Another trading people, although an inland one, were the Aramæans, Semites of the same wave as the Hebrews but established north of Palestine in Syria, with Damascus as their greatest center. Never more than a secondary political power, they penetrated other countries peacefully, brought in their system of measures and weights, their writing, and even their language. Assyria had become half Aramaic speaking by the time of her fall, and the every-day language of Palestine in the days of Jesus and for some centuries before was Aramaic. Aramæan script, a cursive form of the Phœnician alphabet, gradually replaced Cuneiform writing, first for business and then for official purposes, throughout western Asia and beyond. In the fourteenth century, the Syrian and Palestinian city rulers had written their reports and dispatches to the Egyptian overlord in Cuneiform, which a corps of clerks in the Foreign Office or Dependencies Department at Tell-el-Amarna transcribed into Hieroglyphic or Hieratic. In the fourth century, Persian officials were employing Aramæan for official communications. As the Cuneiform more and more died out, derivatives of Aramæan became the alphabets of Persia; of at least part and possibly the whole of India; of the Jews; of the Arabs; of the Nestorian Christians; and of the ancient Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchus. Practically all Asia except perhaps India, so far as it writes alphabetically, thus derives its letters from an Aramæan source (§ [146]).

Equally profound was the influence of the neighboring Hebrews in another phase of civilization. At the time they first entered history, about 1400 B.C., the Hebrews worshiped a tribal god Jahveh. They believed that there were many gods beside him, but that they were his people and he their god. A growing national consciousness led them more and more to emphasize the special relation between him and them, to the exclusion of worship of other deities which was constantly creeping in from their Canaanite, Phœnician, Aramæan, and Egyptian neighbors. Thus they grew into the stage of monolatry, or worship limited to one god. As however Assyria and Babylonia first threatened and then engulfed them, and their national impotence became more and more evident, they confided less in themselves, as they had done in the brief days of their little tenth century glory, and trusted increasingly in their god as their salvation. National hopes fell and divine ones rose; until the Hebrew people passed from thinking of the Lord as all powerful to thinking of him as one and sole: monotheism had evolved out of monolatry as this had grown out of a special tribal cult. Historically the monotheistic idea was not new. Ikhnaton of Egypt had proclaimed it more than half a thousand years before the Hebrew prophets. The concept may actually have been carried over; but it certainly drew sustenance of its own on Hebrew soil and first became established there as a cardinal, enduring element of a national civilization. The Hebrews adhered to monotheism with an ever-increasing insistence; until the concept was taken over by Christianity and Islam—two of the three great international religions; Buddhism, the third, being essentially atheistic. Here then is another tremendously spread cultural element of deep significance that originated as a local west Asiatic variant.

248. Other Contributing Nationalities

Almost every people in the area, in fact, made its special contribution. In Asia Minor evolved the concept of a great primal mother goddess, known to the Greeks as Cybele. Lydia, in western Asia Minor, coined the earliest money about 700 B.C. Some people near the Black Sea in eastern Asia Minor seem to have been the first to develop the working of iron and perhaps of steel. The Kassites from the north or east probably introduced the horse into Babylonia, soon after 2000 B.C. Thence it spread, as the animal of royalty, aristocracy, and the special arm of chariot warfare, until it reached Egypt some three hundred years later. The first domestication of the horse was apparently in central Asia; the transmission to Europe may have been direct rather than through Mediterranean Asia. The camel had been tamed earlier, also in central Asia. Its remains appear in Turkistan in the copper period; and in Israel the Arab Midianite raiders whom Gideon defeated rode camels, while some generations later, in David’s time, about 1000 B.C., horses were still scarce.

249. Ægean Civilization

On the island of Crete, almost equidistant from Asia, Africa, and Europe, there began to grow up with the introduction of bronze, about 3000 B.C., a civilization most of whose elements were imported, but which added to them and molded the whole of its mass with unusual originality. Three great periods, named the Early, Middle, and Late “Minoan” after the legendary Cretan king Minos, are distinguishable in the abundant remains which excavation has brought to light; each of these is divisible into three sub-periods designated I, II, III. At some sites, such as Knossos, the remains of successive sub-periods are separated by layers of packed-down earth deposited when an old settlement was obliterated and serving as floor for the next occupation. Underneath the Bronze Age deposits were thick strata from the Neolithic, with unpainted pottery. With the Early Minoan, about 3000 B.C., painted pottery as well as bronze came in, to be followed by the potter’s wheel and a system of hieroglyphic writing unrelated to the Egyptian. In the Middle Minoan the pottery became polychrome, palaces were built, art took a remarkable naturalistic turn in pottery and fresco painting and carving, and the hieroglyphics evolved into a linear, probably syllabic, script. The beginning of the Late Minoan, from the sixteenth to the fourteenth century B.C., saw the culmination of Cretan civilization. Then something violent happened, the palaces were destroyed, and after a brief decadence Minoan culture passed out at the arrival of the first of the historic Greeks, at the opening of the Iron Age, about 1250 B.C.

The Minoans left no chronology of their own and their writing is unread. But datable Egyptian objects found in Cretan strata of identified period, and Cretan objects characteristic of particular periods found at datable Egyptian sites as the result of trade, have made possible an indirect but positive chronology for Minoan culture. The second sub-periods of Early, Middle, and Late Minoan respectively were contemporary with the Sixth, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Dynasties on the Nile. From 2000 B.C. on, Minoan dates are therefore reliable within a century and sometimes less. Industry, commerce, games, a light, practical style of architecture, above all a graceful realistic art, flourished particularly from Middle Minoan III to Late Minoan II. There was evidently considerable wealth, a leisure class, and life was prevailingly peaceful and surrounded with charm.

The Minoans were a Caucasian people of Mediterranean race. Their language is unknown, but seems to have been distinct from the later Greek, and therefore probably non-Indo-European. When their home power crumbled, a fragment appears to have taken refuge in Asia and founded the Philistine cities which for a time pressed the tribal Hebrews and which gave their name to Palestine.

A related culture appears in the ruins of the successive cities of Troy; on the islands of the Ægean Sea; and in mainland Greece, where it has been called Mycenæan, after the citadel and town attributed to Agamemnon. Ægean perhaps is the name least likely to confuse, for this larger culture of which the Cretan Minoan was long the most illustrious representative. The [table] outlines the principal correlations.