XVIII. Egypt, Babylon and Assyria
1 Assyrian fighter
kills his enemy, ninth century B.C.
3 Assyrian spear-carrier, eighth c. B.C.
4 Winged genie, ninth century B.C.
THE EGYPTIANS had never submitted very willingly to the rule of their
Semitic shepherd kings and about 1600 A.D. a vigorous patriotic movement
expelled these foreigners. Followed a new phase or revival for Egypt, a
period known to Egyptologists as the New Empire. Egypt, which had not
been closely consolidated before the Hyksos invasion, was now a united
country; and the phase of subjugation and insurrection left her full of
military spirit. The Pharaohs became aggressive conquerors. They had now
acquired the war horse and the war chariot, which the Hyksos had brought
to them. Under Thothmes III and Amenophis III Egypt had extended her
rule into Asia as far as the Euphrates.
We are entering now upon a thousand years of warfare between the once
quite separated civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile. At first
Egypt was ascendant. The great dynasties, the Seventeenth Dynasty, which
included Thothmes III and Amenophis III and IV and a great queen Hatasu,
and the Nineteenth, when Rameses II, supposed by some to have been the
Pharaoh of Moses, reigned for sixty-seven years, raised Egypt to high
levels of prosperity. In between there were phases of depression for
Egypt, conquest by the Syrians and later conquest by the Ethiopians from
the South. In Mesopotamia Babylon ruled, then the Hittites and the
Syrians of Damascus rose to a transitory predominance; at one time the
Syrians conquered Egypt; the fortunes of the Assyrians of Nineveh ebbed
and flowed; sometimes the city was a conquered city; sometimes the
Assyrians ruled in Babylon and assailed Egypt. Our space is too limited
here to tell of the comings and goings of the armies of the Egyptians
and of the various Semitic powers of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia.
They were armies now provided with vast droves of war chariots, for the
horse—still used only for war and glory—had spread by this time into the
old civilizations from Central Asia.
Great conquerors appear in the dim light of that distant time and pass,
Tushratta, King of Mitanni, who captured Nineveh, Tiglath Pileser I of
Assyria who conquered Babylon. At last the Assyrians became the greatest
military power of the time. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylon in 745
B.C. and founded what historians call the New Assyrian Empire. Iron had
also come now into civilization out of the north; the Hittites, the
precursors of the Armenians, had it first and communicated its use to
the Assyrians, and an Assyrian usurper, Sargon II, armed his troops with
it. Assyria became the first power to expound the doctrine of blood and
iron. Sargon’s son Sennacherib led an army to the borders of Egypt, and
was defeated not by military strength but by the plague. Sennacherib’s
grandson Assurbanipal (who is also known in history by his Greek name of
Sardanapalus) did actually conquer Egypt in 670 B.C. But Egypt was
already a conquered country then under an Ethiopian dynasty.
Sardanapalus simply replaced one conqueror by another.
If one had a series of political maps of this long period of history,
this interval of ten centuries, we should have Egypt expanding and
contracting like an amœba under a microscope, and we should see these
various Semitic states of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites
and the Syrians coming and going, eating each other up and disgorging
each other again. To the west of Asia Minor there would be little Ægean
states like Lydia, whose capital was Sardis, and Caria. But after about
1200 B.C. and perhaps earlier, a new set of names would come into the
map of the ancient world from the north-east and from the north-west.
These would be the names of certain barbaric tribes, armed with iron
weapons and using horsechariots, who were becoming a great affliction to
the Ægean and Semitic civilizations on the northern borders. They all
spoke variants of what once must have been the same language, Aryan.
Round the north-east of the Black and Caspian Seas were coming the Medes
and Persians. Confused with these in the records of the time were
Scythians and Samatians. From north-east or north-west came the
Armenians, from the north-west of the sea-barrier through the Balkan
peninsula came Cimmerians, Phrygians and the Hellenic tribes whom now we
call the Greeks. They were raiders and robbers and plunderers of cities,
these Ayrans, east and west alike. They were all kindred and similar
peoples, hardy herdsmen who had taken to plunder. In the east they were
still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they were taking
cities and driving out the civilized Ægean populations. The Ægean
peoples were so pressed that they were seeking new homes in lands beyond
the Aryan range. Some were seeking a settlement in the delta of the Nile
and being repulsed by the Egyptians; some, the Etruscans, seem to have
sailed from Asia Minor to found a state in the forest wildernesses of
middle Italy; some built themselves cities upon the south-east coasts of
the Mediterranean and became later that people known in history as the
Philistines.
Of these Aryans who came thus rudely upon the scene of the ancient
civilizations we will tell more fully in a later section. Here we note
simply all this stir and emigration amidst the area of the ancient
civilizations, that was set up by the swirl of the gradual and
continuous advance of these Aryan barbarians out of the northern forests
and wildernesses between 1600 and 600 B.C.
And in a section to follow we must tell also of a little Semitic people,
the Hebrews, in the hills behind the Phœnician and Philistine coasts,
who began to be of significance in the world towards the end of this
period. They produced a literature of very great importance in
subsequent history, a collection of books, histories, poems, books of
wisdom and prophetic works, the Hebrew Bible.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt the coming of the Aryans did not cause
fundamental changes until after 600 B.C. The flight of the Ægeans before
the Greeks and even the destruction of Cnossos must have seemed a very
remote disturbance to both the citizens of Egypt and of Babylon.
Dynasties came and went in these cradle states of civilization, but the
main tenor of human life went on, with a slow increase in refinement and
complexity age by age. In Egypt the accumulated monuments of more
ancient times—the pyramids were already in their third thousand of years
and a show for visitors just as they are to-day—were supplemented by
fresh and splendid buildings, more particularly in the time of the
seventeenth and nineteenth dynasties. The great temples at Karnak and
Luxor date from this time. All the chief monuments of Nineveh, the great
temples, the winged bulls with human heads, the reliefs of kings and
chariots and lion hunts, were done in these centuries between 1600 and
600 B.C., and this period also covers most of the splendours of Babylon.
Both from Mesopotamia and Egypt we now have abundant public records,
business accounts, stories, poetry and private correspondence. We know
that life, for prosperous and influential people in such cities as
Babylon and the Egyptian Thebes, was already almost as refined and as
luxurious as that of comfortable and prosperous people to-day. Such
people lived an orderly and ceremonious life in beautiful and
beautifully furnished and decorated houses, wore richly decorated
clothing and lovely jewels; they had feasts and festivals, entertained
one another with music and dancing, were waited upon by highly trained
servants, were cared for by doctors and dentists. They did not travel
very much or very far, but boating excursions were a common summer
pleasure both on the Nile and on the Euphrates. The beast of burthen was
the ass; the horse was still used only in chariots for war and upon
occasions of state. The mule was still novel and the camel, though it
was known in Mesopotamia, had not been brought into Egypt. And there
were few utensils of iron; copper and bronze remained the prevailing
metals. Fine linen and cotton fabrics were known as well as wool. But
there was no silk yet. Glass was known and beautifully coloured, but
glass things were usually small. There was no clear glass and no optical
use of glass. People had gold stoppings in their teeth but no spectacles
on their noses.
