grow for another two centuries and to speak of them more at length when
they have become a potent factor in West Asian society. When we ring up
the curtain again after two hundred years, it will be found that the
light shed on the eastern scene has brightened; for not only will
contemporary records have increased in volume and clarity, but we shall
be able to use the lamp of literary history fed by traditions, which had
not had to survive the lapse of more than a few generations.




CHAPTER III

THE EAST IN 600 B.C.


When we look at the East again in 600 B.C. after two centuries of war
and tumultuous movements we perceive that almost all its lands have
found fresh masters. The political changes are tremendous. Cataclysm has
followed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygian dynasty has gone down in
massacre and rapine, and from another seat of power its former client
rules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholds of the lesser Semitic
peoples have almost all succumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone
snatched by one foreign dog from another. The Assyrian colossus which
bestrid the west Asiatic world has failed and collapsed, and the Medes
and the Chaldaeans--these two clouds no bigger than a man's hand which
had lain on Assyria's horizon--fill her seat and her room. As we look
back on it now, the political revolution is complete; but had we lived
in the year 600 at Asshur or Damascus or Tyre or Tarsus, it might have
impressed us less. A new master in the East did not and does not always