probably they were not worth the

trouble of a visit after those of the cities of the plain: endless

stories were told of feats of brigandage and of the mysterious

hiding-places which these localities offered to every outlaw, one of the

most celebrated being the isle of Elbô, where the blind Anysis defied

the power of Ethiopia for thirty years, and in which the first Amyrtasus

found refuge. With the exception of a few merchants or adventurers

who visited them with an eye to gain, most travellers coming from or

returning to Asia avoided their territory, and followed the military

road along the Pelusiac arm of the Nile from Pehisium to Daphno or Zalu,

and from Daphnæ or Zalu to Bubastis. A little below Kerkasoron, near

the apex of the Delta, the pyramids stood out on the horizon, looking

insignificant at first, but afterwards so lofty that, during the period

of inundation, when the whole valley, from the mountains of Arabia to

those of Libya, was nothing but one vast river, a vessel seemed to

sail in their shadow for a long time before it reached their base. The

traveller passed Heliopolis on his left with its temple of the Sun,

next the supposed sources of the Northern Nile, the quarries of the Red

Mountain, and then entering at length the Nile itself, after a journey

of some hours, came to anchor by the quays of Memphis.

To the Greeks of that time, Memphis was very much what Cairo is to

us, viz. the typical Oriental city, the quintessence and chief

representative of ancient Egypt. In spite of the disasters which had

overwhelmed it during the last few centuries, it was still a very

beautiful city, ranking with Babylon as one of the largest in the world.

Its religious festivals, especially those in honour of Apis, attracted

numberless pilgrims to it at certain seasons of the year, and hosts of

foreigners, recruited from every imaginable race of the old continent,

resorted to it for purposes of trade. Most of the nationalities who

frequented it had a special quarter, which was named after them; the

Phoenicians occupied the _Tyrian Camp_, the Greeks and Carians the

_Hellenic Wall and Carian Wall_, and there were Oaromemphites or

Hellenomemphites side by side with the native inhabitants. A Persian

garrison was stationed within the White Wall, ready to execute the

satrap’s orders in the event of rebellion, and could have held out for

a long time even after the rest of the country had fallen into the hands

of the insurgents. Animals which one would scarcely have expected

to find in the streets of a capital, such as cows, sheep, and goats,

wandered about unheeded in the most crowded thoroughfares; for the

common people, instead of living apart from their beasts, as the Greeks

did, stabled them in their own houses. Nor was this the only custom

which must have seemed strange in the eyes of a newly arrived visitor,

for the Egyptians might almost have been said to make a point of doing

everything differently from other nation’s. The baker, seen at the

kneading-trough inside his shop, worked the dough with his foot; on the

other hand, the mason used no trowel in applying his mortar, and the

poorer classes scraped up handfuls of mud mixed with dung when they had

occasion to repair the walls of their hovels. In Greece, even the very

poorest retired to their houses and ate with closed doors; the Egyptians

felt no repugnance at eating and drinking in the open air, declaring

that unbecoming and improper acts should be performed in secret, but

seemly acts in public. The first blind alley they came to, a recess

between two hovels, the doorstep of a house or temple, any of these

seemed to them a perfectly natural place to dine in. Their bill of

fare was not a sumptuous one. A sort of flat pancake somewhat bitter in

taste, and made--not of corn or barley--but of spelt, a little oil, an

onion or a leek, with an occasional scrap of meat or poultry, washed

down by a jug of beer or wine; there was nothing here to tempt the

foreigner, and, besides, it would not have been thought right for him

to invite himself. A Greek who lived on the flesh of the cow was looked

upon as unclean in the highest degree; no Egyptian would have thought of

using the same pot or knife with him, or of kissing him on the mouth by

way of greeting. Moreover, Egyptian etiquette did not tolerate the same

familiarities as the Greek: two friends on catching sight of one another

paused before they met, bowed, then clasped one another round the knees

or pretended to do so. Young people gave way to an old man, or, if

seated, rose to let him pass. The traveller recalled the fact that the

Spartans behaved in the same way, and approved this mark of deference;

but nothing in his home-life had prepared him for the sight of

respectable women coming and going as they pleased, without escort and

unveiled, carrying burdens on their shoulders (whereas the men carried

them on their heads), going to market, keeping stalls or shops, while

their husbands or fathers stayed comfortably at home, wove cloth,

kneaded the potter’s clay or turned the wheel, and worked at their

trades; no wonder that they were ready to believe that the man was the

slave, and the wife the mistress of the family. Some historians traced

the origin of these customs back to Osiris, others only as far as

Sesostris: Sesostris was the last resource of Greek historians when they

got into difficulties. The city was crowded with monuments; there was

the temple of the Phoenician Astarte, in which priests of Syrian descent

had celebrated the mysteries of the great goddess ever since the days

of the XVIIIth dynasty; then there was the temple of Râ, the temple of

Amon, the temple of Tamu, the temple of Bastît, and the temple of Isis.*

* This list is taken mainly from one of the mutilated

letters found on the back of the _Sallier Papyrus_. The

Phoenician Astarte, called a foreign Aphrodite by Herodotus,

was regarded by the Egyptians as a counterpart of Bastît,

lady of Onkhtoui.