One odd contrast between the life of old Thebes or Babylon and modern
life was the absence of coined money. Most trade was still done by
barter. Babylon was financially far ahead of Egypt. Gold and silver were
used for exchange and kept in ingots; and there were bankers, before
coinage, who stamped their names and the weight on these lumps of
precious metal. A merchant or traveller would carry precious stones to
sell to pay for his necessities. Most servants and workers were slaves
who were paid not money but in kind. As money came in slavery declined.
A modern visitor to these crowning cities of the ancient world would
have missed two very important articles of diet: there were no hens and
no eggs. A French cook would have found small joy in Babylon. These
things came from the East somewhere about the time of the last Assyrian
empire.
Religion like everything else had undergone great refinement. Human
sacrifice for instance had long since disappeared; animals or bread
dummies had been substituted for the victim. (But the Phœnicians and
especially the citizens of Carthage, their greatest settlement in
Africa, were accused later of immolating human beings.) When a great
chief had died in the ancient days it had been customary to sacrifice
his wives and slaves and break spear and bow at his tomb so that he
should not go unattended and unarmed in the spirit world. In Egypt there
survived of this dark tradition the pleasant custom of burying small
models of house and shop and servants and cattle with the dead, models
that give us to-day the liveliest realization of the safe and cultivated
life of these ancient people, three thousand years and more ago.
Such was the ancient world before the coming of the Aryans out of the
northern forests and plains. In India and China there were parallel
developments. In the great valleys of both these regions agricultural
city states of brownish peoples were growing up, but in India they do
not seem to have advanced or coalesced so rapidly as the city states of
Mesopotamia or Egypt. They were nearer the level of the ancient
Sumerians or of the Maya civilization of America. Chinese history has
still to be modernized by Chinese scholars and cleared of much legendary
matter. Probably China at this time was in advance of India.
Contemporary with the seventeenth dynasty in Egypt, there was a dynasty
of emperors in China, the Shang dynasty, priest emperors over a
loose-knit empire of subordinate kings. The chief duty of these early
emperors was to perform the seasonal sacrifices. Beautiful bronze
vessels from the time of the Shang dynasty still exist, and their beauty
and workmanship compel us to recognize that many centuries of
civilization must have preceded their manufacture.
XIX. The Primitive Aryans
FOUR thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C., central and
south-eastern Europe and central Asia were probably warmer, moister and
better wooded than they are now. In these regions of the earth wandered
a group of tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race,
sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations of one
common language from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time they may
not have been a very numerous people, and their existence was
unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by
the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in
those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part indeed
in the world’s history. They were a people of the parklands and the
forest clearings; they had no horses at first but they had cattle; when
they wandered they put their tents and other gear on rough ox waggons;
when they settled for a time they may have made huts of wattle and mud.
They burnt their important dead; they did not bury them ceremoniously as
the brunette peoples did. They put the ashes of their greater leaders in
urns and then made a great circular mound about them. These mounds are
the “round barrows” that occur all over north Europe. The brunette
people, their predecessors, did not burn their dead but buried them in a
sitting position in elongated mounds; the “long barrows.”
The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they did not
settle down by their crops; they would reap and move on. They had
bronze, and somewhen about 1500 B.C. they acquired iron. They may have
been the discoverers of iron smelting. And somewhen vaguely about that
time they also got the horse—which to begin with they used only for
draught purposes. Their social life did not centre upon a temple like
that of the more settled people round the Mediterranean, and their chief
men were leaders rather than priests. They had an aristocratic social
order rather than a divine and regal order; from a very early stage they
distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble.
They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wanderings by
feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special sort
of man, the bards, would sing and recite. They had no writing until they
had come into contact with civilization, and the memories of these bards
were their living literature. This use of recited language as an
entertainment did much to make it a fine and beautiful instrument of
expression, and to that no doubt the subsequent predominance of the
languages derived from Aryan is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan
people had its legendary history crystallized in bardic recitations,
epics, sagas and vedas, as they were variously called.
The social life of these people centred about the households of their
leading men. The hall of the chief where they settled for a time was
often a very capacious timber building. There were no doubt huts for
herds and outlying farm buildings; but with most of the Aryan peoples
this hall was the general centre, everyone went there to feast and hear
the bards and take part in games and discussions. Cowsheds and stabling
surrounded it. The chief and his wife and so forth would sleep on a dais
or in an upper gallery; the commoner sort slept about anywhere, as
people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons, ornaments,
tools and suchlike personal possessions there was a sort of patriarchal
communism in the tribe. The chief owned the cattle and grazing lands in
the common interest; forest and rivers were the wild.
This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and multiplying
over the great spaces of central Europe and west central Asia during the
growth of the great civilization of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and whom
we find pressing upon the heliolithic peoples everywhere in the second
millennium before Christ. They were coming into France and Britain and
into Spain. They pushed westward in two waves. The first of these people
who reached Britain and Ireland were armed with bronze weapons. They
exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the great stone
monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge and Avebury in England.
They reached Ireland. They are called the Goidelic Celts. The second
wave of a closely kindred people, perhaps intermixed with other racial
elements, brought iron with it into Great Britain, and is known as the
wave of Brythonic Celts. From them the Welsh derive their language.
Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into Spain and coming
into contact not only with the heliolithic Basque people who still
occupied the country but with the Semitic Phœnician colonies of the sea
coast. A closely allied series of tribes, the Italians, were making
their way down the still wild and wooded Italian peninsula. They did not
always conquer. In the eighth century B.C. Rome appears in history, a
trading town on the Tiber, inhabited by Aryan Latins but under the rule
of Etruscan nobles and kings.
At the other extremity of the Aryan range there was a similar progress
southward of similar tribes. Aryan peoples, speaking Sanskrit, had come
down through the western passes into North India long before 1000 B.C.
There they came into contact with a primordial brunette civilization,
the Dravidian civilization, and learnt much from it. Other Aryan tribes
seem to have spread over the mountain masses of Central Asia far to the
east of the present range of such peoples. In Eastern Turkestan there
are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but now they speak Mongolian
tongues.
Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites had been
submerged and “Aryanized” by the Armenians before 1000 B.C., and the
Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and formidable
fighting barbarism on the north-eastern frontiers, a group of tribes
amidst which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain as
outstanding names.
But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made their
first heavy thrust into the heart of the old-world civilization. They
were already coming southward and crossing into Asia Minor many
centuries before 1000 B.C. First came a group of tribes of whom the
Phrygians were the most conspicuous, and then in succession the Æolic,
the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks. By 1000 B.C. they had wiped out the
ancient Ægean civilization both in the mainland of Greece and in most of
the Greek islands; the cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns were obliterated and
Cnossos was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea before
1000 A.D., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes, and they were founding
colonies in Sicily and the south of Italy after the fashion of the
Phœnician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean
coasts.
