Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a woodcut in Bonndorff.
The whole face of their country had undergone a profound change since that time: the Urartians, driven northwards, became intermingled with the tribes on the slopes of the Caucasus, while the Armenians, carried along towards the east, as though by some resistless current, were now scaling the mountainous bulwark of Ararat, and slowly but surely encroaching on the lower plains of the Araxes. These political changes had been almost completed by the time of Ochus, and Urartu had disappeared from the scene, but an Armenia now flourished in the very region where Urartu had once ruled, and its princes, who were related to the family of the Achæmenides, wielded an authority little short of regal under the modest name of satraps. Thanks to their influence, the religions and customs of Iran were introduced into the eastern borders of Asia Minor. They made their way into the valleys of the Iris and the Halys, into Cappadocia and the country round Mount Taurus, and thither they brought with them the official script of the empire, the Persian and Aramaean cuneiform which was employed in public documents, in inscriptions, and on coins. The centre of the peninsula remained very much the same as it had been in the period of the Phrygian supremacy, but further westward Hellenic influences gradually made themselves felt.
The arts of Greece, its manners, religious ideals, and modes of thought, were slowly displacing civilisations of the Asianic type, and even in places like Lycia, where the language successfully withstood the Greek invasion, the life of the nations, and especially of their rulers, became so deeply impregnated with Hellenism as to differ but little from that in the cities on the Ionic, Æolian, or Doric seaboard. The Lycians still adhered to the ancient forms which characterised their funerary architecture, but it was to Greek sculptors, or pupils from the Grecian schools, that they entrusted the decoration of the sides of their sarcophagi and of their tombs.
Their kings minted coins many of which are reckoned among the masterpieces of antique engraving; and if we pass from Lycia to the petty states of Caria, we come upon one of the greatest triumphs of Greek art—that huge mausoleum in which the inconsolable Artemisia enclosed the ashes and erected the statue of her husband. The Asia Minor of Egyptian times, with its old-world dynasties, its old-world names, and old-world races, had come to be nothing more than an historic memory; even that martial world, in which the Assyrian conquerors fought so many battles from the Euphrates to the Black Sea, was now no more, and its neighbours and enemies of former days had, for the most part, disappeared from the land of the living.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photogravure published by
Hamdy-Beg and Th. Reinach.
The Lotanu were gone, the Khâti were gone, and gone, too, were Carchemish, Arpad, and Qodshu, much of th§ir domain having been swallowed up again by the desert for want of hands to water and till it; even Assyria itself seemed but a shadow half shrouded in the mists of oblivion. Sangara, Nisibis, Resaina, and Edessa still showed some signs of vigour, but on quitting the slopes of the Masios and proceeding southwards, piles of ruins alone marked the sites of those wealthy cities through which the Ninevite monarchs had passed in their journeyings towards Syria. Here wide tracts of arid and treeless country were now to be seen covered with aromatic herbage, where the Scenite Arabs were wont to pursue the lion, wild ass, ostrich, bustard, antelope, and gazelle; a few abandoned forts, such as Korsortê, Anatho, and Is (Hit) marked the halting-places of armies on the banks of the Euphrates. In the region of the Tigris, the descendants of Assyrian captives who, like the Jews, had been set free by Cyrus, had rebuilt Assur, and had there grown wealthy by husbandry and commerce,* but in the district of the Zab solitude reigned supreme.** Calah and Nineveh were alike deserted, and though their ruins still littered the sites where they had stood, their names were unknown in the neighbouring villages. Xenophon, relying on his guides, calls the former place Larissa, the second Mespila.***
* This seems to be indicated by a mutilated passage in the
Cylinder of Gyrus, where Assur is mentioned in the list of
towns and countries whose inhabitants were sent back to
their homes by Cyrus after the capture of Babylon. Xenophon
calls it Esense, this being, possibly, a translation of the
name given to it by its inhabitants. Nothing could be more
natural than for exiles to call the villages founded by them
on their return “new.” The town seems to have been a large
and wealthy one.
** Xenophon calls this country Media, a desert region which
the Ten Thousand took six days to cross.
*** The name Larissa is, possibly, a corruption of some name
similar to that of the city of Larsam in Chaldæa; Mespila
may be a generic term. [Mespila is Muspula, “the low ground”
at the foot of Kouyunjik; Larissa probably Al Resen or
Res-eni, between Kouyunjik and Nebi Yunus.—Ed.]