24.THE WARS OF THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

24.THE WARS OF THE GREEKS

AND

PERSIANS

While the Greeks in the cities in Greece, South Italy and Asia Minor were embarking upon free intellectual enquiry and while in Babylon and Jerusalem the last of the Hebrew prophets were creating a free conscience for mankind, two adventurous Aryan peoples, the Medes and the Persians, were in possession of the civilization of the ancient world and were making a great empire, the Persian empire, which was far larger in extent than any empire the world had seen hitherto. Under Cyrus, Babylon and the rich and ancient civilization of Lydia had been added to the Persian rule; the Phœnician cities of the Levant and all the Greek cities in Asia Minor had been made tributary, Cambyses had subjected Egypt, and Darius I, the Mede, the third of the Persian rulers (521 B.C.), found himself monarch as it seemed of all the world.

His couriers rode with his decrees from the Dardanelles to the Indus and from Upper Egypt to Central Asia.

The Greeks in Europe, it is true, Italy, Carthage, Sicily and the

Spanish Phœnician settlements, were not under the Persian Peace; but

they treated it with respect and the only people who gave any serious

trouble were the old parent hordes of Nordic people in South Russia and

Central Asia, the Scythians, who raided the northern and north-eastern

borders.

Of course the population of this great Persian empire was not a

population of Persians, The Persians were only the small conquering

minority of this enormous realm. The rest of the population was what

it had been before the Persians came from time immemorial, only that

Persian was the administrative language. Trade and finance were still

largely Semitic, Tyre and Sidon as of old were the great Mediterranean

ports and Semitic shipping plied upon the seas. But many of these

Semitic merchants and business people as they went from place to place

already found a sympathetic and convenient common history in the Hebrew

tradition and the Hebrew scriptures. A new element which was

increasing rapidly in this empire was the Greek element. The Greeks

were becoming serious rivals to the Semites upon the sea, and their

detached and vigorous intelligence made them useful and, unprejudiced

officials.

FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY

FINE PIECE OF ATHENIAN POTTERY

Showing Greek merchant vesselswith sails and oars statue on left

_Brit. Mus._

It was on account of the Scythians that Darius I invaded Europe. He

wanted to reach South Russia, the homeland of the Scythian horsemen.

He crossed the Bosphorus with a great army and marched through Bulgaria

to the Danube, crossed this by a bridge of boats and pushed far

northward. His army suffered terribly. It was largely an infantry

force and the mounted Scythians rode all round it, cut off its

supplies, destroyed any stragglers and never came to a pitched battle.

Darius was forced into an inglorious retreat.

He returned himself to Susa but he left an army in Thrace and

Macedonia, and Macedonia submitted to Darius. Insurrections of the

Greek cities in Asia followed this failure, and the European Greeks

were drawn into the contest. Darius resolved upon the subjugation of

the Greeks in Europe. With the Phœnician fleet at his disposal he was

able to subdue one island after another, and finally in 490 B.C. he

made his main attack upon Athens. A considerable Armada sailed from

the ports of Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, and the

expedition landed its troops at Marathon to the north of Athens. There

they were met and signally defeated by the Athenians.

An extraordinary thing happened at this time. The bitterest rival of

Athens in Greece was Sparta, but now Athens appealed to Sparta, sending

a herald, a swift runner, imploring the Spartans not to let Greeks

become slaves to barbarians. This runner (the prototype of all

“Marathon” runners) did over a hundred miles of broken country in less

than two days. The Spartans responded promptly and generously; but

when, in three days, the Spartan force reached Athens, there was

nothing for it to do but to view the battlefield and the bodies of the

defeated Persian soldiers. The Persian fleet had returned to Asia. So

ended the first Persian attack on Greece.

The next was much more impressive. Darius died soon after the news of

his defeat at Marathon reached him, and for four years his son and

successor, Xerxes, prepared a host to crush the Greeks. For a time

terror united all the Greeks. The army of Xerxes was certainly the

greatest that had hitherto been assembled in the world. It was a huge

assembly of discordant elements. It crossed the Dardanelles, 480 B.C.,

by a bridge of boats; and along the coast as it advanced moved an

equally miscellaneous fleet carrying supplies. At the narrow pass of

Thermopylæ a small force of 1400 men under the Spartan Leonidas

resisted this multitude, and after a fight of unsurpassed heroism was

completely destroyed. Every man was killed. But the losses they

inflicted upon the Persians were enormous, and the army of Xerxes

pushed on to Thebes and Athens in a chastened mood. Thebes surrendered

and made terms. The Athenians abandoned their city and it was burnt.