The temple of Phtah, as yet intact, provided the visitor with a

spectacle scarcely less admirable than that offered by the temple of the

Theban Amon at Karnak. The kings had modified the original plan as each

thought best, one adding obelisks or colossal statues, another a pylon,

a third a pillared hall. Completed in this way by the labours of a score

of dynasties, it formed, as it were, a microcosm of Egyptian history, in

which each image, inscription and statue, aroused the attention of the

curious. They naturally desired to learn who were the strangely dressed

races shown struggling in a battle scene, the name of the king who had

conquered them, and the reasons which had led him to construct this or

that part of a monument, and there were plenty of busybodies ready to

satisfy, as far as they could, the curiosity of visitors. Interpreters

were at hand who bartered such information as they possessed, and

the modern traveller who has had occasion to employ the services of a

dragoman will have no difficulty in estimating the value of intelligence

thus hawked about in ancient times. Priests of the lower class,

doorkeepers and sacristans were trained to act as _ciceroni_, and knew

the main outlines of the history of the temple in which they lived.

Menés planned it, Moeris added the northern propylæ, Ehampsinitus those

on the west, Psammetichus the south, Asychis those on the east, the most

noteworthy of them all. A native of Memphis, born at the foot of the

pyramids, had been familiar with the names of Menés and Cheops from

childhood; he was consequently apt to attribute to them everything of

importance achieved by the Pharaohs of the old days. Menés had built the

temple, Menés had founded the city, Menés had created the soil on

which the city stood, and preserved it from floods by his dykes. The

thoughtful traveller would assent, for had he not himself observed the

action of the mud; a day’s journey from the coast one could not let down

a plummet without drawing it up covered with a blackish slime, a clear

proof that the Nile continued to gain upon the sea. Menés, at all

events, had really existed; but as to Asychis, Moris, Proteus, Pheron,

and most of the characters glibly enumerated by Herodotus, it would be

labour lost to search for their names among the inscriptions; they are

mere puppets of popular romance, some of their names, such as Pirâui or

Pruti, being nothing more than epithets employed by the story-tellers to

indicate in general terms the heroes of their tales. We can understand

how strangers, placed at the mercy of their dragoman, were misled by

this, and tempted to transform each title into a man, taking Pruti and

Pirâui to be Pharaoh Proteus and Pharaoh Pheron, each of them celebrated

for his fabulous exploits. The guides told Herodotus, and Herodotus

retails to us, as sober historical facts, the remedy employed by this

unhistorical Pheron in order to recover his sight; the adventures of

Paris and Helen at the court of Proteus,* and the droll tricks played by

a thief at the expense of the simple Ehampsinitus.

* Some dragomans identified the Helen of the Homeric legend

with the “foreign Aphrodite” who had a temple in the Tyrian

quarter at Memphis, and who was really a Semitic divinity.

[Illustration: 359.jpg THE STEP PYRAMID SEEN FROM THE GROVE OP PALM

TREES TO THE NORTH OF SAQQARAH]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Haussoullier.

The excursions made by the Greek traveller in the environs of Memphis

were very similar to those taken by modern visitors to Cairo: on the

opposite bank of the Nile there was Heliopolis with its temple of Râ,

then there were the quarries of Turah, which had been worked from time

immemorial, yet never exhausted, and from which the monuments he had

been admiring, and the very Pyramids themselves had been taken stone by

stone.*

* These are “the quarries in the Arabian Mountain,”

mentioned by Herodotus without indication of the local name.

The Sphinx probably lay hidden beneath the sand, and the nearest

Pyramids, those at Saqqarah, were held in small esteem by visitors;*

they were told as they passed by that the step Pyramid was the most

ancient of all, having been erected by Uenephes, one of the kings of the

first dynasty, and they asked no further questions.

* Herodotus does not mention it, nor does any other writer

of the Greek period.

Their whole curiosity was reserved for the three giants at Gizeh and

their inmates, Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos, and the fair Nitokris with

the rosy cheeks. Through all the country round, at Heliopolis, and even

in the Fayum itself, they heard the same names that had been dinned into

their ears at Memphis; the whole of the monuments were made to fit into

a single cycle of popular history, and what they learned at one place

completed, or seemed to complete, what they had learned at another.

