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