Greece seemed in the hands of the conqueror, but again came victory

against the odds and all expectations. The Greek fleet, though not a

third the size of the Persian, assailed it in the bay of Salamis and

destroyed it. Xerxes found himself and his immense army cut off from

supplies and his heart failed him. He retreated to Asia with one half

of his army, leaving the rest to be defeated at Platea (479 B.C.) what

time the remnants of the Persian fleet were hunted down by the Greeks

and destroyed at Mycalæ in Asia Minor.

ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF CORINTH

ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF CORINTH

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

The Persian danger was at an end. Most of the Greek cities in Asia

became free. All this is told in great detail and with much

picturesqueness in the first of written histories, the _History_ of

Herodotus. This Herodotus was born about 484 B.C. in the Ionian city

of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, and he visited Babylon and Egypt in his

search for exact particulars. From Mycalæ onward Persia sank into a

confusion of dynastic troubles. Xerxes was murdered in 465 B.C. and

rebellions in Egypt, Syria and Media broke up the brief order of that

mighty realm. The history of Herodotus lays stress on the weakness of

Persia. This history is indeed what we should now call

propaganda—propaganda for Greece to unite and conquer Persia.

Herodotus makes one character, Aristagoras, go to the Spartans with a

map of the known world and say to them: “These Barbarians are not

valiant in fight. You on the other hand have now attained the utmost

skill in war .... No other nations in the world have what they possess:

gold, silver, bronze, embroidered garments, beasts and slaves. _All

this you might have for yourselves, if you so desired_.”

THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON) AT CAPE SUNIUM

23.THE GREEKS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

23.THE GREEKS

Now while after Solomon (whose reign was probably about 960 B.C.) the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah were suffering destruction and deportation, and while the Jewish people were developing their tradition in captivity in Babylon, another great power over the human mind, the Greek tradition, was also arising. While the Hebrew prophets were working out a new sense of direct moral responsibility between the people and an eternal and universal God of Right, the Greek philosophers were training the human mind in a new method and spirit of intellectual adventure.

The Greek tribes as we have told were a branch of the Aryan- speaking

stem. They had come down among the Ægean cities and islands some

centuries before 1000 B.C. They were probably already in southward

movement before the Pharaoh Thothmes hunted his first elephants beyond

the conquered Euphrates. For in those days there were elephants in

Mesopotamia and lions in Greece.

It is possible that it was a Greek raid that burnt Cnossos, but there

are no Greek legends of such a victory though there are stories of

Minos and his palace (the Labyrinth) and of the skill of the Cretan

artificers.

STATUE OF MELEAGER

STATUE OF MELEAGER

Note the progress in plastic power from the earlier wooden statue on

left

_Photo: Sebah & Foaillier_

Like most of the Aryans these Greeks had singers and reciters whose

performances were an important social link, and these handed down from

the barbaric beginnings of their people two great epics, the _Iliad_,

telling how a league of Greek tribes besieged and took and sacked the

town of Troy in Asia Minor, and the _Odyssey_, being a long adventure

story of the return of the sage captain, Odysseus, from Troy to his own

island. These epics were written down somewhen in the eighth or

seventh century B.C., when the Greeks had acquired the use of an

alphabet from their more civilized neighbours, but they are supposed to

have been in existence very much earlier. Formerly they were ascribed

to a particular blind bard, Homer, who was supposed to have sat down

and composed them as Milton composed Paradise Lost. Whether there

really was such a poet, whether he composed or only wrote down and

polished these epics and so forth, is a favourite quarrelling ground

for the erudite. We need not concern ourselves with such bickerings

here. The thing that matters from our point of view is that the Greeks

were in possession of their epics in the eighth century B.C., and that

they were a common possession and a link between their various tribes,

giving them a sense of fellowship as against the outer barbarians.

They were a group of kindred peoples linked by the spoken and

afterwards by the written word, and sharing common ideals of courage

and behaviour.