I cannot tell whether many of them cared to stray much beyond Lake

Moris: the repressive measures of Ochus had, as it would appear,

interrupted for a time the regular trade which, ever since the Saite

kings of the XXVIth dynasty, had been carried on by the Greeks with the

Oases, by way of Abydos. A stranger who ventured as far as the Thebaid

would have found himself in the same plight as a European of the last

century who undertook to reach the first cataract. Their point

of departure--Memphis or Cairo--was very much the same; their

destinations--Elephantine and Assuan--differed but little. They employed

the same means of transport, for, excepting the cut of the sails, the

modern dahabeah is an exact counterpart of the pleasure and passenger

boats shown on the monuments. Lastly, they set out at the same time of

year, in November or December, after the floods had subsided. The same

length of time was required for the trip; it took a month to reach

Assuan from Cairo if the wind-were favourable, and if only such

stoppages were made as were strictly necessary for taking in fresh

provisions. Pococke, having left Cairo on the 6th of December, 1737,

about midday, was at Akhmîm by the 17th. He set sail again on the 18th,

stayed at Thebes from the 13th of January, 1738, till the 17th, and

finally moored at Assuan on the evening of January 20th, making in

all forty-five days, fourteen of which were spent at various

stopping-places. If the diary of a Greek excursionist or tourist had

come down to us, we should probably find in it entries of a very similar

kind.* The departure from Memphis would take place in November or

December; ten or twelve days later the traveller would find himself

at Panopolis;** from Panopolis to Elephantine, stopping at Coptos and

Thebes, would take about a month, allowing time for a stay at Thebes,

and returning to Memphis in February or March.

* Herodotus fixes twenty days for the voyage from Sais to

Elephantine. This period of time must be probably correct,

since at the present day dahabeahs constantly run from Cairo

to the second cataract and back in two months, including

stoppages of ten days to a fortnight for seeing the

monuments. The twenty days of Herodotus represent the

minimum duration of the voyage, without taking into account

the stoppages and accidents which often delay sailing

vessels on the Nile. Nine days, which Herodotus gives as the

time for reaching Thebes, is not sufficient, if the voyage

is undertaken in the usual way, stopping every evening for

the night; but it would be possible if the navigation were

uninterrupted day and night. This is now rarely done, but it

might have been frequent in ancient times, especially in the

service of the State.

** It would seem clear that Herodotus stopped at Panopolis

and had communications with the people of the town.

[Panopolis or Khemmis is the present Ekhmîm.--Tr.]

[Illustration: 362a.jpg LONG STRINGS OF LADEN VESSELS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gautier.

The greater part of the time was employed in getting from one point to

another, and the necessity of taking advantage of a favourable wind in

going up the river, often obliged the travellers to neglect more than

one interesting locality.

[Illustration: 302b.jpg THE VAST SHEET OF WATER IN THE MIDDAY HEAT]

The Greek was not so keenly alive to the picturesqueness of the scenes

through which he passed as the modern visitor, and in the account of

his travels he took no note of the long lines of laden boats going up or

down stream, nor of the vast sheet of water glowing in the midday sun,

nor of the mountains honeycombed with tombs and quarries, at the foot of

which he would be sailing day after day. What interested him above all

things was information with regard to the sources of the immense river

itself, and the reasons for its periodic inundation, and, according to

the mental attitude impressed on him by his education, he accepted the

mythological solution offered by the natives, or he sought for a more

natural one in the physical lore of his own _savants_: thus he was told

that the Nile took its rise at Elephantine, between the two rocks called

Krôphi and Môphi, and in showing them to him his informant would add

that Psammetichus I. had attempted to sound the depth of the river at

this point, but had failed to fathom it. At the few places where the

pilot of the barque put in to port, the population showed themselves

unfriendly, and refused to hold any communication with the Greeks.

[Illustration: 363.jpg the mountains honeycombed with tombs AND

Quarries]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gautier.

