theirs. The strongest Nilotic influence which affected Mesopotamian art
is to be noticed during the latter half of the New Assyrian Kingdom,
when there was no need for alien intermediaries to keep Nineveh in
communication with its own province of Egypt.

Apparently, therefore, it was not through the Phoenicians that the
Greeks had learned most of what they knew about the East in 400 B.C.
Other agents had played a greater part and almost all the
intercommunication had been effected by way, not of the Levant Sea, but
of the land bridge through Asia Minor. In the earlier part of our story,
during the latter rule of Assyria in the farther East and the subsequent
rule of the Medes and the Babylonians in her room, intercourse had been
carried on almost entirely by intermediaries, among whom (if something
must be allowed to the Cilicians) the Lydians were undoubtedly the most
active. In the later part of the story it will be seen that the
intermediaries have vanished; the barriers are down; the East has itself
come to the West and intercourse is immediate and direct. How this
happened--what agency brought Greeks and Orientals into an intimate
contact which was to have the most momentous consequences to
both--remains to be told.


SECTION 3. THE COMING OF THE PERSIANS

We have seen already how a power, which had grown behind the frontier
mountains of the Tigris basin, forced its way at last through the
defiles and issued in the riverine plains with fatal results to the
north Semitic kings. By the opening of the sixth century Assyria had
passed into Median hands, and these were reaching out through Armenia to
central Asia Minor. Even the south Semites of Babylonia had had to