worked the smiths who made the Rhodian jewellery, and so, the artists
who painted the Milesian ware and the Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the
other side of the ledger (though three parts of its page is still hidden
from us) we must put to Greek credit the script of Lydia, the rock
pediments of Phrygia, and the forms and decorative schemes of many
vessels and small articles in clay and bronze found in the Gordian
tumuli and at other points on the western plateau from Mysia to
Pamphylia. The men of "Javan," who had held the Syrian sea for a century
past, were known to Ezekiel as great workers in metal; and in Cyprus
they had long met and mingled their culture with that of men from the
East.

It was implied in the opening of this chapter that in 600 B.C. social
changes in the East would be found disproportionate to political
changes; and on the whole they seem so to have been. The Assyrian Empire
was too lately fallen for any great modification of life to have taken
place in its area, and, in fact, the larger part of that area was being
administered still by a Chaldaean monarchy on the established lines of
Semitic imperialism. Whether the centre of such a government lay at
Nineveh or at Babylon can have affected the subject populations very
little. No new religious force had come into the ancient East, unless
the Mede is to be reckoned one in virtue of his Zoroastrianism. Probably
he did not affect religion much in his early phase of raiding and
conquest. The great experience, which was to convert the Jews from
insignificant and barbarous highlanders into a cultured, commercial and
cosmopolitan people of tremendous possibilities had indeed begun, but
only for a part of the race, and so far without obvious result. The
first incursion of Iranians in force, and that slow soakage of
Indo-European tribes from Russia, which was to develop the Armenian
people of history, are the most momentous signs of coming change to be