The interpreters, who were almost all natives of the Delta, were not

always familiar with the people and customs of the Said, and felt almost

as completely foreign at Thebes as did their employers. Their office

was confined to translating the information furnished by the inhabitants

when the latter were sufficiently civilised to hold communication with

the travellers. What most astonished Herodotus at Panopolis was the

temple and the games held in honour, so he believed, of Perseus, the son

of Danaë. These exercises terminated in an attempt to climb a regular

“greasy pole” fixed in the ground, and strengthened right and left by

three rows of stays attached to the mast at different heights; as for

Perseus, he was the ithyphallic god of the locality, Mînu himself, one

of whose epithets--Pehresu, the runner--was confounded by the Greek ear

with the name of the hero. The dragomans, enlarging on this mistaken

identity, imagined that the town was the birthplace of Danaos and

Lyncseus; that Perseus, returning from Libya with the head of Medusa,

had gone out of his way to visit the cradle of his family, and that he

had instituted the games in remembrance of his stay there. Thebes had

become the ghost of its former self; the Persian governors had neglected

the city, and its princesses and their ministers were so impoverished

that they were unable to keep up its temples and palaces. Herodotus

scarcely mentions it, and we can hardly wonder at it: he had visited

the still flourishing Memphis, where the temples were cared for and

were filled with worshippers. What had Thebes to show him in the way of

marvels which he had not already seen, and that, too, in a better state

of preservation? His Theban ciceroni also told him the same stories that

he had heard in Lower Egypt, and he states that their information agreed

in the main with that which he had received at Memphis and Heliopolis,

which made it unnecessary to repeat it at length. Two or three things

only appeared to him worthy of mention. His admiration was first roused

by the 360 statues of the high priests of Amon which had already excited

the wonder of his rival Hecataeus; he noted that all these personages

were, without exception, represented as mere men, each the son of

another man, and he took the opportunity of ridiculing the vanity of his

compatriots, who did not hesitate to inscribe the name of a god at the

head of their genealogies, removed by some score of generations only

from their own. On the other hand, the temple servitors related to him

how two Theban priestesses, carried off by the Phoenicians and sold, one

in Libya and the other in Greece, had set up the first oracles known

in those two countries: Herodotus thereupon remembered the story he had

heard in Epirus of two black doves which had flown away from Thebes, one

towards the Oasis of Ammon, the other in the direction of Dodona; the

latter had alighted on an old beech tree, and in a human voice had

requested that a temple consecrated to Zeus should be founded on the

spot.*

* This indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian

dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and

Nephthys, considered as _Zarait_, that is to say, as two

birds of a different species, according to the different

traditions either vultures, rooks, or doves.

Herodotus is quite overcome with joy at the thought that Greek

divination could thus be directly traced to that of Egypt, for like most

of his contemporaries, he felt that the Hellenic cult was ennobled by

the fact of its being derived from the Egyptian. The traveller on the

Nile had to turn homewards on reaching Elephantine, as that was the

station of the last Persian garrison. Nubia lay immediately beyond the

cataract, and the Ethiopians at times crossed the frontier and carried

their raids as far as Thebes. Elephantine, like Assuan at the present

day, was the centre of a flourishing trade. Here might be seen

Kushites from Napata or Meroë, negroes from the Upper Nile and the Bahr

el-Ghazal, and Ammonians, from all of whom the curious visitor might

glean information while frequenting the bazaars. The cataract was

navigable all the year round, and the natives in its vicinity enjoyed

the privilege of piloting freight boats through its difficult channel.

It took four days to pass through it, instead of the three, or even

two, which suffice at the present day. Above it, the Nile spread out

and resembled a lake dotted over with islands, several of which, such

as Phike and Biggeh, contained celebrated temples, which were as much

frequented by the Ethiopians as by the Egyptians.

Correctly speaking, it was not Egypt herself that the Greeks saw,

but her external artistic aspect and the outward setting of Egyptian

civilisation. The vastness of her monuments, the splendour of her tombs,

the pomp of her ceremonies, the dignity and variety of her religious

formulas, attracted their curiosity and commanded their respect: the

wisdom of the Egyptians had passed into a proverb with them, as it had

with the Hebrews. But if they had penetrated behind the scenes, they

would have been obliged to acknowledge that beneath this attractive

exterior there was hopeless decay. As with all creatures when they have

passed their prime, Egypt had begun to grow old, and was daily losing

her elasticity and energy. Her spirit had sunk into a torpor, she

had become unresponsive to her environment, and could no longer adapt

herself to the form she had so easily acquired in her youth: it was as

much as she could do to occupy fully the narrower limits to which she

had been reduced, and to maintain those limits unbroken. The instinct

which made her shrink from the intrusion of foreign customs and ideas,

or even mere contact with nations of recent growth, was not the mere

outcome of vanity. She realised that she maintained her integrity only

by relying on the residue of her former solidarity and on the force of

custom. The slightest disturbance of the equilibrium established among

her members, instead of strengthening her, would have robbed her of the

vigour she still possessed, and brought about her dissolution.

[Illustration: 367.jpg DARIUS III.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coin in the Cabinet des

Médailles.

She owed whatever activity she possessed to impulses imparted to her by

the play of her ancient mechanism--a mechanism so stable in its action,

and so ingeniously constructed, that it had still a reserve of power

within it sufficient to keep the whole in motion for centuries, provided

there was no attempt to introduce new wheels among the old. She had

never been singularly distinguished for her military qualities; not that

she was cowardly, and shrank from facing death, but because she lacked

energy and enthusiasm for warlike enterprise. The tactics and armaments

by which she had won her victories up to her prime, had at length become

fetters which she was no longer inclined to shake off, and even if she

was still able to breed a military caste, she was no longer able to

produce armies fit to win battles without the aid of mercenaries. In

order to be successful in the field, she had to associate with her own

troops recruits from other countries--Libyans, Asiatics, and Greeks, who

served to turn the scale. The Egyptians themselves formed a compact body

in this case, and bearing down upon the enemy already engaged by the

mercenaries, broke through his ranks by their sheer weight, or, if they

could not accomplish this, they stood their ground bravely, taking to

flight only when the vacancies in their ranks showed them that further

resistance was impossible. The machinery of government, like the

organisation of their armies, had become antiquated and degenerate.

