CHAPTER I

THE EAST IN 1000 B.C.


In 1000 B.C. West Asia was a mosaic of small states and contained, so
far as we know, no imperial power holding wide dominion over aliens.
Seldom in its history could it so be described. Since it became
predominantly Semitic, over a thousand years before our survey, it had
fallen under simultaneous or successive dominations, exercised from at
least three regions within itself and from one without.


SECTION 1. BABYLONIAN EMPIRE

The earliest of these centres of power to develop foreign empire was
also that destined, after many vicissitudes, to hold it latest, because
it was the best endowed by nature to repair the waste which empire
entails. This was the region which would be known later as Babylonia
from the name of the city which in historic times dominated it, but, as
we now know, was neither an early seat of power nor the parent of its
distinctive local civilization. This honour, if due to any one city,
should be credited to Ur, whose also was the first and the only truly
"Babylonian" empire. The primacy of Babylonia had not been the work of
its aboriginal Sumerian population, the authors of what was highest in
the local culture, but of Semitic intruders from a comparatively