So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and Sardanapalus were
ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt, the
Aryan peoples were learning the methods of civilization and making it
over for their own purposes in Italy and Greece and north Persia. The
theme of history from the ninth century B.C. onward for six centuries is
the story of how these Aryan peoples grew to power and enterprise and
how at last they subjugated the whole Ancient World, Semitic, Ægean and
Egyptian alike. In form the Aryan peoples were altogether victorious;
but the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian ideas and methods was
continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan hands. It is indeed a
struggle that goes on through all the rest of history and still in a
manner continues to this day.
XX. The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius I
Scythians meeting with Darius, painting by
Franciszek Smuglewicz, 1785
WE have already mentioned how Assyria became a great military power
under Tiglath Pileser III and under the usurper Sargon II. Sargon was
not this man’s original name; he adopted it to flatter the conquered
Babylonians by reminding them of that ancient founder of the Akkadian
Empire, Sargon I, two thousand years before his time. Babylon, for all
that it was a conquered city, was of greater population and importance
than Nineveh, and its great god Bel Marduk and its traders and priests
had to be treated politely. In Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C. we
are already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a town
meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to propitiate and win the
conquered. For a century and a half after Sargon the new Assyrian empire
endured and, as we have noted, Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus) held at least
lower Egypt.
But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly. Egypt by an
effort threw off the foreigner under a Pharoah Psammetichus I, and under
Necho II attempted a war of conquest in Syria. By that time Assyria was
grappling with foes nearer at hand, and could make but a poor
resistance. A Semitic people from south-east Mesopotamia, the Chaldeans,
combined with Aryan Medes and Persians from the north-east against
Nineveh, and in 606 B.C.—for now we are coming down to exact
chronology—took that city.
There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median Empire was set
up in the north under Cyaxares. It included Nineveh, and its capital was
Ecbatana. Eastward it reached to the borders of India. To the south of
this in a great crescent was a new Chaldean Empire, the Second
Babylonian Empire, which rose to a very great degree of wealth and power
under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar the Great (the Nebuchadnezzar of the
Bible). The last great days, the greatest days of all, for Babylon
began. For a time the two Empires remained at peace, and the daughter of
Nebuchadnezzar was married to Cyaxares.
Meanwhile Necho II was pursuing his easy conquests in Syria. He had
defeated and slain King Josiah of Judah, a small country of which there
is more to tell presently, at the battle of Megiddo in 608 B.C., and he
pushed on to the Euphrates to encounter not a decadent Assyria but a
renascent Babylonia. The Chaldeans dealt very vigorously with the
Egyptians. Necho was routed and driven back to Egypt, and the Babylonian
frontier pushed down to the ancient Egyptian boundaries.
From 606 until 539 B.C. the Second Babylonian Empire flourished
insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the peace with the
stronger, hardier Median Empire to the north. And during these
sixty-seven years not only life but learning flourished in the ancient
city.
Even under the Assyrian monarchs and especially under Sardanapalus,
Babylon had been a scene of great intellectual activity. Sardanapalus,
though an Assyrian, had been quite Babylonized. He made a library, a
library not of paper but of the clay tablets that were used for writing
in Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days. His collection has been
unearthed and is perhaps the most precious store of historical material
in the world. The last of the Chaldean line of Babylonian monarchs,
Nabonidus, had even keener literary tastes. He patronized antiquarian
researches, and when a date was worked out by his investigators for the
accession of Sargon I he commemorated the fact by inscriptions. But
there were many signs of disunion in his empire, and he sought to
centralize it by bringing a number of the various local gods to Babylon
and setting up temples to them there. This device was to be practised
quite successfully by the Romans in later times, but in Babylon it
roused the jealousy of the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the
dominant god of the Babylonians. They cast about for a possible
alternative to Nabonidus and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler of
the adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already distinguished himself by
conquering Crœsus, the rich king of Lydia in Eastern Asia Minor. He came
up against Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls, and the gates
of the city were opened to him (538 B.C.). His soldiers entered the city
without fighting. The crown prince Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus, was
feasting, the Bible relates, when a hand appeared and wrote in letters
of fire upon the wall these mystical words: “Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin,” which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel, whom he summoned
to read the riddle, as “God has numbered thy kingdom and finished it;
thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting and thy kingdom is
given to the Medes and Persians.” Possibly the priests of Bel Marduk
knew something about that writing on the wall. Belshazzar was killed
that night, says the Bible. Nabonidus was taken prisoner, and the
occupation of the city was so peaceful that the services of Bel Marduk
continued without intermission.
Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were united. Cambyses, the
son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt. Cambyses went mad and was accidentally
killed, and was presently succeeded by Darius the Mede, Darius I, the
son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors of Cyrus.
The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan empires in
the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest empire the world had
hitherto seen. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, all the old
Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian
regions, Media, Persia, and it extended into India as far as the Indus.
Such an empire was possible because the horse and rider and the chariot
and the made-road had now been brought into the world. Hitherto the ass
and ox and the camel for desert use had afforded the swiftest method of
transport. Great arterial roads were made by the Persian rulers to hold
their new empire, and post horses were always in waiting for the
imperial messenger or the traveller with an official permit. Moreover
the world was now beginning to use coined money, which greatly
facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of this vast empire
was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priesthood of Bel Marduk
gained nothing by their treason. Babylon though still important was now
a declining city, and the great cities of the new empire were Persepolis
and Susa and Ecbatana. The capital was Susa. Nineveh was already
abandoned and sinking into ruins.
XXI. The Early History of the Jews
David Plays the Harp for Saul, by
Rembrandt van Rijn,
c. 1658.
AND now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so
important in their own time as in their influence upon the later history
of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000 B.C., and
their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is
interwoven with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt
to the south and the changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to
the north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these
latter powers and Egypt.
Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a
written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles,
psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political utterances
which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the
Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the fourth or fifth
century B.C.
Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have
already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian Empire
while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and
Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated and slain
at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and when
Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in Babylon, rolled back
Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up puppet
kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred his
Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break up this little
state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against the
northern empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant of the
people was carried off captive to Babylon.
There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then
collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country and
rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.
Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or
united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write. In
their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible being
read; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The
Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They returned
aware of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and political
people.
Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the Pentateuch,
that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as we know it.
In addition, as separate books they already had many of the other books
that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch into the present
Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for example.
The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the
Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar
Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the common beliefs of
all the Semetic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson have
Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham and
onward begins something more special to the Jewish race.
Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon. He
was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader must
go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons and
grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He
travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story,
promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his
children.
And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in
the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham,
grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from
the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen
between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian records of Moses
nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they
did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of the
promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the Canaanites but
of newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and their cities,
Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully withstood the Hebrew
attack. For many generations the children of Abraham remained an obscure
people of the hilly back country engaged in incessant bickerings with
the Philistines and with the kindred tribes about them, the Moabites,
the Midianites and so forth. The reader will find in the book of Judges
a record of their struggles and disasters during this period. For very
largely it is a record of disasters and failures frankly told.