[Illustration: 368.jpg AN ELEPHANT ARMED FOR WAR]

Drawn by Boudier, from a little terra-cotta group from

Myrrhina now in the Louvre. This object dates from the time

of the kings of Pergamos, and the soldier round whom the

elephant winds his trunk in order to dash him to the ground

is a Gaul of Asia Minor.

The nobility were as turbulent as in former times, and the royal

authority was as powerless now as of old to assert itself in the absence

of external help, or when treason was afoot among the troops. Religion

alone maintained its ascendency, and began to assume to itself

the loyalty once given to the Pharaoh, and the devotion previously

consecrated to the fatherland. The fellahîn had never fully realised the

degradation involved in serving a stranger, and what they detested in

the Persian king was not exactly the fact that he was a Persian. Their

national pride, indeed, always prompted them to devise some means

of connecting the foreign monarch with their own solar line, and to

transform an Achæmenian king into a legitimate Pharaoh. That which was

especially odious to them in a Cambyses or an Ochus was the disdain

which such sovereigns displayed for their religion, and the persecution

to which they subjected the immortals. They accustomed themselves

without serious repining to have no longer one of their own race upon

the throne, and to behold their cities administered by Asiatics, but

they could not understand why the foreigner preferred his own gods,

and would not admit Amon, Phtah, Horus, and Râ to the rank of supreme

deities. Ochus had, by his treatment of the Apis and the other divine

animals, put it out of his power ever to win their good will. His

brutality had made an irreconcilable enemy of that state which alone

gave signs of vitality among the nations of the decaying East. This was

all the more to be regretted, since the Persian empire, in spite of the

accession of power which it had just manifested, was far from having

regained the energy which had animated it, not perhaps in the time

of Darius, but at all events under the first Xerxes. The army and the

wealth of the country were doubtless still intact--an army and a revenue

which, in spite of all losses, were still the largest in the world--but

the valour of the troops was not proportionate to their number. The

former prowess of the Persians, Medians, Bactrians, and other tribes of

Iran showed no degeneracy: these nations still produced the same race

of brave and hardy foot-soldiers, the same active and intrepid horsemen;

but for a century past there had not been the improvements either in

the armament of the troops or in the tactics of the generals which were

necessary to bring them up to the standard of excellence of the Greek

army. The Persian king placed great faith in extraordinary military

machines. He believed in the efficacy of chariots armed with scythes;

besides this, his relations with India had shown him what use his

Oriental neighbours made of elephants, and having determined to employ

these animals, he had collected a whole corps of them, from which he.

hoped great things. In spite of the addition of these novel recruits, it

was not on the Asiatic contingents that he chiefly relied in the event

of war, but on the mercenaries who’ were hired at great expense, and who

formed the chief support of his power. From the time of Artaxerxes II.

onwards, it was the Greek hoplites and peltasts who had always decided

the issue of the Persian battles. The expeditions both by land and

sea had been under the conduct of Athenian or Spartan generals--Conon,

Chabrias, Iphi-crates, Agesilas, Timotheus, and their pupils; and again

also it was to the Greeks--to the Rhodian Mentor and to, Memnon--that

Ochus had owed his successes. The older nations--Egypt, Syria, Chaldæa,

and Elam--had all had their day of supremacy; they had declined in the

course of centuries, and Assyria had for a short time united them under

her rule. On the downfall of Assyria, the Iranians had succeeded to

her heritage, and they had built up a single empire comprising all the

states which had preceded them in Western Asia; but decadence had fallen

upon them also, and when they had been masters for scarcely two short

centuries, they were in their turn threatened with destruction. Their

rule continued to be universal, not by reason of its inherent vigour,

but on account of the weakness of their subjects and neighbours, and a

determined attack on any of the frontiers of the empire would doubtless

have resulted in its overthrow.

Greece herself was too demoralised to cause Darius any grave anxiety.

