The Ancient East

D >> D. G. Hogarth >> The Ancient East

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SECTION 6. ASIA MINOR

A good part of the East, however, remains which owed allegiance neither
to Media nor to Babylon. It is, indeed, a considerably larger area than
was independent of the Farther East at the date of our last survey. Asia
Minor was in all likelihood independent from end to end, from the Aegean
to the Euphrates--for in 600 B.C. Kyaxares had probably not yet come
through Urartu--and from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Issus. About much
of this area we have far more trustworthy information now than when we
looked at it last, because it had happened to fall under the eyes of the
Greeks of the western coastal cities, and to form relations with them of
trade and war. But about the residue, which lay too far eastward to
concern the Greeks much, we have less information than we had in 800
B.C., owing to the failure of the Assyrian imperial annals.

The dominant fact in Asia Minor in 600 B.C. is the existence of a new
imperial power, that of Lydia. Domiciled in the central west of the
peninsula, its writ ran eastwards over the plateau about as far as the
former limits of the Phrygian power, on whose ruins it had arisen. As
has been stated already, there is reason to believe that its "sphere of
influence," at any rate, included Cilicia, and the battle to be fought
on the Halys, fifteen years after our present survey, will argue that
some control of Cappadocia also had been attempted. Before we speak of
the Lydian kingdom, however, and of its rise to its present position, it
will be best to dispose of that outlying state on the southeast,
probably an ally or even client of Lydia, which, we are told, was at
this time one of the "four powers of Asia." These powers included
Babylon also, and accordingly, if our surmise that the Mede was then the
overlord of Nebuchadnezzar be correct, this statement of Eusebius, for
what it is worth, does not imply that Cilicia had attained an imperial
position. Doubtless of the four "powers," she ranked lowest.

SECTION 7. CILICIA

It will be remembered how much attention a great raiding Emperor of the
Middle Assyrian period, Shalmaneser II, had devoted to this little
country. The conquering kings of later dynasties had devoted hardly
less. From Sargon to Ashurbanipal they or their armies had been there
often, and their governors continuously. Sennacherib is said to have
rebuilt Tarsus "in the likeness of Babylon," and Ashurbanipal, who had
to concern himself with the affairs of Asia Minor more than any of his
predecessors, was so intimately connected with Tarsus that a popular
tradition of later days placed there the scene of his death and the
erection of his great tomb. And, in fact, he may have died there for all
that we know to the contrary; for no Assyrian record tells us that he
did not. Unlike the rest of Asia Minor, Cilicia was saved by the
Assyrians from the ravages of the Cimmerians. Their leader, Dugdamme,
whom the Greeks called Lygdamis, is said to have met his death on the
frontier hills of Taurus, which, no doubt, he failed to pass. Thus, when
Ashurbanipal's death and the shrinking of Ninevite power permitted
distant vassals to resume independence, the unimpaired wealth of Cilicia
soon gained for her considerable importance. The kings of Tarsus now
extended their power into adjoining lands, such as Kue on the east and
Tabal on the north, and probably over even the holding of the Kummukh;
for Herodotus, writing a century and a half after our date, makes the
Euphrates a boundary of Cilicia. He evidently understood that the
northernmost part of Syria, called by later geographers (but never by
him) Commagene, was then and had long been Cilician territory. His
geographical ideas, in fact, went back to the greater Cilicia of
pre-Persian time, which had been one of the "four great powers of Asia."

The most interesting feature of Cilician history, as it is revealed very
rarely and very dimly in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom,
consists in its relation to the earliest eastward venturing of the
Greeks. The first Assyrian king with whom these western men seem to have
collided was Sargon, who late in the eighth century, finding their ships
in what he considered his own waters, i.e. on the coasts of Cyprus and
Cilicia, boasts that he "caught them like fish." Since this action of
his, he adds, "gave rest to Kue and Tyre," we may reasonably infer that
the "Ionian pirates" did not then appear on the shores of Phoenicia and
Cilicia for the first time; but, on the contrary, that they were already
a notorious danger in the easternmost Levant. In the year 720 we find a
nameless Greek of Cyprus (or Ionia) actually ruling Ashdod. Sargon's
successor, Sennacherib, had serious trouble with the Ionians only a few
years later, as has been learned from the comparison of a royal record
of his, only recently recovered and read, with some statements made
probably in the first place by the Babylonian historian, Berossus, but
preserved to us in a chronicle of much later date, not hitherto much
heeded. Piecing these scraps of information together, the Assyrian
scholar, King, has inferred that, in the important campaign which a
revolt of Tarsus, aided by the peoples of the Taurus on the west and
north, compelled the generals of Sennacherib to wage in Cilicia in the
year 698, Ionians took a prominent part by land, and probably also by
sea. Sennacherib is said (by a late Greek historian) to have erected an
"Athenian" temple in Tarsus after the victory, which was hardly won; and
if this means, as it may well do, an "Ionic" temple, it states a by no
means incredible fact, seeing that there had been much local contact
between the Cilicians and the men of the west. Striking similarities of
form and artistic execution between the early glyptic and toreutic work
of Ionia and Cilicia respectively have been mentioned in the last
chapter; and it need only be added here, in conclusion, that if Cilicia
had relations with Ionia as early as the opening of the seventh
century--relations sufficient to lead to alliance in war and to
modification of native arts--it is natural enough that she should be
found allied a few years later with Lydia rather than with Media.

SECTION 8. PHRYGIA

When we last surveyed Asia Minor as a whole it was in large part under
the dominance of a central power in Phrygia. This power is now no more,
and its place has been taken by another, which rests on a point nearer
to the western coast. It is worth notice, in passing, how Anatolian
dominion has moved stage by stage from east to west--from the Halys
basin in northern Cappadocia, where its holders had been, broadly
speaking, in the same cultural group as the Mesopotamian East, to the
middle basin of the Sangarius, where western influences greatly modified
the native culture (if we may judge by remains of art and script). Now
at last it has come to the Hermus valley, up which blows the breath of
the Aegean Sea. Whatever the East might recover in the future, the
Anatolian peninsula was leaning more and more on the West, and the
dominion of it was coming to depend on contact with the vital influence
of Hellenism, rather than on connection with the heart of west Asia.

A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New
Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his
reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial
empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and
Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in
the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As
has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king
with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas--preferably
with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been
immortalized in mythology. If this identification is correct, we have to
picture Phrygia at the close of the eighth century as dominating almost
all Asia Minor, whether by direct or by indirect rule; as prepared to
measure her forces (though without ultimate success) against the
strongest power in Asia; and as claiming interests even outside the
peninsula. Pisiris, king of Carchemish, appealed to Mita as his ally,
either because the Mushki of Asia Minor sat in the seat of his own
forbears, the Hatti of Cappadocia, or because he was himself of Mushki
kin. There can be no doubt that the king thus invoked was king of
Cappadocia. Whether he was king also of Phrygia, i.e. really the same as
Midas son of Gordius, is, as has been said already, less certain. Mita's
relations with Kue, Tabal and Carchemish do not, in themselves, argue
that his seat of power was anywhere else than in the east of Asia Minor,
where Moschi did actually survive till much later times: but, on the
other hand, the occurrence of inscriptions in the distinctive script of
Phrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and at Tyana, south-east of the
central Anatolian desert, argue that at some time the filaments of
Phrygian power did stretch into Cappadocia and towards the land of the
later Moschi.

It must also be admitted that the splendour of the surviving rock
monuments near the Phrygian capital is consistent with its having been
the centre of a very considerable empire, and hardly consistent with its
having been anything less. The greatest of these, the tomb of a king
Midas (son not of Gordius but of Atys), has for facade a cliff about a
hundred feet high, cut back to a smooth face on which an elaborate
geometric pattern has been left in relief. At the foot is a false door,
while above the immense stone curtain the rock has been carved into a
triangular pediment worthy of a Greek temple and engraved with a long
inscription in a variety of the earliest Greek alphabet. There are many
other rock-tombs of smaller size but similar plan and decoration in the
district round the central site, and others which show reliefs of human
figures and of lions, the latter of immense proportions on two famous
facades. When these were carved, the Assyrian art of the New Kingdom was
evidently known in Phrygia (probably in the early seventh century), and
it is difficult to believe that those who made such great things under
Assyrian influence can have passed wholly unmentioned by contemporary
Assyrian records. Therefore, after all, we shall, perhaps, have to admit
that they were those same Mushki who followed leaders of the name Mita
to do battle with the Great Kings of Nineveh from Sargon to
Ashurbanipal.

There is no doubt how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian
records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European
Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present
Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh
century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of
Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the last King Midas.