For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there was any
rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders of the
people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose themselves a
king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul’s leading was no great
improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished under the hail
of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa, his armour went into
the temple of the Philistine Venus, and his body was nailed to the walls
of Beth-shan.
His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David
dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to
know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phoenician city of Tyre,
whose King Hiram seems to have been a man of very great intelligence and
enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the Red Sea through the
Hebrew hill country. Normally Phœnician trade went to the Red Sea by
Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder at this time; there
may have been other obstructions to Phœnician trade along this line, and
at any rate Hiram established the very closest relations both with David
and with his son and successor Solomon. Under Hiram’s auspices the
walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose, and in return Hiram built
and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A very considerable trade passed
northward and southward through Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a
prosperity and magnificence unprecedented in the experience of his
people. He was even given a daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.
But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax
of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little
city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his death,
Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty, had taken
Jerusalem and looted most of his splendours. The account of Solomon’s
magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is questioned by
many critics. They say that it was added to and exaggerated by the
patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible account read carefully
is not so overwhelming as it appears at the first reading. Solomon’s
temple, if one works out the measurements, would go inside a small
suburban church, and his fourteen hundred chariots cease to impress us
when we learn from an Assyrian monument that his successor Ahab sent a
contingent of two thousand to the Assyrian army. It is also plainly
manifest from the Bible narrative that Solomon spent himself in display
and overtaxed and overworked his people. At his death the northern part
of his kingdom broke off from Jerusalem and became the independent
kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem remained the capital city of Judah.
The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died, and the
help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong again.
The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah becomes a
history of two little states ground between, first, Syria, then Assyria
and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It is a tale of
disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster. It is a tale
of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C. the kingdom of
Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians and its people
utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in 604 B.C., as we
have told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be details open to
criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the days of the
Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true story which
squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of Egypt and
Assyria and Babylon during the past century.
It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and
evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the
command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge
from those who had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization. In
the development of their peculiar character a very great part was played
by certain men, a new sort of men, the Prophets, to whom we must now
direct our attention. These Prophets mark the appearance of new and
remarkable forces in the steady development of human society.
XXII. Priests and Prophets in Judea
THE FALL of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of
disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the seventh
century B.C. it would have seemed as though the whole civilized world
was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian
empire and they had conquered Egypt; Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all
Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible. The trade
of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities
of the Phœnician coast, had thrown out colonies that grew at last to
even greater proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded
before 800 B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It
was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain and
out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have already
noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build ships on the Red Sea
for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time of the
Pharaoh Necho, a Phœnician expedition sailed completely round Africa.
At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the Greeks
were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the one they had
destroyed, and the Medes were becoming “formidable,” as an Assyrian
inscription calls them, in central Asia. In 800 B.C. no one could have
prophesied that before the third century B.C. every trace of Semitic
dominion would be wiped out by Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that
everywhere the Semitic peoples would be subjects or tributaries or
scattered altogether. Everywhere except in the northern deserts of
Arabia, where the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life,
the ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his Akkadians
went down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were never conquered
by Aryan masters.
Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in these
five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its
ancient traditions and that was little people, the Jews, who were sent
back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And they
were able to do this, because they had got together this literature of
theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It is not so much the Jews who made the
Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were
certain ideas, different from the ideas of the people about them, very
stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they were destined to cling
through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure and oppression.
Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible
and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of
Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods
embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and
the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new idea,
this God of the Jews, in the heavens, high above priests and sacrifices.
And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen them to be his
peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of
Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by their sense of
a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when they returned to
Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.
Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many
Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many Phœnicians,
speaking practically the same language and having endless customs,
habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be attracted by this
inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and its
promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the Spanish
Phœnician cities, the Phœnicians suddenly vanish from history; and as
suddenly we find, not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt,
Arabia, the East, wherever the Phœnicians had set their feet,
communities of Jews. And they were all held together by the Bible and by
the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only their
nominal capital; their real city was this book of books. This is a new
sort of thing in history. It is something of which the seeds were sown
long before, when the Sumerians and Egyptians began to turn their
hieroglyphics into writing. The Jews were a new thing, a people without
a king and presently without a temple (for as we shall tell Jerusalem
itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held together and consolidated out of
heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of the written word.
And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor foreseen nor
done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new kind of community
but a new kind of man comes into history with the development of the
Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a little
people just like any other little people of that time clustering around
court and temple, ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led by the
ambition of the king. But already, the reader may learn from the Bible,
this new sort of man of which we speak, the Prophet, was in evidence.
As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance of these
Prophets increases.
What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse origins. The
Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the Prophet Amos wore the
goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had this in common, that they
gave allegiance to no one but to the God of Righteousness and that they
spoke directly to the people. They came without licence or consecration.
“Now the word of the Lord came unto me;” that was the formula. They were
intensely political. They exhorted the people against Egypt, “that
broken reed,” or against Assyria or Babylon; they denounced the
indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of the King. Some
of them turned their attention to what we should now call “social
reform.” The rich were “grinding the faces of the poor,” the luxurious
were consuming the children’s bread; wealthy people made friends with
and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and this was
hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly punish this
land.
These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied. They
went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they spread a new
religious spirit. They carried the common man past priest and temple,
past court and king and brought him face to face with the Rule of
Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the history of
mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to
a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united
and at peace under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.
All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent
reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much
prejudice, and much that will remind him of the propaganda pamphlets of
the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period
round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a
new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an
appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices
and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.
XXIII. The Greeks
Marble statue of a helmed hoplite (5th century BC),
Archæological Museum of Sparta, Greece
NOW while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about 960 B.C.) the
divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering destruction and
deportation, and while the Jewish people were developing their tradition
in captivity in Babylon, another great power over the human mind, the
Greek tradition, was also arising. While the Hebrew prophets were
working out a new sense of direct moral responsibility between the
people and an eternal and universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers
were training the human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual
adventure.
The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan-speaking
stem. They had come down among the Ægean cities and islands some
centuries before 1000 B.C. They were probably already in southward
movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his first elephants beyond
the conquered Euphrates. For in those days there were elephants in
Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.
It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but there
are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories of Minos
and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill of the Cretan
artificers.
Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters whose
performances were an important social link, and these handed down from
the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics, the Iliad,
telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the
town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the Odyssey, being a long adventure
story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus, from Troy to his own
island. These epics were written down somewhen in the eighth or seventh
century B.C., when the Greeks had acquired the use of an alphabet from
their more civilized neighbours, but they are supposed to have been in
existence very much earlier. Formerly they were ascribed to a particular
blind bard, Homer, who was supposed to have sat down and composed them
as Milton composed Paradise Lost. Whether there really was such a poet,
whether he composed or only wrote down and polished these epics and so
forth, is a favourite quarrelling ground for the erudite. We need not
concern ourselves with such bickerings here. The thing that matters from
our point of view is that the Greeks were in possession of their epics
in the eighth century B.C., and that they were a common possession and a
link between their various tribes, giving them a sense of fellowship as
against the outer barbarians. They were a group of kindred peoples
linked by the spoken and afterwards by the written word, and sharing
common ideals of courage and behaviour.