Not only had she renounced all intention of attacking the great king in

his own domain, as in the days of the Athenian hegemony, when she could

impose her own conditions of peace, but her perpetual discords had

yielded her an easy prey to Persia, and were likely to do so more and

more. The Greek cities chose the great king as the arbiter in their

quarrels; they vied with each other in obtaining his good will, his

subsidies in men and vessels, and his darics: they armed or disarmed at

his command, and the day seemed at hand when they would become a normal

dependency of Persia, little short of a regular satrapy like Asiatic

Hellas. One chance of escape from such a fate remained to them--if one

or other of them, or some neighbouring state, could acquire such an

ascendency as to make it possible to unite what forces remained to them

under one rule. Macedonia in particular, having hitherto kept aloof from

the general stream of politics, had at this juncture begun to shake

off its lethargy, and had entered with energy into the Hellenic concert

under the auspices of its king, Philip. Bagoas recognised the danger

which threatened his people in the person of this ambitious sovereign,

and did not hesitate to give substantial support to the adversaries of

the Macedonian prince; Chersobleptes of Thrace and the town of Perinthus

receiving from him such succour as enabled them to repulse Philip

successfully (340). Unfortunately, while Bagoas was endeavouring

to avert danger in this quarter, his rivals at court endeavoured to

prejudice the mind of the king against him, and their intrigues were so

successful that he found himself ere long condemned to the alternative

of murdering his sovereign or perishing himself. He therefore poisoned

Ochus, to avoid being assassinated or put to the torture, and placed on

the throne Arses, the youngest of the king’s sons, while he caused the

remaining royal children to be put to death (336).* Egypt hailed

this tragic end as a mark of the vengeance of the gods whom Ochus had

outraged. A report was spread that the eunuch was an Egyptian, that he

had taken part in the murder of the Apis under fear of death, but that

when he was sure of his own safety he had avenged the sacrilege. As soon

as the poison had taken effect, it was said he ate a portion of the dead

body and threw the remainder to the cats: he then collected the bones

and made them into whistles and knife-handles.**

* Plutarch calls the successor of Ochus Oarses, which

recalls the name which Dinon gives to Artaxerxes II.

Diodorus says that Bagoas destroyed the whole family of

Ochus, but he is mistaken. Arrian mentions a son of Ochus

about 330, and several other members of the royal Achæmenian

race are known to have been living in the time of Alexander.

** The body of the enemy thrown to the cats to be devoured

is a detail added by the popular imagination, which crops up

again in the Tale of Satni Khâmois.

Ochus had astonished his contemporaries by the rapidity with which he

had re-established the integrity of the empire; they were pleased to

compare him with the heroes of his race, with Cyrus, Cambyses, and

Darius. But to exalt him to such a level said little for their moral or

intellectual perceptions, since in spite of his victories he was merely

a despot of the ordinary type; his tenacity degenerated into brutal

obstinacy, his severity into cruelty, and if he obtained successes,

they were due rather to his generals and his ministers than to his own

ability. His son Arses was at first content to be a docile instrument

in the hands of Bagoas; but when the desire for independence came to him

with the habitual exercise of power, and he began to chafe at his bonds,

the eunuch sacrificed him to his own personal safety, and took his life

as he had done that of his father in the preceding year (336). So

many murders following each other in rapid succession had considerably

reduced the Achsemenian family, and Bagoas for a moment was puzzled

where to find a king: he at length decided in favour of Codomannos, who

according to some was a great-grandson of Darius II., but according to

others was not of the royal line, but had in his youth been employed as

a courier. He had distinguished himself in the hostilities against the

Casduians, and had been nominated satrap of Armenia by Ochus as a reward

for his bravery. He assumed at his accession the name of Darius; brave,

generous, clement, and possessed with an ardent desire to do right,

he was in every way the superior of his immediate predecessors, and he

deserved to have reigned at a time when the empire was less threatened.

Bagoas soon perceived that his new protégé, whose conduct he had

reckoned on directing as he pleased, intended to govern for himself, and

he therefore attempted to get rid of him; Bagoas was, however, betrayed

by his accomplices, and compelled to drink the poison which he had

prepared for Darius. These revolutions had distracted the attention of

the court of Susa from the events which were taking place on the shores

of the Ægean, and Philip had taken advantage of them to carry into

effect the designs against Persia which he had been long meditating.

