The Ancient East

by D. G. Hogarth

So useful or so dangerous--at any rate so numerous--did the Greeks become in Lower Egypt by the opening of the sixth century that a reservation was assigned to them beside the Egyptian town of Piemro, and to this alone, according to Herodotus, newcomers from the sea were allowed to make their way. This foreign suburb of Piemro was named Naukratis, and nine cities of the Asiatic Greeks founded a common sanctuary there. Other maritime communities of the same race (probably the more powerful, since Miletus is named among them) had their particular sanctuaries also and their proper places. The Greeks had come to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that throughout the Persian domination, which superseded the Saitic before the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was maintained. The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the land, enthroned Hellenism at Alexandria on the sea itself.

SECTION 2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERS

Nor was it only through Greek sea-rovers and settlers in Cilicia, and through Greek mercenaries, merchants and courtesans in the Nile-Delta, that the East and the West had been making mutual acquaintance. Other agencies of communication had been active in bringing Mesopotamian models to the artists of the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor, and Ionian models to Mesopotamia and Syria. The results are plain to see, on the one hand in the fabric and design of early ivories, jewellery and other objects found in the archaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in the decoration of painted pottery produced at Miletus; on the other hand, in the carved ivories of the ninth century found at Calah on the Tigris. But the processes which produced these results are not so clear. If the agents or carriers of those mutual influences were certainly the Phoenicians and the Lydians, we cannot yet apportion with confidence to each of these peoples the responsibility for the results, or be sure that they were the only agents, or independent of other middlemen more directly in contact with one party or the other.

The Phoenicians have pushed far afield since we looked at them last. By founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours, beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western Mediterranean basin. By means of secondary settlements in west Sicily, Sardinia and Spain, she proceeded to convert this sea for a while into something like a Phoenician lake. No serious rival had forestalled her there or was to arise to dispute her monopoly till she herself, long after our date, would provoke Rome. The Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy, which looked westward, failed to make head against her at the first, and soon dropped out of the running; nor did the one or two isolated centres of Hellenism on other shores do better. On the other hand, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, although it was her own home-sea, Tyre never succeeded in establishing commercial supremacy, and indeed, so far as we know, she never seriously tried to establish it. It was the sphere of the Aegean mariners and had been so as far back as Phoenician memory ran. The Late Minoan Cretans and men of Argolis, the Achaean rovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armed merchantmen had successively turned away from it all but isolated and peaceful ships of Sidon and Tyre, and even so near a coast as Cyprus remained foreign to the Phoenicians for centuries after Tyre had grown to full estate. In the Homeric stories ships of the Sidonians, though not unknown, make rare appearances, and other early legends of the Greeks, which make mention of Phoenician visits to Hellenic coasts, imply that they were unusual phenomena, which aroused much local curiosity and were long remembered. The strangeness of the Phoenician mariners, the unfamiliar charm of their cargoes--such were the impressions left on Greek story by the early visits of Phoenician ships.

That they did pay such visits, however, from time to time is certain. The little Egyptian trinkets, which occur frequently in Hellenic strata of the eighth to the sixth centuries, are sufficient witness of the fact. They are most numerous in Rhodes, in Caria and Ionia, and in the Peloponnese. But the main stream of Tyrian commerce hugged the south rather than the north coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Phoenician sailors were essentially southerners--men who, if they would brave now and again the cold winds of the Aegean and Adriatic, refused to do so oftener than was necessary--men to whom African shores and a climate softened by the breath of the Ocean were more congenial.

If, however, the Phoenicians were undoubtedly agents who introduced the Egyptian culture to the early Hellenes of both Asia and Europe, did they also introduce the Mesopotamian? Not to anything like the same extent, if we may judge by the products of excavations. Indeed, wherever Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often either certain or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician. We find the nearest affinities to archaic Cypriote art (where this was indebted to Asiatic art at all) in Cilician and in Hittite Syrian art. Early Ionian and Carian strata contain very little that is of Egyptian character, but much whose inspiration can be traced ultimately to Mesopotamia; and research in inner Asia Minor, imperfect though its results are yet, has brought to light on the plateau so much parallelism to Ionian Orientalizing art, and so many examples of prior stages in its development, that we must assume Mesopotamian influence to have reached westernmost Asia chiefly by overland ways. As for the European sites, since their Orientalism appears to have been drawn from Ionia, it also had come through Asia overland.

Therefore on the whole, though Herodotus asserts that the Phoenician mariners carried Assyrian cargoes, there is remarkably little evidence that those cargoes reached the West, and equally little that Phoenicians had any considerable direct trade with Mesopotamia. They may have been responsible for the small Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects which have been found by the excavators of Carchemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of the ninth and eighth centuries; but the carrying of similar objects eastward across the Euphrates was more probably in Hittite hands than 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 acknowledge the superior power of the newcomers and, probably, to accept a kind of vassalage. Thus, since all lower Mesopotamia with most part of Syria obeyed the Babylonian, a power, partly Iranian, was already overshadowing two-thirds of the East before Cyrus and his Persians issued upon the scene. It is important to bear this fact in mind when one comes to note the ease with which a hitherto obscure king of Anshan in Elam would prove able to possess himself of the whole Semitic Empire, and the rapidity with which his arms would appear in the farthest west of Asia Minor on the confines of the Greeks themselves. Nebuchadnezzar allied with and obedient to the Median king, helping him on the Halys in 585 B.C. to arrange with Lydia a division of the peninsula of Asia Minor on the terms uti possidetis--that is the significant situation which will prepare us to find Cyrus not quite half a century later lord of Babylon, Jerusalem and Sardes.