The title of this book needs a word of explanation, since each of its terms can legitimately be used to denote more than one conception both of time and place. "The East" is understood widely and vaguely nowadays to include all the continent and islands of Asia, some part of Africa--the northern part where society and conditions of life are most like the Asiatic--and some regions also of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. Therefore it may appear arbitrary to restrict it in the present book to Western Asia. But the qualifying term in my title must be invoked in justification. It is the East not of to-day but of antiquity with which I have to deal, and, therefore, I plead that it is not unreasonable to understand by "The East" what in antiquity European historians understood by that term. To Herodotus and his contemporary Greeks Egypt, Arabia and India were the South; Thrace and Scythia were the North; and Hither Asia was the East: for they conceived nothing beyond except the fabled stream of Ocean. It can be pleaded also that my restriction, while not in itself arbitrary, does, in fact, obviate an otherwise inevitable obligation to fix arbitrary bounds to the East. For the term, as used in modern times, implies a geographical area characterized by society of a certain general type, and according to his opinion of this type, each person, who thinks or writes of the East, expands or contracts its geographical area.

It is more difficult to justify the restriction which will be imposed in the following chapters on the word Ancient. This term is used even more vaguely and variously than the other. If generally it connotes the converse of "Modern," in some connections and particularly in the study of history the Modern is not usually understood to begin where the Ancient ended but to stand only for the comparatively Recent. For example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. At the same time it is not implied that we can have no knowledge at all of the Prehistoric province. It may even be better known to us than parts of the Historic, through sure deduction from archaeological evidence. But what we learn from archaeological records is annalistic not historic, since such records have not passed through the transforming crucible of a human intelligence which reasons on events as effects of causes. The boundary between Prehistoric and Historic, however, depends too much on the subjectivity of individual historians and is too apt to vary with the progress of research to be a fixed moment. Nor can it be the same for all civilizations. As regards Egypt, for example, we have a body of literary tradition which can reasonably be called Historic, relating to a time much earlier than is reached by respectable literary tradition of Elam and Babylonia, though their civilizations were probably older than the Egyptian.

For the Ancient East as here understood, we possess two bodies of historic literary tradition and two only, the Greek and the Hebrew; and as it happens, both (though each is independent of the other) lose consistency and credibility when they deal with history before 1000 B.C. Moreover, Prof. Myres has covered the prehistoric period in the East in his brilliant Dawn of History. Therefore, on all accounts, in treating of the historic period, I am absolved from looking back more than a thousand years before our era. It is not so obvious where I may stop. The overthrow of Persia by Alexander, consummating a long stage in a secular contest, which it is my main business to describe, marks an epoch more sharply than any other single event in the history of the Ancient East. But there are grave objections to breaking off abruptly at that date. The reader can hardly close a book which ends then, with any other impression than that since the Greek has put the East under his feet, the history of the centuries, which have still to elapse before Rome shall take over Asia, will simply be Greek history writ large--the history of a Greater Greece which has expanded over the ancient East and caused it to lose its distinction from the ancient West. Yet this impression does not by any means coincide with historical truth. The Macedonian conquest of Hither Asia was a victory won by men of Greek civilization, but only to a very partial extent a victory of that civilization. The West did not assimilate the East except in very small measure then, and has not assimilated it in any very large measure to this day. For certain reasons, among which some geographical facts--the large proportion of steppe-desert and of the human type which such country breeds--are perhaps the most powerful, the East is obstinately unreceptive of western influences, and more than once it has taken its captors captive. Therefore, while, for the sake of convenience and to avoid entanglement in the very ill-known maze of what is called "Hellenistic" history, I shall not attempt to follow the consecutive course of events after 330 B.C., I propose to add an epilogue which may prepare readers for what was destined to come out of Western Asia after the Christian era, and enable them to understand in particular the religious conquest of the West by the East. This has been a more momentous fact in the history of the world than any political conquest of the East by the West.