After having been victorious against the Greeks, he had despatched an

army of ten thousand men into Asia under the command of Parmenion and

Attains (336). We may ask if it were not he who formed the project of

universal conquest which was so soon to be associated with the name of

his son Alexander. He was for the moment content to excite revolt among

the cities of the Ægean littoral, and restore to them that liberty of

which they had been deprived for nearly a century. He himself followed

as soon as these lost children of Greece had established themselves

firmly in Asia. The story of his assassination on the eve of his

departure is well known (336), and of the difficulties which compelled

Alexander to suspend the execution of the plans which his father had

made. Darius attempted to make use of the respite thus afforded him by

fortune; he adopted the usual policy of liberally bribing one part of

Greece to take up arms against Macedonia--a method which was at first

successful. While Alexander was occupied in the destruction of Thebes,

the Rhodian general Memnon, to whom had been entrusted the defence of

Asia Minor, forced the invaders to entrench themselves in the Troad. If

the Persian fleet had made its appearance in good time, and had kept

an active watch over the straits, the advance-guard of the Macedonians

would have succumbed to the enemy before the main body of the troops

had succeeded in joining them in Asia, and it was easy to foretell

what would have been the fate of an enterprise inaugurated by such

a disaster. Persia, however, had not yet learnt to seize the crucial

moment for action: her vessels were still arming when the enemy made

their appearance on the European shore of Hellespont, and Alexander had

ample time to embark and disembark the whole of his army without having

to draw his sword from the scabbard. He was accompanied by about thirty

thousand foot soldiers and four thousand five hundred horse; the finest

troops commanded by the best generals of the time--Parmenion, his two

sons Nikanor and Philotas, Crater, Clitos, Antigonus, and others

whose names are familiar to us all; a larger force than Memnon and his

subordinates were able to bring up to oppose him, at all events at

the opening of the campaign, during the preliminary operations which

determined the success of the enterprise.

The first years of the campaign seem like a review of the countries

and nations which in bygone times had played the chief part in Oriental

history. An engagement at the fords of the Granicus, only a few days

after the crossing of the Hellespont, placed Asia Minor at the mercy

of the invader (334). Mysia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia tendered their

submission, Miletus and Halicarnassus being the only towns to offer any

resistance. In the spring of 333, Phrygia followed the general movement,

in company with Cappadocia and Cilicia; these represented the Hittite

and Asianic world, the last representatives of which thus escaped from

the influences of the East and passed under the Hellenic supremacy.

[Illustration: 376.jpg THE BATTLEFIELD OF ISSUS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Lortet.

At the foot of the Amanus, Alexander came into conflict not only with

the generals of Darius, but with the great king himself. The Amanus, and

the part of the Taurus which borders on the Euphrates valley, had always

constituted the line of demarcation between the domain of the races of

the Asianic peninsula and that of the Semitic peoples.

[Illustration: 377.jpg A BAS-RELIEF ON A SIDONIAN SARCOPHAGUS]

A second battle near the Issus, at the entrance to the Cilician gates,

cleared the ground, and gave the conqueror time to receive the homage of

the maritime provinces. Both Northern and Coele-Syria submitted to him

from Samosata to Damascus.

[Illustration: 379.jpg THE ISTHMUS OF TYRE AT THE PRESENT DAY]

Drawn by Boudier, from a sketch by Lortet.

The less important towns of Phonicia, such as Arvad, Byblos, Sidon, and

those of Cyprus, followed their example; but Tyre closed its gates,

and trusted to its insular position for the preservation of its

independence, as it had done of old in the time of Sennacherib and of

Nebuchadrezzar. It was not so much a scrupulous feeling of loyalty which

emboldened her to take this step, as a keen realisation of what her

conquest by the Macedonian would entail. It was entirely-owing to Persia

that she had not succumbed in all parts of the Eastern Mediterranean in

that struggle with Greece which had now lasted for centuries: Persia had

not only arrested the progress of Hellenic colonisation in Cyprus, but

had given a fresh impulse to that of Tyre, and Phoenician influence

had regained its ascendency over a considerable part of the island. The

surrender of Tyre, therefore, would be equivalent to a Greek victory,

and would bring about the decay of the city; hence its inhabitants

preferred hostilities, and they were prolonged in desperation over a

period of seven months. At the end of that time Alexander succeeded in

reducing the place by constructing a dyke or causeway, by means of

which he brought his machines of war up to the foot of the ramparts, and

filled in the channel which separated the town from the mainland; the

island thus became a peninsula, and Tyre henceforth was reduced to

the rank of an ordinary town, still able to maintain her commercial

activity, but having lost her power as an independent state (332).

Phoenicia being thus brought into subjection, Judæa and Samaria yielded

to the conqueror without striking a blow, though the fortress of Gaza

followed the example set by Tyre, and for the space of two months

blocked the way to the Delta. Egypt revolted at the approach of her

liberator, and the rising was so unanimous as to dismay the satrap

Mazakes, who capitulated at the first summons. Alexander passed the

winter on the banks of the Nile. Finding that the ancient capitals of

the country--Thebes, Sais, and even Memphis itself--occupied positions

which were no longer suited to the exigencies of the times, he founded

opposite to the island of Pharos, in the township of Eakotis, a city

to which he gave his own name. The rapid growth of the prosperity of

Alexandria showed how happy the founder had been in the choice of its

site: in less than half a century from the date of its foundation, it

had eclipsed all the other capitals of the Eastern Mediterranean, and

had become the centre of African Hellenism. While its construction

was in progress, Alexander, having had opportunities of studying the

peculiarities and characteristics of the Egyptians, had decided to

perform the one act which would conciliate the good feeling of the

natives, and secure for him their fidelity during his wars in the East:

