for--accretions easily accepted by a people which had become rather a
church than a nation--it remains a striking testimony to Persian
toleration that after only some six or seven generations the once
insignificant Jews should have grown numerous enough to contribute an
important element to the populations of several foreign cities. It is
worth remark also that even when, presumably, free to return to the home
of their race, many Jews preferred to remain in distant parts of the
Persian realm. Names mentioned on contract tablets of Nippur show that
Jews found it profitable to still sit by the waters of Babylon till late
in the fifth century; while in another distant province of the Persian
Empire (as the papyri of Syene have disclosed) a flourishing
particularist settlement of the same race persisted right down to and
after 500 B.C.


SECTION 7. ASIA UNDER PERSIA

On the whole evidence the Persians might justifiably claim that their
imperial organization in its best days, destitute though it was of
either the centralized strength or the theoretic justification of modern
civilized rule, achieved a very considerable advance, and that it is not
unworthy to be compared even to the Roman in respect of the freedom and
peace which in effect it secured to its subjects.

[Plate 5: PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS
HYSTASPIS]

Not much more need--or can--be said about the other conquered peoples
before we revert to the Greeks. Though Cyrus did not live to receive in
person the submission of all the west Asian peoples, his son Cambyses