PREFACE

IN this book I have endeavoured to tell the story of the ancient history of the Near East within the limits of a single volume. Those who know the great works of Maspero and of Meyer will realize that in order to effect this great compression has been necessary, and will guess that many matters of great interest have had to be treated more cursorily than I would have wished. But, while writing as succinctly as possible, I have of set purpose refused to sacrifice too much on the altar of brevity, and have aspired to make the book readable as well as moderate in size.

Of all regions of the earth probably the Near East has had and will have the greatest interest for us Europeans, for from it sprang our civilization and our religion.

There took place the mingling of the Indo-European from the North with the Mediterranean of the South, which produced the culture, art, and law of the Greeks and Romans; and there, on the Semitic verge of Asia, the home of religious enthusiasms from the beginning, arose the Christian Faith. And if the Near East has from the first seen the mingling of the ideas of the East and West, it has also seen their secular struggle for mastery, the first phase of which ended at Salamis, when the Aryan invader made good his footing in the Mediterranean world, and threw back the Asiatics from Greece, now become the most eastern of western lands instead of the most westerly of the eastern. The second phase ended with Arbela and the complete triumph of the West. At the end of the third, Kossovo-polje and Constantinople registered the return of the pendulum, which swung its weight from east to west as far as Vienna. Then it swung back, and the end of the fourth phase seems to be approaching as I write, when Bulgars and Greeks are hammering at the gates of Constantinople.

It is with the history of the first phase of the great drama that this book deals, from the beginning of things to the grand climacteric of Salamis. The story begins with prehistoric Greece. Of the Bronze Age civilization of Greece which has been revealed to us by the discoveries of Schliemann, Halbherr, and Evans we cannot yet write the history: we can only guess at the probable course of events from the relics of antiquity which archaeology has revealed to us. It is otherwise with Egypt, with Babylonia, and Assyria. Of them we have intelligible records upon which we can base history. Therefore it seems best to treat the prehistory of Greece separately, and before we pass to real history with Egypt and Babylonia. We pass then from Greece to the Nilotic and Mesopotamian communities, treating them separately till in the second millennium BC they came into connexion with each other and with the Anatolian culture of Asia Minor. It then becomes impossible to treat them separately any longer. At different periods one or the other more or less dominated the rest and took the most prominent part in the history of the time. I have therefore told the story of each period more or less from the standpoint of the chief actor in it. During the First Egyptian Empire, from about 1550 to 1350 BC, one regards the world from the standpoint of imperial Thebes; during the ensuing period, till about 1100, one looks down upon it from the bleak heights of Asia Minor; till about 850 the rise of the Israelitish kingdom centres our attention upon Palestine; from 850 to 650 we watch from Nineveh the marching forth of the hosts of Ashur and the smoke of their holocausts spreading over all the lands. Then, with dramatic swiftness of overthrow, comes the Destruction of Nineveh. The destroyers, the Scyths of the Northern Steppes and the Medes and Persians of Iran, found their kingdoms on the ruins of the Semitic empires, while Egypt and even Babylonia spring once more into life. And the great event was contemporaneous with the expansion of the young Greece of the Iron Age, young with the new Indo-European blood from the north which had begun to invade the Aegean lands towards the end of the Egyptian imperial period. Persia took the place of Assyria in the world, and all the lands of the Near East but Greece coalesced in her Empire. Greece alone, possessed of a stronger rrfog and with a brain many times more intelligent than those of the Easterns, resisted successfully. The barbarian recoiled : Greece had saved the West, and with it the future civilization of the world.

I have intended the book mainly for the use of students in the school of Litterae Humaniores at Oxford, whose work neces­sitates a competent general knowledge of the early history of the west-oriental world, without which the history of Greece cannot be understood fully. Greece was never, as the older historians seemed to think, a land by itself, fully Western in spirit, supremely civilized in a world of foolish Scythians and gibbering black men. Originally she seems to have been as much or as little oriental as originally was Egypt, with whose culture hers may have had, at the beginning, direct affinity. Later she was westernized, but in the fifth century she was not more distinct from the more oriental nations of the Near East than she is now. She called them “barbarian” : that only meant that they did not talk Greek. Greece respected Persia while she fought her, Aeschylos knew better than to make Darius a savage. In fact, the Greeks hardly realized as yet how much more intelligent they were than the other nations. Herodotus has no feeling of great superiority to his Median and Egyptian friends. And when he set himself to write the history of the great struggle which the preceding generation had seen, it was in no spirit of contempt and aloofness that he gathered his information as to the early history of the peoples of the Near East who had marched against Greece under the Persian banner. He did not separate Greece absolutely from the rest of mankind, though no doubt he felt that she was better than the rest.

