The Semitic invasions seem to have proceeded from the great motherland of that stock, Arabia, whose deserts and half-deserts have been at all times like a multiplying hive. Some of the movements were outright conquests, others half-forceful penetrations, still others infiltrations. Several great waves can be distinguished. About 3000 there was a drift which brought the Akkadians, Sargon’s people, into Babylonia, perhaps the Assyrians into their home up the Tigris, the Canaanites and Phœnicians into the Syrian region. About 2200 the Amorites flowed north: into Babylonia, where Babylon now sprang up and the famous lawgiver Hammurabi ruled; into Mesopotamia proper; and into Syria. Around 1400, the Aramæans gradually occupied the Syrian district, and the Hebrews began to dispossess the Canaanites. Around 700 still another wave brought the Chaldæans into Babylonia, to erect a great Semitic kingdom once more—that of Nebuchadnezzar. Then, for more than a thousand years, Arabia lay contained within herself, dammed perhaps by the Persian, Macedonian, Parthian, and Roman empires, until in the seventh century after Christ Mohammedanism led forth her peoples. A much earlier movement, at an unknown time, had brought the forefathers of the Abyssinians across the mouth of the Red Sea into Africa, and the Hyksos who overthrew the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt may have been Semites.
The Indo-Europeans entered southwest Asia later and permeated it more locally than the Semites. Soon after 2000 the Kassites or Kossæans intruded into Babylonia; they seem to have been Indo-Europeans, perhaps Iranians. Around 1500 the Mitanni were a power on the upper Euphrates between the Assyrians and the Hittites of Asia Minor. Their personal and god names as preserved in Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions show them to have been an Iranian people. The latter are not recognizably referred to in their permanent home on the Iranian plateau until about 1000, but may well have settled there a thousand years earlier. Their close relatives, the Indic branch, are believed to have begun their entry of India about 2000-1500 B.C. or soon after.
245. Iranian Peoples and Cultures
By the seventh century B.C., the Iranians were civilized and strong enough to participate in the overthrow of Semitic Assyria, whose principal inheritors they became. From then on for over twelve hundred years, with only a century of interruption due to Alexander and his successors, a succession of Iranian powers dominated not only the plateau but Babylonia and Mesopotamia: Medes, Achæmenian Persians, Parthians, Sassanian Persians. A strong national consciousness was evolved and reinforced by a national religion—Zoroastrianism, Magism, Fire-worship, the Avestan faith, are some of its names. This Iranian religion endured nearly three thousand years, and still survives among a shrunken number of followers, notably the emigrant Parsis—that is, “Persians”—of India; and its basic ideas of the eternal conflict of good and evil, truth and lie, and of a single supreme deity of righteousness, have influenced many other cults, including Christianity. The long contact between Iran and the Tigris-Euphrates valley and their frequent political unity since 600 B.C. reacted favorably to the intensification of culture in the highlands; with the result that when the Arabs and later the Turks broke from their marginal homes into the old civilized parts of western Asia, they absorbed heavily from the long established cultures of Iran. Much of Arab and Turkish civilization is really Persian, and goes back ultimately to Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian origins.
Soon after the Iranians pushed southward out of the steppe on to the plateau east of the Caspian, other Indo-Europeans drove southward west of the Caspian and Black Sea; the Armenians into the seats which they have held ever since, the Kardouchoi into the Kurd country, tribes allied to the Balkan Thracians and the Phrygians into Asia Minor. The centuries before and after 1000 B.C. were the period of these movements, all of which failed to penetrate as deeply into the heart of the west Asiatic cultural center as had the Semitic inflows. Nor was the Indo-Europeanization of all the newly occupied territories as permanent as the corresponding Semitization. Asia Minor, which is now prevailingly Turkish, is the one area of consequence that in the historic period has been de-Indo-Europeanized in speech (§ [50]).
246. The Composite Culture of the Near East
In this western end of Asia, then, from the Hellespont to Persia and from the Caucasus to the Arabian desert, beginning five thousand years ago and probably more, a motley of nations was thrown together—autochthonous peoples of several sorts, Semites, Indo-Europeans, possibly Ural-Altaians. Their contacts enabled each to acquire many of the new devices developed by the others, to combine these with their own attainments, and thus to be a source of culture stimulation over again for the others. The largest tract of rich lowland in the area was the Fertile Crescent which bowed from Jerusalem northward and eastward into Mesopotamia and then down the course of the Tigris and Euphrates to their mouths, and here, for several millenia, civilization tended to advance most intensively. Within this Crescent, again, its southeastern end, the drainable and irrigable alluvial plain of Babylonia, averaged in the lead from the earliest known Sumerian times until shortly before the Christian era. Yet political dominance often shifted elsewhere: to Egypt, which conquered to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C.; to the Hittites of Asia Minor in the fourteenth and thirteenth; to the Assyrians of the middle Tigris in the twelfth and eleventh and again in the eighth and seventh centuries. Culturally, too, almost every one of the many nations or tracts comprised within the west Asiatic area developed a degree of independence; each added features or modified those which it borrowed; each gave to its local civilization a cast of its own, without losing touch with the others.
247. Phœnicians, Aramæans, Hebrews
Thus, the Phœnicians, or some Semitic people closely related and geographically near them, by 1000 B.C. developed, presumably out of one of the several part-phonetic or syllabic writings in use about or among them, the true alphabet (§ [134]). In the two or three centuries following, they established a commercial and maritime supremacy over the Mediterranean that led to the founding of Carthage, direct trade as far as Spain and indirect to Britain, and transmission of the alphabet and other knowledge to the Greeks.