The epics showed the Greeks a barbaric people without iron, without

writing, and still not living in cities. They seem to have lived at

first in open villages of huts around the halls of their chiefs outside

the ruins of the Ægean cities they had destroyed. Then they began to

wall their cities and to adopt the idea of temples from the people they

had conquered. It has been said that the cities of the primitive

civilizations grew up about the altar of some tribal god, and that the

wall was added; in the cities of the Greeks the wall preceded the

temple. They began to trade and send out colonies. By the seventh

century B.C. a new series of cities had grown up in the valleys and

islands of Greece, forgetful of the Ægean cities and civilization that

had preceded them; Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Samos, Miletus

among the chief. There were already Greek settlements along the coast

of the Black Sea and in Italy and Sicily. The heel and toe of Italy

was called Magna Græcia. Marseilles was a Greek town established on

the site of an earlier Phœnician colony.

Now countries which are great plains or which have as a chief means of

transport some great river like the Euphrates or Nile tend to become

united under some common rule. The cities of Egypt and the cities of

Sumeria, for example, ran together under one system of government. But

the Greek peoples were cut up among islands and mountain valleys; both

Greece and Magna Græcia are very mountainous; and the tendency was all

the other way. When the Greeks come into history they are divided up

into a number of little states which showed no signs of coalescence.

They are different even in race. Some consist chiefly of citizens of

this or that Greek tribe, Ionic, Æolian or Doric; some have a mingled

population of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek “Mediterranean”

folk; some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks lording it over

an enslaved conquered population like the “Helots” in Sparta. In some

the old leaderly Aryan families have become a close aristocracy; in

some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens; in some there are

elected or even hereditary kings, in some usurpers or tyrants.

RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA

RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA

_Photo: Fred Boissonnas_

And the same geographical conditions that kept the Greek states divided

and various, kept them small. The largest states were smaller than

many English counties, and it is doubtful if the population of any of

their cities ever exceeded a third of a million. Few came up even to

50,000. There were unions of interest and sympathy but no coalescences.

Cities made leagues and alliances as trade increased, and small cities

put themselves under the protection of great ones. Yet all Greece was

held together in a certain community of feeling by two things, by the

epics and by the custom of taking part every fourth year in the

athletic contests at Olympia. This did not prevent wars and feuds, but

it mitigated something of the savagery of war between them, and a truce

protected all travellers to and from the games. As time went on the

sentiment of a common heritage grew and the number of states

participating in the Olympic games increased until at last not only

Greeks but competitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and

Macedonia to the north were admitted.

The Greek cities grew in trade and importance, and the quality of their

civilization rose steadily in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.

Their social life differed in many interesting points from the social

life of the Ægean and river valley civilizations. They had splendid

temples but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in

the cities of the older world, the-repository of all knowledge, the

storehouse of ideas. They had leaders and noble families, but no

quasi- divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organized court.

Rather their organization was aristocratic, with leading families which

kept each other in order. Even their so- called “democracies” were

aristocratic; every citizen had a share in public affairs and came to

the assembly in a democracy, _but everybody was not a citizen_. The

Greek democracies were not like our modern “democracies” in which

everyone has a vote. Many of the Greek democracies had a few hundred

or a few thousand citizens and then many thousands of slaves, freedmen

and so forth, with no share in public affairs. Generally in Greece

affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial men. Their

kings and their tyrants alike were just men set in front of other men

or usurping a leadership; they were not quasi-divine overmen like

Pharaoh or Minos or the monarchs of Mesopotamia. Both thought and

government therefore had a freedom under Greek conditions such as they

had known in none of the older civilizations. The Greeks had brought

down into cities the individualism, the personal initiative of the

wandering life of the northern parklands. They were the first

republicans of importance in history.

THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY

THE TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE (POSEIDON), PÆSTUM, SICILY

_Photo: Alinari_

And we find that as they emerge from a condition of barbaric warfare a

new thing becomes apparent in their intellectual life. We find men who

are not priests seeking and recording knowledge and enquiring into the

mysteries of life and being, in a way that has hitherto been the

sublime privilege of priesthood or the presumptuous amusement of kings.

We find already in the sixth century B.C.—perhaps while Isaiah was

still prophesying in Babylon—such men as Thales and Anaximander of

Miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we should now call

independent gentlemen, giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the

world in which we live, asking what its real nature was, whence it came

and what its destiny might be, and refusing all ready-made or evasive

answers. Of these questionings of the universe by the Greek mind, we

shall have more to say a little later in this history. These Greek

enquirers who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C. are the

first philosophers, the first “wisdom-lovers,” in the world.

And it may be noted here how important a century this sixth century

B.C. was in the history of humanity. For not only were these Greek

philosophers beginning the research for clear ideas about this universe

and man’s place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its

sublimest levels, but as we shall tell later Gautama Buddha was then

teaching in India and Confucius and Lao Tse in China. From Athens to

the Pacific the human mind was astir.

