any peculiar historic significance. They might just as well have been
1001, 801 and so forth, or any other dates divided by equal intervals.
Least of all is any mysterious virtue to be attached to the millenary
date with which I begin. But it is a convenient starting-point, not only
for the reason already stated, that Greek literary memory--the only
literary memory of antiquity worth anything for early history--goes back
to about that date; but also because the year 1000 B.C. falls within a
period of disturbance during which certain racial elements and groups,
destined to exert predominant influence on subsequent history, were
settling down into their historic homes.

A westward and southward movement of peoples, caused by some obscure
pressure from the north-west and north-east, which had been disturbing
eastern and central Asia Minor for more than a century and apparently
had brought to an end the supremacy of the Cappadocian Hatti, was
quieting down, leaving the western peninsula broken up into small
principalities. Indirectly the same movement had brought about a like
result in northern Syria. A still more important movement of Iranian
peoples from the farther East had ended in the coalescence of two
considerable social groups, each containing the germs of higher
development, on the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the old
Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian.
A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts,
marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western
fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all
parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from
Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there
is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic
East much behind 1000 B.C.--that nothing like a sure chronological basis
of it exists before that date. Precision in the dating of events in West