The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron, without
writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to have lived at
first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs outside
the ruins of the Ægean cities they had destroyed. Then they began to
wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from the people they
had conquered. It has been said that the cities of the primitive
civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god, and that the
wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the
temple. They began to trade and send out colonies. By the seventh
century B.C. a new series of cities had grown up in the valleys and
islands of Greece, forgetful of the Ægean cities and civilization that
had preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus among
the chief. There were already Greek settlements along the coast of the
Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The heel and toe of Italy was called
Magna Græcia. Marseilles was a Greek town established on the site of an
earlier Phœnician colony.
Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief means of
transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become
united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of
Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system of government. But
the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain valleys; both
Greece and Magna Græcia are very mountainous; and the tendency was all
the other way. When the Greeks come into history they are divided up
into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence.
They are different even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens of
this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, Æolian or Doric; some have a mingled
population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek “Mediterranean”
folk; some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over an
enslaved conquered population like the “Helots” in Sparta. In some the
old leaderly Aryan families have become a close aristocracy; in some
there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens; in some there are
elected or even hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.
And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states divided
and various, kept them small. The largest states were smaller than many
English counties, and it is doubtful if the population of any of their
cities ever exceeded a third of a million. Few came up even to 50,000.
There were unions of interest and sympathy but no coalescences. Cities
made leagues and alliances as trade increased, and small cities put
themselves under the protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was held
together in a certain community of feeling by two things, by the epics
and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the athletic
contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and feuds, but it
mitigated something of the savagery of war between them, and a truce
protected all travellers to and from the games. As time went on the
sentiment of a common heritage grew and the number of states
participating in the Olympic games increased until at last not only
Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and
Macedonia to the north were admitted.
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of their
civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Their
social life differed in many interesting points from the social life of
the Ægean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid temples but
the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in the cities
of the older world, the repository of all knowledge, the storehouse of
ideas. They had leaders and noble families, but no quasi-divine monarch
surrounded by an elaborately organized court. Rather their organization
was aristocratic, with leading families which kept each other in order.
Even their so-called “democracies” were aristocratic; every citizen had
a share in public affairs and came to the assembly in a democracy, but
everybody was not a citizen. The Greek democracies were not like our
modern “democracies” in which everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek
democracies had a few hundred or a few thousand citizens and then many
thousands of slaves, freedmen and so forth, with no share in public
affairs. Generally in Greece affairs were in the hands of a community of
substantial men. Their kings and their tyrants alike were just men set
in front of other men or usurping a leadership; they were not
quasi-divine overmen like Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of
Mesopotamia. Both thought and government therefore had a freedom under
Greek conditions such as they had known in none of the older
civilizations. The Greeks had brought down into cities the
individualism, the personal initiative of the wandering life of the
northern parklands. They were the first republicans of importance in
history.
And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a
new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life. We find men who
are not priests seeking and recording knowledge and enquiring into the
mysteries of life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the sublime
privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings. We find
already in the sixth century B.C. — perhaps while Isaiah was still
prophesying in Babylon — such men as Thales and Anaximander of Miletus
and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now call independent
gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the world in
which we live, asking what its real nature was, whence it came and what
its destiny might be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive answers. Of
these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we shall have more
to say a little later in this history. These Greek enquirers who begin
to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the first philosophers,
the first “wisdom-lovers,” in the world.
And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century B.C.
was in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek
philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe
and man’s place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its
sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then
teaching in India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to the
Pacific the human mind was astir.
XXIV. The Wars of the Greeks and Persians
Greek hoplite and Persian warrior depicted fighting
WHILE the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and Asia Minor
were embarking upon free intellectual enquiry and while in Babylon and
Jerusalem the last of the Hebrew prophets were creating a free
conscience for mankind, two adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and the
Persians, were in possession of the civilization of the ancient world
and were making a great empire, the Persian empire, which was far larger
in extent than any empire the world had seen hitherto. Under Cyrus,
Babylon and the rich and ancient civilization of Lydia had been added to
the Persian rule; the Phœnician cities of the Levant and all the Greek
cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had subjected
Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian rulers (521
B.C.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world. His couriers
rode with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the Indus and from Upper
Egypt to Central Asia.
The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the
Spanish Phœnician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace; but
they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any serious
trouble were the old parent hordes of Nordic people in South Russia and
Central Asia, the Scythians, who raided the northern and north-eastern
borders.
Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a
population of Persians. The Persians were only the small conquering
minority of this enormous realm. The rest of the population was what it
had been before the Persians came from time immemorial, only that
Persian was the administrative language. Trade and finance were still
largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were the great Mediterranean
ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the seas. But many of these
Semitic merchants and business people as they went from place to place
already found a sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew
tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was increasing
rapidly in this empire was the Greek element. The Greeks were becoming
serious rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their detached and
vigorous intelligence made them useful and unprejudiced officials.
It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe. He
wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Scythian horsemen. He
crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched through Bulgaria to
the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far northward.
His army suffered terribly. It was largely an infantry force and the
mounted Scythians rode all round it, cut off its supplies, destroyed any
stragglers and never came to a pitched battle. Darius was forced into an
inglorious retreat.
He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and Macedonia,
and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrections of the Greek cities in
Asia followed this failure, and the European Greeks were drawn into the
contest. Darius resolved upon the subjugation of the Greeks in Europe.
With the Phœnician fleet at his disposal he was able to subdue one
island after another, and finally in 490 B.C. he made his main attack
upon Athens. A considerable Armada sailed from the ports of Asia Minor
and the eastern Mediterranean, and the expedition landed its troops at
Marathon to the north of Athens. There they were met and signally
defeated by the Athenians.
An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest rival of
Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to Sparta, sending
a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans not to let Greeks
become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the prototype of all
“Marathon” runners) did over a hundred miles of broken country in less
than two days. The Spartans responded promptly and generously; but when,
in three days, the Spartan force reached Athens, there was nothing for
it to do but to view the battlefield and the bodies of the defeated
Persian soldiers. The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So ended the
first Persian attack on Greece.
The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after the news of
his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years his son and
successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks. For a time
terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was certainly the
greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the world. It was a huge
assembly of discordant elements. It crossed the Dardanelles, 480 B.C.,
by a bridge of boats; and along the coast as it advanced moved an
equally miscellaneous fleet carrying supplies. At the narrow pass of
Thermopylæ a small force of 1400 men under the Spartan Leonidas resisted
this multitude, and after a fight of unsurpassed heroism was completely
destroyed. Every man was killed. But the losses they inflicted upon the
Persians were enormous, and the army of Xerxes pushed on to Thebes and
Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered and made terms. The
Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.
Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came victory
against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet, though not a
third the size of the Persian, assailed it in the bay of Salamis and
destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense army cut off from
supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated to Asia with one half of
his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at Platea (479 B.C.) what time
the remnants of the Persian fleet were hunted down by the Greeks and
destroyed at Mycalæ in Asia Minor.
The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in Asia
became free. All this is told in great detail and with much
picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the History of
Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in the Ionian city of
Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon and Egypt in his
search for exact particulars. From Mycalæ onward Persia sank into a
confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered in 465 B.C. and
rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke up the brief order of that
mighty realm. The history of Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of
Persia. This history is indeed what we should now call
propaganda—propaganda for Greece to unite and conquer Persia. Herodotus
makes one character, Aristagoras, go to the Spartans with a map of the
known world and say to them: “These Barbarians are not valiant in fight.
You on the other hand have now attained the utmost skill in war ƒ. No
other nations in the world have what they possess: gold, silver, bronze,
embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. All this you might have for
yourselves, if you so desired.”
XXV. The Splendour of Greece
The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens.
THE CENTURY and a half that followed the defeat of Persia was one of
very great splendour for the Greek civilization. True that Greece was
torn by a desperate struggle for ascendancy between Athens, Sparta and
other states (the Peloponnesian War 431 to 404 B.C.) and that in 338
B.C. the Macedonians became virtually masters of Greece; nevertheless
during this period the thought and the creative and artistic impulse of
the Greeks rose to levels that made their achievement a lamp to mankind
for all the rest of history.
The head and centre of this mental activity was Athens. For over thirty
years (466 to 428 B.C.) Athens was dominated by a man of great vigour
and liberality of mind, Pericles, who set himself to rebuild the city
from the ashes to which the Persians had reduced it. The beautiful ruins
that still glorify Athens to-day are chiefly the remains of this great
effort. And he did not simply rebuild a material Athens. He rebuilt
Athens intellectually. He gathered about him not only architects and
sculptors but poets, dramatists, philosophers and teachers. Herodotus
came to Athens to recite his history (438 B.C.). Anaxagoras came with
the beginnings of a scientific description of the sun and stars.
Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides one after the other carried the Greek
drama to its highest levels of beauty and nobility.
The impetus Pericles gave to the intellectual life of Athens lived on
after his death, and in spite of the fact that the peace of Greece was
now broken by the Peloponnesian War and a long and wasteful struggle for
“ascendancy” was beginning. Indeed the darkling of the political horizon
seems for a time to have quickened rather than discouraged men’s minds.
Already long before the time of Pericles the peculiar freedom of Greek
institutions had given great importance to skill in discussion. Decision
rested neither with king nor with priest but in the assemblies of the
people or of leading men. Eloquence and able argument became very
desirable accomplishments therefore, and a class of teachers arose, the
Sophists, who undertook to strengthen young men in these arts. But one
cannot reason without matter, and knowledge followed in the wake of
speech. The activities and rivalries of these Sophists led very
naturally to an acute examination of style, of methods of thought and of
the validity of arguments. When Pericles died a certain Socrates was
becoming prominent as an able and destructive critic of bad argument—and
much of the teaching of the Sophists was bad argument. A group of
brilliant young men gathered about Socrates. In the end Socrates was
executed for disturbing people’s minds (399 B.C.), he was condemned
after the dignified fashion of the Athens of those days to drink in his
own house and among his own friends a poisonous draught made from
hemlock, but the disturbance of people’s minds went on in spite of his
condemnation. His young men carried on his teaching.
Chief among these young men was Plato (427 to 347 B.C.) who presently
began to teach philosophy in the grove of the Academy. His teaching fell
into two main divisions, an examination of the foundations and methods
of human thinking and an examination of political institutions. He was
the first man to write a Utopia, that is to say the plan of a community
different from and better than any existing community. This shows an
altogether unprecedented boldness in the human mind which had hitherto
accepted social traditions and usages with scarcely a question. Plato
said plainly to mankind: “Most of the social and political ills from
which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage
to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you
choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own
power.” That is a high adventurous teaching that has still to soak in to
the common intelligence of our race. One of his earliest works was the
Republic, a dream of a communist aristocracy; his last unfinished work
was the Laws, a scheme of regulation for another such Utopian state.
The criticism of methods of thinking and methods of government was
carried on after Plato’s death by Aristotle, who had been his pupil and
who taught in the Lyceum. Aristotle came from the city of Stagira in
Macedonia, and his father was court physician to the Macedonian king.
For a time Aristotle was tutor to Alexander, the king’s son, who was
destined to achieve very great things of which we shall soon be telling.
Aristotle’s work upon methods of thinking carried the science of Logic
to a level at which it remained for fifteen hundred years or more, until
the mediæval schoolmen took up the ancient questions again. He made no
Utopias. Before man could really control his destiny as Plato taught,
Aristotle perceived that he needed far more knowledge and far more
accurate knowledge than he possessed. And so Aristotle began that
systematic collection of knowledge which nowadays we call Science. He
sent out explorers to collect facts. He was the father of natural
history. He was the founder of political science. His students at the
Lyceum examined and compared the constitutions of 158 different states
ƒ.
Here in the fourth century B.C. we find men who are practically “modern
thinkers.” The child-like, dream-like methods of primitive thought had
given way to a disciplined and critical attack upon the problems of
life. The weird and monstrous symbolism and imagery of the gods and god
monsters, and all the taboos and awes and restraints that have hitherto
encumbered thinking are here completely set aside. Free, exact and
systematic thinking has begun. The fresh and unencumbered mind of these
newcomers out of the northern forests has thrust itself into the
mysteries of the temple and let the daylight in.
XXVI. The Empire of Alexander the Great
Alexander the
Great. Mosaic
of Battle of Issus.
FROM 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece. Meanwhile
to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising
slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language
closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian competitors
had taken part in the Olympic games. In 359 B.C. a man of very great
abilities and ambition became king of this little country—Philip. Philip
had previously been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek
education and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus—which had
also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates—of a possible conquest
of Asia by a consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to remodel
his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-chariot had been
the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-fighting infantry.
Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of skirmishers,
individually and without discipline. Philip made his infantry fight in a
closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he trained his mounted
gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in formation and so
invented cavalry. The master move in most of his battles and in the
battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge. The phalanx held the
enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept away the enemy horse on
his wings and poured in on the flank and rear of his infantry. Chariots
were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to
Greece; and the battle of Chæronia (338 B.C.), fought against Athens and
her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of Herodotus
was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states appointed Philip
captain-general of the Græco-Macedonian confederacy against Persia, and
in 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia upon this long
premeditated adventure. But he never followed it. He was assassinated;
it is believed at the instigation of his queen Olympias, Alexander’s
mother. She was jealous because Philip had married a second wife.