22.PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

22.PRIESTS AND PROPHETS IN JUDEA

The fall of Assyria and Babylon were only the first of a series of disasters that were to happen to the Semitic peoples. In the seventh century B.C. it would have seemed as though the whole civilized world was to be dominated by Semitic rulers. They ruled the great Assyrian empire and they had conquered Egypt; Assyria, Babylon, Syria were all Semitic, speaking languages that were mutually intelligible. The trade of the world was in Semitic hands. Tyre, Sidon, the great mother cities of the Phœnician coast, had thrown out colonies that grew at last to even greater proportion in Spain, Sicily and Africa. Carthage, founded before 800 B.C., had risen to a population of more than a million. It was for a time the greatest city on earth. Its ships went to Britain and out into the Atlantic. They may have reached Madeira. We have already noted how Hiram co-operated with Solomon to build ships on the Red Sea for the Arabian and perhaps for the Indian trade. In the time of the Pharaoh Necho, a Phœnician expedition sailed completely round Africa.

At that time the Aryan peoples were still barbarians. Only the Greeks

were reconstructing a new civilization of the ruins of the one they had

destroyed, and the Medes were becoming “formidable,” as an Assyrian

inscription calls them, in central Asia. In 800 B.C. no one could have

prophesied that before the third century B.C. every trace of Semitic

dominion would be wiped out by Aryan-speaking conquerors, and that

everywhere the Semitic peoples would be subjects or tributaries or

scattered altogether. Everywhere except in the northern deserts of

Arabia, where the Bedouin adhered steadily to the nomadic way of life,

the ancient way of life of the Semites before Sargon I and his

Akkadians went down to conquer Sumeria. But the Arab Bedouin were

never conquered by Aryan masters.

Now of all these civilized Semites who were beaten and overrun in these

five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its

ancient traditions and that was this little people, the Jews, who were

sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And

they were able to do this, because they had got together this

literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It is not so much the

Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running

through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the

people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they

were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship,

adventure and oppression.

Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible

and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of

Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods

embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and

the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new

idea, this God of the Jews, in the heavens, high above priests and

sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen

them to be his peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the

capital of Righteousness in the World. They were a people exalted by

their sense of a common destiny. This belief saturated them all when

they returned to Jerusalem after the captivity in Babylon.

Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many

Babylonians and Syrians and so forth and later on many Phœnicians,

speaking practically the same language and having endless customs,

habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be attracted by this

inspiring cult and should seek to share in its fellowship and its

promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the Spanish

Phœnician cities, the Phœnicians suddenly vanish from history; and as

suddenly we find, not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt,

Arabia, the East, wherever the Phœnicians had set their feet,

communities of Jews. And they were all held together by the Bible and

by the reading of the Bible. Jerusalem was from the first only their

nominal capital; their real city was this book of books. This is a new

sort of thing in history. It is something of which the seeds were sown

long before, when the Sumerians and Egyptians began to turn their

hieroglyphics into writing. The Jews were a new thing, a people

without a king and presently without a temple (for as we shall tell

Jerusalem itself was broken up in 70 A.D.), held together and

consolidated out of heterogeneous elements by nothing but the power of

the written word.

And this mental welding of the Jews was neither planned nor foreseen

nor done by either priests or statesmen. Not only a new kind of

community but a new kind of man comes into history with the development

of the Jews. In the days of Solomon the Hebrews looked like becoming a

little people just like any other little people of that time clustering

around court and temple, ruled by the wisdom of the priest and led by

the ambition of the king. But already, the reader may learn from the

Bible, this new sort of man of which we speak, the Prophet, was in

evidence.

As troubles thicken round the divided Hebrews the importance of these

Prophets increases.

THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II

THE BLACK OBELISK OF SHALMANESER II

This obelisk (in the British Museum) of the King of Assyria mentions,

in cuneiform, “Jehu the son of Omri.” Panel showing Jewish captives

bringing tribute

What were these Prophets? They were men of the most diverse origins.

The Prophet Ezekiel was of the priestly caste and the Prophet Amos wore

the goatskin mantle of a shepherd, but all had this in common, that

they gave allegiance to no one but to the God of Righteousness and that

they spoke directly to the people. They came without licence or

consecration. “Now the word of the Lord came unto me;” that was the

formula. They were intensely political. They exhorted the people

against Egypt, “that broken reed,” or against Assyria or Babylon; they

denounced the indolence of the priestly order or the flagrant sins of

the King. Some of them turned their attention to what we should now

call “social reform.” The rich were “grinding the faces of the poor,”

the luxurious were consuming the children’s bread; wealthy people made

friends with and imitated the splendours and vices of foreigners; and

this was hateful to Jehovah, the God of Abraham, who would certainly

punish this land.

ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK

ANOTHER PANEL OF THE BLACK OBELISK

Captive Princes making obeisance to Shalmaneser II

These fulminations were written down and preserved and studied. They

went wherever the Jews went, and wherever they went they spread a new

religious spirit. They carried the common man past priest and temple,

past court and king and brought him face to face with the Rule of

Righteousness. That is their supreme importance in the history of

mankind. In the great utterances of Isaiah the prophetic voice rises to

a pitch of splendid anticipation and foreshadows the whole earth united

and at peace under one God. Therein the Jewish prophecies culminate.

All the Prophets did not speak in this fashion, and the intelligent

reader of the prophetic books will find much hate in them, much

prejudice, and much that will remind him of the propaganda pamphlets of

the present time. Nevertheless it is the Hebrew Prophets of the period

round and about the Babylonian captivity who mark the appearance of a

new power in the world, the power of individual moral appeal, of an

appeal to the free conscience of mankind against the fetish sacrifices

and slavish loyalties that had hitherto bridled and harnessed our race.

21.THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

21.THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS

And now we can tell of the Hebrews, a Semitic people, not so important in their own time as in their influence upon the later history of the world. They were settled in Judea long before 1000 B.C., and their capital city after that time was Jerusalem. Their story is interwoven with that of the great empires on either side of them, Egypt to the south and the changing empires of Syria, Assyria and Babylon to the north. Their country was an inevitable high road between these latter powers and Egypt.

Their importance in the world is due to the fact that they produced a

written literature, a world history, a collection of laws, chronicles,

psalms, books of wisdom, poetry and fiction and political utterances

which became at last what Christians know as the Old Testament, the

Hebrew Bible. This literature appears in history in the fourth or

fifth century B.C.

Probably this literature was first put together in Babylon. We have

already told how the Pharaoh, Necho II, invaded the Assyrian Empire

while Assyria was fighting for life against Medes, Persians and

Chaldeans. Josiah King of Judah opposed him, and was defeated and

slain at Megiddo (608 B.C.). Judah became a tributary to Egypt, and

when Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the new Chaldean king in Babylon, rolled

back Necho into Egypt, he attempted to manage Judah by setting up

puppet kings in Jerusalem. The experiment failed, the people massacred

his Babylonian officials, and he then determined to break up this

little state altogether, which had long been playing off Egypt against

the northern empire. Jerusalem was sacked and burnt, and the remnant

of the people was carried off captive to Babylon.

There they remained until Cyrus took Babylon (538 B.C.). He then

collected them together and sent them back to resettle their country

and rebuild the walls and temple of Jerusalem.

Before that time the Jews do not seem to have been a very civilized or

united people. Probably only a very few of them could read or write.

In their own history one never hears of the early books of the Bible

being read; the first mention of a book is in the time of Josiah. The

Babylonian captivity civilized them and consolidated them. They

returned aware of their own literature, an acutely self-conscious and

political people.

Their Bible at that time seems to have consisted only of the

Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Old Testament as

we know it. In addition, as separate books they already had many of

the other books that have since been incorporated with the Pentateuch

into the present Hebrew Bible, Chronicles, the Psalms and Proverbs for

example.

The accounts of the Creation of the World, of Adam and Eve and of the

Flood, with which the Bible begins, run closely parallel with similar

Babylonian legends; they seem to have been part of the common beliefs

of all the Semitic peoples. So too the stories of Moses and of Samson

have Sumerian and Babylonian parallels. But with the story of Abraham

and onward begins something more special to the Jewish race.

Abraham may have lived as early as the days of Hammurabi in Babylon.

He was a patriarchal Semitic nomad. To the book of Genesis the reader

must go for the story of his wanderings and for the stories of his sons

and grandchildren and how they became captive in the Land of Egypt. He

travelled through Canaan, and the God of Abraham, says the Bible story,

promised this smiling land of prosperous cities to him and to his

children.