SECTION 9. LYDIA

It must have been in the hour of that disaster, or but little before,
that a Mermnad prince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyrians and Gyges by
Greeks, threw off any allegiance he may have owed to Phrygia and began
to exalt his house and land of Lydia. He was the founder of a new
dynasty, having been by origin, apparently, a noble of the court who
came to be elevated to the throne by events differently related but
involving in all the accounts some intrigue with his predecessor's
queen. One historian, who says that he prevailed by the aid of Carians,
probably states a fact; for it was this same Gyges who a few years later
seems to have introduced Carian mercenaries to the notice of
Psammetichus of Egypt. Having met and repulsed the Cimmerian horde
without the aid of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, to whom he had applied in
vain, Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebel who had just founded
the Saite dynasty, and proceeded to enlarge his boundaries by attacking
the prosperous Greeks on his western hand. But he was successful only
against Colophon and Magnesia on the Maeander, inland places, and failed
before Smyrna and Miletus, which could be provisioned by their fleets
and probably had at their call a larger proportion of those warlike
"Ionian pirates" who had long been harrying the Levant. In the course of
a long reign, which Herodotus (an inexact chronologist) puts at
thirty-eight years, Gyges had time to establish his power and to secure
for his Lydians the control of the overland trade; and though a fresh
Cimmerian horde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians (perhaps these
were not unconnected with the Medes then moving westward, as we know),
came down from the north, defeated and killed him, sacked the
unfortified part of his capital and swept on to plunder what it could of
the land as far as the sea without pausing to take fenced places, his
son Ardys, who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, and made his
submission to Ashurbanipal, was soon able to resume the offensive
against the Greeks. After an Assyrian attack on the Cimmerian flank or
rear had brought about the death of the chief barbarian leader in the
Cilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm, the Lydian marched down
the Maeander again. He captured Priene, but like his predecessor and his
successor, he failed to snatch the most coveted prize of the Greek
coast, the wealthy city Miletus at the Maeander mouth.

Up to the date of our present survey, however, and for half a century
yet to come, these conquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia and Caria
amounted to little more than forays for plunder and the levy of
blackmail, like the earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They might result in
the taking and sacking of a town here and there, but not in the holding
of it. The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not much more than a century
later, tells us expressly that up to the time of Croesus, that is, to
his own father's time, all the Greeks kept their freedom: and even if he
means by this statement, as possibly he does, that previously no Greeks
had been subjected to regular slavery, it still supports our point: for,
if we may judge by Assyrian practice, the enslaving of vanquished
peoples began only when their land was incorporated in a territorial
empire. We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities
and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and
Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians
and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each
people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the
only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.

Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the
popular belief of his time, were deeply indebted to Lydia for their
civilization. The larger part of this debt (if real) was incurred
probably after 600 B.C.; but some constituent items of the account must
have been of older date--the coining of money, for example. There is,
however, much to be set on the other side of the ledger, more than
Herodotus knew, and more than we can yet estimate. Too few monuments of
the arts of the earlier Lydians and too few objects of their daily use
have been found in their ill-explored land for us to say whether they
owed most to the West or to the East. From the American excavation of
Sardes, however, we have already learned for certain that their script
was of a Western type, nearer akin to the Ionian than even the Phrygian
was; and since their language contained a great number of Indo-European
words, the Lydians should not, on the whole, be reckoned an Eastern
people. Though the names given by Herodotus to their earliest kings are
Mesopotamian and may be reminiscent of some political connection with
the Far East at a remote epoch--perhaps that of the foreign relations of
Ur, which seem to have extended to Cappadocia--all the later royal and
other Lydian names recorded are distinctly Anatolian. At any rate all
connection with Mesopotamia must have long been forgotten before
Ashurbanipal's scribes could mention the prayer of "Guggu King of Luddi"
as coming from a people and a land of which their master and his
forbears had not so much as heard. As the excavation of Sardes and of
other sites in Lydia proceeds, we shall perhaps find that the higher
civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating
mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an
influence of the Hellenic cities which began not much earlier than 600
B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date.

We know nothing of the extent of Lydian power towards the east, unless
the suggestions already based on the passage of Herodotus concerning the
meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some
years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If
they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have
included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been
involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the
Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held
before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive
Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot
of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times
only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally
remote and insignificant Tibareni.

SECTION 10. THE GREEK CITIES

Of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast something has been said
already. The great period of the elder ones as free and independent
communities falls between the opening of the eighth century and the
close of the sixth. Thus they were in their full bloom about the year
600. By the foundation of secondary colonies (Miletus alone is said to
have founded sixty!) and the establishment of trading posts, they had
pushed Hellenic culture eastwards round the shores of the peninsula, to
Pontus on the north and to Cilicia on the south. In the eyes of
Herodotus this was the happy age when "all Hellenes were free" as
compared with his own experience of Persian overlordship. Miletus, he
tells us, was then the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and
certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as
do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as
Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon
of Teos, and many more. The fact is significant, because studies and
literary activities like theirs could hardly have been pursued except in
highly civilized, free and leisured societies where life and wealth were
secure.