In the further hope of enabling readers to retain a clear idea of the evolution of the history, I have adopted the plan of looking out over the area which is here called the East, at certain intervals, rather than the alternative and more usual plan of considering events consecutively in each several part of that area. Thus, without repetition and overlapping, one may expect to convey a sense of the history of the whole East as the sum of the histories of particular parts. The occasions on which the surveys will be taken are purely arbitrary chronological points two centuries apart. The years 1000, 800, 600, 400 B.C. are not, any of them, distinguished by known events of the kind that is called epoch-making; nor have round numbers been chosen for any peculiar historic significance. They might just as well have been 1001, 801 and so forth, or any other dates divided by equal intervals. Least of all is any mysterious virtue to be attached to the millenary date with which I begin. But it is a convenient starting-point, not only for the reason already stated, that Greek literary memory--the only literary memory of antiquity worth anything for early history--goes back to about that date; but also because the year 1000 B.C. falls within a period of disturbance during which certain racial elements and groups, destined to exert predominant influence on subsequent history, were settling down into their historic homes.

A westward and southward movement of peoples, caused by some obscure pressure from the north-west and north-east, which had been disturbing eastern and central Asia Minor for more than a century and apparently had brought to an end the supremacy of the Cappadocian Hatti, was quieting down, leaving the western peninsula broken up into small principalities. Indirectly the same movement had brought about a like result in northern Syria. A still more important movement of Iranian peoples from the farther East had ended in the coalescence of two considerable social groups, each containing the germs of higher development, on the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the old Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian. A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic East much behind 1000 B.C.--that nothing like a sure chronological basis of it exists before that date. Precision in the dating of events in West Asia begins near the end of the tenth century with the Assyrian Eponym lists, that is, lists of annual chief officials; while for Babylonia there is no certain chronology till nearly two hundred years later. In Hebrew history sure chronological ground is not reached till the Assyrian records themselves begin to touch upon it during the reign of Ahab over Israel. For all the other social groups and states of Western Asia we have to depend on more or less loose and inferential synchronisms with Assyrian, Babylonian or Hebrew chronology, except for some rare events whose dates may be inferred from the alien histories of Egypt and Greece.

The area, whose social state we shall survey in 1000 B.C. and re-survey at intervals, contains Western Asia bounded eastwards by an imaginary line drawn from the head of the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. This line, however, is not to be drawn rigidly straight, but rather should describe a shallow outward curve, so as to include in the Ancient East all Asia situated on this side of the salt deserts of central Persia. This area is marked off by seas on three sides and by desert on the fourth side. Internally it is distinguished into some six divisions either by unusually strong geographical boundaries or by large differences of geographical character. These divisions are as follows--

(1) A western peninsular projection, bounded by seas on three sides and divided from the rest of the continent by high and very broad mountain masses, which has been named, not inappropriately, Asia Minor, since it displays, in many respects, an epitome of the general characteristics of the continent. (2) A tangled mountainous region filling almost all the rest of the northern part of the area and sharply distinct in character not only from the plateau land of Asia Minor to the west but also from the great plain lands of steppe character lying to the south, north and east. This has perhaps never had a single name, though the bulk of it has been included in "Urartu" (Ararat), "Armenia" or "Kurdistan" at various epochs; but for convenience we shall call it Armenia. (3) A narrow belt running south from both the former divisions and distinguished from them by much lower general elevation. Bounded on the west by the sea and on the south and east by broad tracts of desert, it has, since Greek times at least, been generally known as Syria. (4) A great southern peninsula largely desert, lying high and fringed by sands on the land side, which has been called, ever since antiquity, Arabia. (5) A broad tract stretching into the continent between Armenia and Arabia and containing the middle and lower basins of the twin rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, which, rising in Armenia, drain the greater part of the whole area. It is of diversified surface, ranging from sheer desert in the west and centre, to great fertility in its eastern parts; but, until it begins to rise northward towards the frontier of "Armenia" and eastward towards that of the sixth division, about to be described, it maintains a generally low elevation. No common name has ever included all its parts, both the interfluvial region and the districts beyond Tigris; but since the term Mesopotamia, though obviously incorrect, is generally understood nowadays to designate it, this name may be used for want of a better. (6) A high plateau, walled off from Mesopotamia and Armenia by high mountain chains, and extending back to the desert limits of the Ancient East. To this region, although it comprises only the western part of what should be understood by Iran, this name may be appropriated "without prejudice."

Plate 1: THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS