cities on or near the Anatolian coast still await excavators who will go
to the bottom of all things and dig systematically over a large area;
while some sites await any excavation whatsoever, except such as is
practised by plundering peasants.

In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the
Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained,
exclusive. Their several societies had in consequence the intensely
vivid and interested communal existence which develops civilization as a
hot-house develops plants; but they were not democratic, and they had
little sense of nationality--defects for which they were to pay dearly
in the near future. In spite of their associations for the celebration
of common festivals, such as the League of the twelve Ionian cities, and
that of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-west, which led to discussion
of common political interests, a separatist instinct, reinforced by the
strong geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic
territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling
the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in
the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular
situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any
strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over
Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become
domiciled on the western fringe of the inland plateau. Such a state had
now appeared and established itself; and if the Greeks of Asia had had
eyes to read, the writing was on their walls in 600 B.C.

Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes
and their influence penetrated far up into Asia. The hands which carved
some of the ivories found in the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus worked
on artistic traditions derived ultimately from the Tigris. So, too,