I hope, therefore, that this book may serve as a very general “companion” to Herodotus for university students. But at the same time I have endeavoured to make it no less useful to the general reader whose interest is keen on the history of these ancient civilizations, the relics of which have been and are being discovered day by day by the archaeologists. In the case of Egypt and prehistoric Greece, new material of the utmost importance may turn up at any moment. I have tried to make the book as up-to-date as possible, and in order to do so, during the work of writing it, which has occupied several years, several chapters have been recast, even wholly re-written, as the work of discovery necessitated. Owing to the indulgence of the publishers I have had unlimited time in which to complete the work, and I hope that the present moment, when there seems to be a lull in the work of discovery, may be a favourable one for its publication, and that I shall not have to wish that I had de­layed a little longer in order to register this or that new fact of importance. I have recounted the facts of the history so far as they are known without, I hope, undue generalization or theorizing, except, of course, in the case of prehistoric Greece, where the whole is theory, based however upon the evidence of material things. For an acute generalization of the history of the early peoples of the world I may refer the reader to Prof. J. L. myres’s little book, The Dawn of History, published last year, and for a suggestive study on certain natural causes which have influenced the history of the East to Mr. ellsworth huntington's most interesting Pulse of Asia.

In dealing with the early history of “classical” Greece I have simply endeavoured to present an impression or sketch of the development of Greek culture and its relations with the Eastern nations. I have not considered it necessary or desirable to treat the history in any detail. So much more is known of it than of the early history of the other lands concerned that to do so would be to make the latter part of the book (and the Greek section especially) totally disproportionate in size. This part too is written rather from the Persian-Egyptian than from the Greek standpoint. And Greece when she became Hellenic ceased to belong wholly to the Near East. It is only her “foreign relations”. her connexions with the East, that interest us now. Her internal affairs we leave to the historians of Greece. They call for our attention only in so far as they bear directly upon the general progress of Hellenic culture, especially towards the east and south, or affect directly the approach of the conflict with Persia.

I have myself specially translated for this book all the Egyptian inscriptions from which I quote at length, with the exception of that containing the hymn of King Akhenaten to the sun-disk, which is quoted, with his very kind permission, from Prof. breasted’s translation in his History of Egypt.

I have tried not to weary the reader by too rigid an insistence on the use of diacritical marks on my transliterations of Egyptian and Semitic names, giving the fully-marked forms usually only on the first appearance of a name in the book, and dispensing with them afterwards unless it would seem better to retain them in order to mark the pronunciation.

I have to thank various friends who have assisted me in the reading of portions of my proofs. To them I owe many corrections and suggestions. Chapters I., V., IX. and X., in which Babylonian and Assyrian matters are chiefly dealt with, have been read by my colleague Mr. L. w. king, author of The History of Sumer and Akkad. Chapters IX. and X. have also been read by the Rev. C. f. Burney, D.D., of St. John's College, Oxford, to whom I am specially indebted for my preservation from the many pitfalls that beset the path of a general historian in dealing with early Jewish history. My friend Prof. M. A. canney, of Manchester University, has also read Chapter IX., and has made several very useful suggestions. Chapter II. has been read by Mr. E. J. forsdyke, of the Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum; and Mr. G. f. Hill, the Keeper of Coins and Medals, and Mr. f. J. marshall, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, have most kindly read Chapters XI. and XII., with results valuable both to myself and to the reader. Only in those chapters of the book which are written more or less from the Egyptian point of view, namely, Chapters III., IV., VI., VII. and VIII., have I not submitted my work to the judgment and criticism of another. But in those chapters which any friends have read I alone am responsible for the opinions ultimately expressed. Dr. burney, for instance, must not be taken to agree with everything I have said in Chapter IX.; as, for example, with my revival, for which I only am responsible, of Josephus's idea that the Biblical account of the Exodus is possibly a reminiscence of the Expulsion of the Hyksos. I have recorded divergences of view when necessary ; and have also, when I am indebted to one of my friends for a new view, indicated the fact in a footnote.

I mustexpress my thanks to the Deutsche Orient Gesell-schaft of Berlin, to Messrs. Dietrich Reimer, also of Berlin, and also Mr. Edward stanford, of London, for permission to base plans on other maps and plans published by them, of which details are given in the List of Maps. For the sketch-map of Knossos and its surroundings I wish to acknowledge my obligation to the plans published in Annual of the British School at Athens, on which the small inset-plan of the palace is based. Finally, as regards photographs, I must thank Prof. garstang for permission to publish the first picture of his Minoan discovery at Abydos (Plate III. i); Mr. A. H. Smith, the Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum, for permission to reproduce the photograph, Plate XXX. 2; and Dr. Schafer and the Administration of the Royal Museums of Berlin for their gift of the photograph, Plate XIX. 1. I have also, thanks to the kindness of Dr. reisner, been able to use as frontispiece a painting, by Mr. F. F. Ogilvie, of one of the splendid sculpture groups of the Fourth Dynasty recently found by the Harvard expedition at the Pyramids of Gizeh. The photographs of Plates XXVI. and XXII. were taken respectively by Mr. L. W. King and by Mr. R. C. thompson, who have kindly lent me their negatives. Those of six of the plates are of my own taking; most of the rest have either been taken for me by Mr. Donald Macbeth or have been selected by me from the stock of Messrs. Mansell & Co.

H. R. HALL

November 1912

 

I. PROLEGOMENA