east. While in Egypt, shut off as it is on all sides, the status quo
did not so easily admit of change, in Asia both to the west and
east of the Euphrates the peoples and states underwent essential
modifications during, and partly in consequence of, this temporary
suspension of the Roman superintendence. Beyond the great desert
of Iran there had arisen not long after Alexander the Great
the kingdom of Palimbothra under Chandragupta (Sandracottus)
on the Indus, and the powerful Bactrian state on the upper Oxus,
both formed from a mixture of national elements with the most
eastern offshoots of Hellenic civilization.

Decline of the Kingdom of Asia

To the west of these began the kingdom of Asia, which, although
diminished under Antiochus the Great, still stretched its unwieldy
bulk from the Hellespont to the Median and Persian provinces, and
embraced the whole basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. That king had
still carried his arms beyond the desert into the territory of the
Parthians and Bactrians; it was only under him that the vast state
had begun to melt away. Not only had western Asia been lost in
consequence of the battle of Magnesia; the total emancipation of the
two Cappadocias and the two Armenias--Armenia proper in the northeast
and the region of Sophene in the south-west--and their conversion
from principalities dependent on Syria into independent kingdoms
also belong to this period.(38) Of these states Great Armenia in
particular, under the Artaxiads, soon attained to a considerable
position. Wounds perhaps still more dangerous were inflicted on the
empire by the foolish levelling policy of his successor Antiochus
Epiphanes (579-590). Although it was true that his kingdom resembled
an aggregation of countries rather than a single state, and that the