But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son’s education. He had not
only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as this
boy’s tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust military
experience upon him. At Chæronia Alexander, who was then only eighteen
years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was possible
for this young man, who was still only twenty years old at the time of
his accession, to take up his father’s task at once and to proceed
successfully with the Persian adventure.
In 334 B.C.—for two years were needed to establish and confirm his
position in Macedonia and Greece—he crossed into Asia, defeated a not
very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the Granicus and captured
a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept along the sea-coast. It was
necessary for him to reduce and garrison all the coast towns as he
advanced because the Persians had control of the fleets of Tyre and
Sidon and so had command of the sea. Had he left a hostile port in his
rear the Persians might have landed forces to raid his communications
and cut him off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and smashed a vast
conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of Xerxes that had
crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it was an
incoherent accumulation of contingents and it was encumbered with a
multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp
followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted obstinately.
Finally that great city was stormed and plundered and destroyed. Gaza
also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 B.C. the conqueror entered
Egypt and took over its rule from the Persians.
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,
accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the trade
of the Phœnician cities was diverted. The Phœnicians of the western
Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history—and as immediately the
Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by Alexander
appear.
In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as Thothmes and
Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he marched by way of Tyre. At
Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten city, he
met Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The Persian
chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the great
composite host and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led the
retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader but fled
northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to
Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa and
Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt down the palace of
Darius, the king of kings.
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central Asia, going
to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he turned
northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at dawn dying in his
chariot, having been murdered by his own people. He was still living
when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to find him
dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea, he went up into the mountains
of western Turkestan, he came down by Herat (which he founded) and Cabul
and the Khyber Pass into India. He fought a great battle on the Indus
with an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian troops met elephants
for the first time and defeated them. Finally he built himself ships,
sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched back by the coast of
Beluchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.C. after an absence of six
years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize this vast empire he
had won. He sought to win over his new subjects. He assumed the robes
and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this roused the jealousy of his
Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble with them. He arranged a
number of marriages between these Macedonian officers and Persian and
Babylonian women: the “Marriage of the East and West.” He never lived to
effect the consolidation he had planned. A fever seized him after a
drinking bout in Babylon and he died in 323 B.C.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his generals,
Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the Indus to
Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured
Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable, passing under the
control of a succession of local adventures. Barbarian raids began from
the north and grew in scope and intensity. Until at last, as we shall
tell, a new power, the power of the Roman republic, came out of the west
to subjugate one fragment after another and weld them together into a
new and more enduring empire.
XXVII. The Museum and Library at Alexandria
The Ancient Library of Alexandria.
BEFORE the time of Alexander Greeks had already been spreading as
merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers, over most of the
Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the death of
Xerxes, a band of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a part under the
leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon is
described in his Retreat of the Ten Thousand, one of the first war
stories that was ever written by a general in command. But the conquests
of Alexander and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate
generals, greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the
Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of this Greek
dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia and in north-west
India. Their influence upon the development of Indian art was profound.
For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of art and
culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 A.D., that is to say for
nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the intellectual activity
of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean to Alexandria,
the new trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the Macedonian
general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a court that spoke Greek. He
had become an intimate of Alexander before he became king, and he was
deeply saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set himself, with great
energy and capacity, to organize knowledge and investigation. He also
wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns which, unhappily, is lost to
the world.
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the enquiries
of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a permanent
endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria which was
formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria. For two or
three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was
extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of the
earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who
wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and
catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the
greater stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers.
Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent
correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the greatest of Greek
anatomists, and is said to have practised vivisection.
For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II
there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria as the
world was not to see again until the sixteenth century A.D. But it did
not continue. There may have been several causes of this decline. Chief
among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was the fact that the
Museum was a “royal” college and all its professors and fellows were
appointed and paid by Pharaoh. This was all very well when Pharaoh was
Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the
Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they fell under the sway of
Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious developments, they ceased to
follow the work that was done, and their control stifled the spirit of
enquiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its first
century of activity.
Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the
finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclopædic
storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was not simply a
storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling organization. A
great army of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies of
books.
Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual
process in which we live to-day; here we have the systematic gathering
and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Museum and Library
marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true
beginning of Modern History.
BOTH the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under
serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that separated
the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the artisan.
There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those days,
but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The glass worker
was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials and so forth,
but he never made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not
seem to have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and jewellery
but he never made a chemical balance. The philosopher speculated loftily
about atoms and the nature of things, but he had no practical experience
of enamels and pigments and philters and so forth. He was not interested
in substances. So Alexandria in its brief day of opportunity produced no
microscopes and no chemistry. And though Hero invented a steam engine it
was never set either to pump or drive a boat or do any useful thing.
There were few practical applications of science except in the realm of
medicine, and the progress of science was not stimulated and sustained
by the interest and excitement of practical applications. There was
nothing to keep the work going therefore when the intellectual curiosity
of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum
went on record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of
scientific curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of
mankind.
Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making. That
ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper
was a Chinese invention and it did not reach the western world until the
ninth century A.D. The only book materials were parchment and strips of
the papyrus reed joined edge to edge. These strips were kept on rolls
which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and read, and very
inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the
development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in the
world it would seem as early as the Old Stone Age; there were seals in
ancient Sumeria; but without abundant paper there was little advantage
in printing books, an improvement that may further have been resisted by
trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed. Alexandria
produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never spread
knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the level of a
wealthy and influential class.
So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached
beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers
collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark
lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze may
be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the
world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific knowledge
that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown. Presently
a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria. Thereafter for a
thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had sown lay hidden.
Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few centuries it had become
that widespread growth of knowledge and clear ideas that is now changing
the whole of human life.
Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity in the
third century B.C. There were many other cities that displayed a
brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating fragments of the
brief empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of
Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two
centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also had a great
library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by invasion
from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were striking down
along the tracks that had once been followed by the ancestors of the
Greeks and Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided, shattered and
destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out
of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half of
the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They were an able but
unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to either science of
art. New invaders were also coming down out of central Asia to shatter
and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the western world again
from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of mounted bowmen, who
treated the Græco-Persian empire of Persepolis and Susa in the third
century B.C. in much the same fashion that the Medes and Persians had
treated it in the seventh and sixth. And there were now other nomadic
peoples also coming out of the north-east, peoples who were not fair and
Nordic and Aryan-speaking but yellow-skinned and black-haired and with a
Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we shall tell more in a
subsequent chapter.
XXVIII. The Life of Gautama Buddha
Birth of Buddha
BUT now we must go back three centuries in our story to tell of a
great teacher who came near to revolutionizing the religious thought and
feeling of all Asia. This was Gautama Buddha, who taught his disciples
at Benares in India about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying
among the Jews in Babylon and Heraclitus was carrying on his speculative
enquiries into the nature of things at Ephesus. All these men were in
the world at the same time, in the sixth century B.C.—unaware of one
another.