If, however, the brilliant culture of the Asiatic Greeks about the
opening of the sixth century admits no shadow of doubt, singularly few
material things, which their arts produced, have been recovered for us
to see to-day. Miletus has been excavated by Germans to a very
considerable extent, without yielding anything really worthy of its
great period, or, indeed, much that can be referred to that period at
all, except sherds of a fine painted ware. It looks as if the city at
the mouth of the greatest and largest valley, which penetrates Asia
Minor from the west coast, was too important in subsequent ages and
suffered chastisements too drastic and reconstructions too thorough for
remains of its earlier greatness to survive except in holes and corners.
Ephesus has given us more archaic treasures, from the deposits bedded
down under the later reconstructions of its great shrine of Artemis; but
here again the site of the city itself, though long explored by
Austrians, has not added to the store. The ruins of the great Roman
buildings which overlie its earlier strata have proved, perhaps, too
serious an impediment to the excavators and too seductive a prize.
Branchidae, with its temple of Apollo and Sacred Way, has preserved for
us a little archaic statuary, as have also Samos and Chios. We have
archaic gold work and painted vases from Rhodes, painted sarcophagi from
Clazomenae, and painted pottery made there and at other places in Asia
Minor, although found mostly abroad. But all this amounts to a very poor
representation of the Asiatic Greek civilization of 600 B.C. Fortunately
the soil still holds far more than has been got out of it. With those
two exceptions, Miletus and Ephesus, the sites of the elder Hellenic
cities on or near the Anatolian coast still await excavators who will go
to the bottom of all things and dig systematically over a large area;
while some sites await any excavation whatsoever, except such as is
practised by plundering peasants.

In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the
Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained,
exclusive. Their several societies had in consequence the intensely
vivid and interested communal existence which develops civilization as a
hot-house develops plants; but they were not democratic, and they had
little sense of nationality--defects for which they were to pay dearly
in the near future. In spite of their associations for the celebration
of common festivals, such as the League of the twelve Ionian cities, and
that of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-west, which led to discussion
of common political interests, a separatist instinct, reinforced by the
strong geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic
territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling
the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in
the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular
situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any
strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over
Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become
domiciled on the western fringe of the inland plateau. Such a state had
now appeared and established itself; and if the Greeks of Asia had had
eyes to read, the writing was on their walls in 600 B.C.

Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes
and their influence penetrated far up into Asia. The hands which carved
some of the ivories found in the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus worked
on artistic traditions derived ultimately from the Tigris. So, too,
worked the smiths who made the Rhodian jewellery, and so, the artists
who painted the Milesian ware and the Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the
other side of the ledger (though three parts of its page is still hidden
from us) we must put to Greek credit the script of Lydia, the rock
pediments of Phrygia, and the forms and decorative schemes of many
vessels and small articles in clay and bronze found in the Gordian
tumuli and at other points on the western plateau from Mysia to
Pamphylia. The men of "Javan," who had held the Syrian sea for a century
past, were known to Ezekiel as great workers in metal; and in Cyprus
they had long met and mingled their culture with that of men from the
East.

It was implied in the opening of this chapter that in 600 B.C. social
changes in the East would be found disproportionate to political
changes; and on the whole they seem so to have been. The Assyrian Empire
was too lately fallen for any great modification of life to have taken
place in its area, and, in fact, the larger part of that area was being
administered still by a Chaldaean monarchy on the established lines of
Semitic imperialism. Whether the centre of such a government lay at
Nineveh or at Babylon can have affected the subject populations very
little. No new religious force had come into the ancient East, unless
the Mede is to be reckoned one in virtue of his Zoroastrianism. Probably
he did not affect religion much in his early phase of raiding and
conquest. The great experience, which was to convert the Jews from
insignificant and barbarous highlanders into a cultured, commercial and
cosmopolitan people of tremendous possibilities had indeed begun, but
only for a part of the race, and so far without obvious result. The
first incursion of Iranians in force, and that slow soakage of
Indo-European tribes from Russia, which was to develop the Armenian
people of history, are the most momentous signs of coming change to be
noted between 800 and 600 B.C. with one exception, the full import of
which will be plain at our next survey. This was the eastward movement
of the Greeks.

CHAPTER IV

THE EAST IN 400 B.C.

As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last
in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose
literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed
curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient
consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of
inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal
about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men,
military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their
merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had
gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias
and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied
Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these,
Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians,
Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had
ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus of
Halicarnassus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of
Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of
the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the
Mediterranean to the Tigris and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, and
with him had marched more than ten thousand Greeks. Not only have works
by these three men of letters survived, wholly or in part, to our time,
but also many notes on the East as it was before 400 B.C. have been
preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we
still have some archaeological documents to fall back upon. If the
cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of
the later Assyrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless
historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on
the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic
texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of
archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material
from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform
us of local society and life.

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