he selected from among their gods the one who was also revered by the

Greeks, Zeus-Amnion, and repaired to the Oasis that he might be adopted

by the deity. As a son of the god, he became a legitimate Pharaoh,

an Egyptian like themselves, and on returning to Memphis he no longer

hesitated to adopt the _pschent_ crown with the accompanying ancient

rites. He returned to Asia early in the year 331, and crossed the

Euphrates. Darius had attempted to wrest Asia Minor from his grasp, but

Antigonus, the governor of Phrygia, had dispersed the troops despatched

for this purpose in 332, and Alexander was able to push forward

fearlessly into those regions beyond the Euphrates, where the Ten

Thousand had pursued their victorious march before him. He crossed the

Tigris about the 20th of September, and a week later fell in with

his rival in the very heart of Assyria, not far from, the village

of Gaugamela, where he took up a position which had been previously

studied, and was particularly suited for the evolutions of cavalry.

[Illustration: 382.jpg THE BATTLE OF ARBELA, FROM THE MOSAIC OF

HERCULANUM]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.

At the Granicus and near Issus, the Greek element had played an

important part among the forces which contested the field; on this

occasion, however, the great king was accompanied by merely two or three

thousand mercenaries, while, on the other hand, the whole of Asia seemed

to have roused herself for a last effort, and brought forward her most

valiant troops to oppose the disciplined ranks of the Macedonians.

Persians, Susians, Medes, Armenians, Iranians from Bactriana, Sakae, and

Indians were all in readiness to do their best, and were accompanied

by every instrument of military warfare employed in Oriental tactics;

chariots armed with scythes, the last descendants of the chariotry which

had dominated all the battle-fields from the time of the XVIIIth Theban

dynasty down to the latest Sargonids, and, employed side by side with

these relics of a bygone day, were Indian elephants, now for the first

time brought into use against European battalions. These picked troops

sold their lives dearly, but the perfection of the Macedonian arms, and,

above all, the superiority of the tactics employed by their generals,

carried the day; the evening of the 30th of September found Darius in

flight, and the Achæmenian empire crushed by the furious charges of

Alexander’s squadrons. Babylon fell into their hands a few days later,

followed by Susa, and in the spring of 330, Ecbatana; and shortly after

Darius met his end on the way to Media, assassinated by the last of his

generals.

With his death, Persia sank back into the obscurity from which Cyrus had

raised her rather more than two centuries previously. With the exception

of the Medes, none of the nations which had exercised the hegemony of

the East before her time, not even Assyria, had had at their disposal

such a wealth of resources and had left behind them so few traces of

their power. A dozen or so of palaces, as many tombs, a few scattered

altars and stelæ, remains of epics preserved by the Greeks, fragments of

religious books, often remodelled, and issuing in the Avesta--when

we have reckoned up all that remains to us of her, what do we find

to compare in interest and in extent with the monuments and wealth of

writings bequeathed to us by Egypt and Chaldæa? The Iranians received

Oriental civilisation at a time when the latter was in its decline, and

caught the spirit of decadence in their contact with it. In succeeding

to the patrimony of the nations they conquered, they also inherited

their weakness; in a few years they had lost all the vigour of their

youth, and were barely able to maintain the integrity of the empire

they had founded. Moreover, the great peoples to whom they succeeded,

although lacking the vigour necessary for the continuance of their

independent existence, had not yet sunk so low as to acquiesce in their

own decay, and resign themselves to allowing their national life to be

absorbed is that of another power: they believed that they would emerge

from the crisis, as they had done from so many others, with fresh

strength, and, as soon as an occasion presented itself, they renewed the

war against their Iranian suzerain. Prom, the first to the latest of the

sovereigns bearing the name of Darius, the history of the Achæmenids in

an almost uninterrupted series of internal wars and provincial revolts.

The Greeks of Ionia, the Egyptians, Chaldæans, Syrians, and the tribes

of Asia Minor, all rose one after another, sometimes alone, sometimes

in concert; some carrying on hostilities for not more than two or

three years; others, like Egypt, maintaining them for more than half a

century. They were not discouraged by the reprisals which followed each

of these rebellions; they again had recourse to arms as soon as there

seemed the least chance of success, and they renewed the struggle till

from sheer exhaustion the sword fell from their hand. Persia was worn

out by this perpetual warfare, in which at the same time each of her

rivals expended the last relics of their vitality, and when Macedonia

entered on the scene, both lords and vassals were reduced to such a

state of prostration, that it was easy to foretell their approaching

end. The old Oriental world was in its death-throes; but before it

passed away, the successful audacity of Alexander had summoned Greece to

succeed to its inheritance.