The sixth century B.C. was indeed one of the most remarkable in all
history. Everywhere—for as we shall tell it was also the case in
China—men’s minds were displaying a new boldness. Everywhere they were
waking up out of the traditions of kingships and priests and blood
sacrifices and asking the most penetrating questions. It is as if the
race had reached a stage of adolescence—after a childhood of twenty
thousand years.
The early history of India is still very obscure. Somewhen perhaps about
2000 B.C., an Aryan-speaking people came down from the north-west into
India either in one invasion or in a series of invasions; and was able
to spread its language and traditions over most of north India. Its
peculiar variety of Aryan speech was the Sanskrit. They found a brunette
people with a more elaborate civilization and less vigour of will, in
possession of the country of the Indus and Ganges. But they do not seem
to have mingled with their predecessors as freely as did the Greeks and
Persians. They remained aloof. When the past of India becomes dimly
visible to the historian, Indian society is already stratified into
several layers, with a variable number of sub-divisions, which do not
eat together nor intermarry nor associate freely. And throughout history
this stratification into castes continues. This makes the Indian
population something different from the simple, freely inter-breeding
European or Mongolian communities. It is really a community of
communities.
Siddhattha Gautama was the son of an aristocratic family which ruled a
small district on the Himalayan slopes. He was married at nineteen to a
beautiful cousin. He hunted and played and went about in his sunny world
of gardens and groves and irrigated rice-fields. And it was amidst this
life that a great discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a
fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the existence he was
leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday—a holiday that had
gone on too long.
The sense of disease and mortality, the insecurity and the
unsatisfactoriness of all happiness, descended upon the mind of Gautama.
While he was in this mood he met one of those wandering ascetics who
already existed in great numbers in India. These men lived under severe
rules, spending much time in meditation and in religious discussion.
They were supposed to be seeking some deeper reality in life, and a
passionate desire to do likewise took possession of Gautama.
He was meditating upon this project, says the story, when the news was
brought to him that his wife had been delivered of his first-born son.
“This is another tie to break,” said Gautama.
He returned to the village amidst the rejoicings of his fellow clansmen.
There was a great feast and a Nautch dance to celebrate the birth of his
new tie, and in the night Gautama awoke in a great agony of spirit,
“like a man who is told that his house is on fire.” He resolved to leave
his happy aimless life forthwith. He went softly to the threshold of his
wife’s chamber, and saw her by the light of a little oil lamp, sleeping
sweetly, surrounded by flowers, with his infant son in her arms. He felt
a great craving to take up the child in one first and last embrace
before he departed, but the fear of waking his wife prevented him, and
at last he turned away and went out into the bright Indian moonshine and
mounted his horse and rode off into the world.
Very far he rode that night, and in the morning he stopped outside the
lands of his clan, and dismounted beside a sandy river. There he cut off
his flowing locks with his sword, removed all his ornaments and sent
them and his horse and sword back to his house. Going on he presently
met a ragged man and exchanged clothes with him, and so having divested
himself of all worldly entanglements he was free to pursue his search
after wisdom. He made his way southward to a resort of hermits and
teachers in a hilly spur of the Vindhya Mountains. There lived a number
of wise men in a warren of caves, going into the town for their simple
supplies and imparting their knowledge by word of mouth to such as cared
to come to them. Gautama became versed in all the metaphysics of his
age. But his acute intelligence was dissatisfied with the solutions
offered him.
The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and
knowledge may be obtained by extreme asceticism, by fasting,
sleeplessness, and self-torment, and these ideas Gautama now put to the
test. He betook himself with five disciple companions to the jungle and
there he gave himself up to fasting and terrible penances. His fame
spread, “like the sound of a great bell hung in the canopy of the
skies.” But it brought him no sense of truth achieved. One day he was
walking up and down, trying to think in spite of his enfeebled state.
Suddenly he fell unconscious. When he recovered, the preposterousness of
these semi-magical ways to wisdom was plain to him.
He horrified his companions by demanding ordinary food and refusing to
continue his mortifications. He had realized that whatever truth a man
may reach is reached best by a nourished brain in a healthy body. Such a
conception was absolutely foreign to the ideas of the land and age. His
disciples deserted him, and went off in a melancholy state to Benares.
Gautama wandered alone.
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its
advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has
made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes
its victory. So it happened to Gautama. He had seated himself under a
great tree by the side of a river to eat, when this sense of clear
version came to him. It seemed to him that he saw life plain. He is said
to have sat all day and all night in profound thought, and then he rose
up to impart his vision to the world.
He went on to Benares and there he sought out and won back his lost
disciples to his new teaching. In the King’s Deer Park at Benares they
built themselves huts and set up a sort of school to which came many who
were seeking after wisdom.
The starting point of his teaching was his own question as a fortunate
young man, “Why am I not completely happy?” It was an introspective
question. It was a question very different in quality from the frank and
self-forgetful externalized curiosity with which Thales and Heraclitus
were attacking the problems of the universe, or the equally
self-forgetful burthen of moral obligation that the culminating prophets
were imposing upon the Hebrew mind. The Indian teacher did not forget
self, he concentrated upon self and sought to destroy it. All suffering,
he taught, was due to the greedy desires of the individual. Until man
has conquered his personal cravings his life is trouble and his end
sorrow. There were three principal forms that the craving for life took
and they were all evil. The first was the desire of the appetites, greed
and all forms of sensuousness, the second was the desire for a personal
and egotistic immortality, the third was the craving for personal
success, worldliness, avarice and the like. All these forms of desire
had to be overcome to escape from the distresses and chagrins of life.
When they were overcome, when self had vanished altogether, then
serenity of soul, Nirvana, the highest good was attained.
This was the gist of his teaching, a very subtle and metaphysical
teaching indeed, not nearly so easy to understand as the Greek
injunction to see and know fearlessly and rightly and the Hebrew command
to fear God and accomplish righteousness. It was a teaching much beyond
the understanding of even Gautama’s immediate disciples, and it is no
wonder that so soon as his personal influence was withdrawn it became
corrupted and coarsened. There was a widespread belief in India at that
time that at long intervals Wisdom came to earth and was incarnate in
some chosen person who was known as the Buddha. Gautama’s disciples
declared that he was a Buddha, the latest of the Buddhas, though there
is no evidence that he himself ever accepted the title. Before he was
well dead, a cycle of fantastic legends began to be woven about him. The
human heart was always preferred a wonder story to a moral effort, and
Gautama Buddha became very wonderful.
Yet there remained a substantial gain in the world. If Nirvana was too
high and subtle for most men’s imaginations, if the myth-making impulse
in the race was too strong for the simple facts of Gautama’s life, they
could at least grasp something of the intention of what Gautama called
the Eight-fold way, the Aryan or Noble Path in life. In this there was
an insistence upon mental uprightness, upon right aims and speech, right
conduct and honest livelihood. There was a quickening of the conscience
and an appeal to generous and self-forgetful ends.