And after a long sojourn in Egypt and after fifty years of wandering in

the wilderness under the leadership of Moses, the children of Abraham,

grown now to a host of twelve tribes, invaded the land of Canaan from

the Arabian deserts to the East. They may have done this somewhen

between 1600 B.C. and 1300 B.C.; there are no Egyptian records of Moses

nor of Canaan at this time to help out the story. But at any rate they

did not succeed in conquering any more than the hilly backgrounds of

the promised land. The coast was now in the hands, not of the

Canaanites but of newcomers, those Ægean peoples, the Philistines; and

their cities, Gaza, Gath, Ashdod, Ascalon and Joppa successfully

withstood the Hebrew attack. For many generations the children of

Abraham remained an obscure people of the hilly back country engaged in

incessant bickerings with the Philistines and with the kindred tribes

about them, the Moabites, the Midianites and so forth. The reader will

find in the book of Judges a record of their struggles and disasters

during this period. For very largely it is a record of disasters and

failures frankly told.

Map: The Land of the Hebrews

For most of this period the Hebrews were ruled, so far as there was any

rule among them, by priestly judges selected by the elders of the

people, but at last somewhen towards 1000 B.C. they chose themselves a

king, Saul, to lead them in battle. But Saul’s leading was no great

improvement upon the leading of the Judges; he perished under the hail

of Philistine arrows at the battle of Mount Gilboa, his armour went

into the temple of the Philistine Venus, and his body was nailed to the

walls of Beth-shan.

MOUND AT BABYLON

THE MOUND AT BABYLON

Beneath which are the remains of a great palace of Nebuchadnezzar

His successor David was more successful and more politic. With David

dawned the only period of prosperity the Hebrew peoples were ever to

know. It was based on a close alliance with the Phœnician city of

Tyre, whose King Hiram seems to have been a man of very great

intelligence and enterprise. He wished to secure a trade route to the

Red Sea through the Hebrew hill country. Normally Phœnician trade went

to the Red Sea by Egypt, but Egypt was in a state of profound disorder

at this time; there may have been other obstructions to Phœnician trade

along this line, and at any rate Hiram established the very closest

relations both with David and with his son and successor Solomon.

Under Hiram’s auspices the walls, palace and temple of Jerusalem arose,

and in return Hiram built and launched his ships on the Red Sea. A

very considerable trade passed northward and southward through

Jerusalem. And Solomon achieved a prosperity and magnificence

unprecedented in the experience of his people. He was even given a

daughter of Pharaoh in marriage.

But it is well to keep the proportion of things in mind. At the climax

of his glories Solomon was only a little subordinate king in a little

city. His power was so transitory that within a few years of his

death, Shishak the first Pharaoh of the twenty-second dynasty, had

taken Jerusalem and looted most of its splendours. The account of

Solomon’s magnificence given in the books of Kings and Chronicles is

questioned by many critics. They say that it was added to and

exaggerated by the patriotic pride of later writers. But the Bible

account read carefully is not so overwhelming as it appears at the

first reading. Solomon’s temple, if one works out the measurements,

would go inside a small suburban church, and his fourteen hundred

chariots cease to impress us when we learn from an Assyrian monument

that his successor Ahab sent a contingent of two thousand to the

Assyrian army. It is also plainly manifest from the Bible narrative

that Solomon spent himself in display and overtaxed and overworked his

people. At his death the northern part of his kingdom broke off from

Jerusalem and became the independent kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem

remained the capital city of Judah.

THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON

THE ISHTAR GATEWAY, BABYLON

The bulls are in richly coloured enamel on baked brick

The prosperity of the Hebrew people was short-lived. Hiram died, and

the help of Tyre ceased to strengthen Jerusalem. Egypt grew strong

again. The history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah

becomes a history of two little states ground between, first, Syria,

then Assyria and then Babylon to the north and Egypt to the south. It

is a tale of disasters and of deliverances that only delayed disaster.

It is a tale of barbaric kings ruling a barbaric people. In 721 B.C.

the kingdom of Israel was swept away into captivity by the Assyrians

and its people utterly lost to history. Judah struggled on until in

604 B.C., as we have told, it shared the fate of Israel. There may be

details open to criticism in the Bible story of Hebrew history from the

days of the Judges onward, but on the whole it is evidently a true

story which squares with all that has been learnt in the excavation of

Egypt and Assyria and Babylon during the past century.

It was in Babylon that the Hebrew people got their history together and

evolved their tradition. The people who came back to Jerusalem at the

command of Cyrus were a very different people in spirit and knowledge

from those who had gone into captivity. They had learnt civilization.

In the development of their peculiar character a very great part was

played by certain men, a new sort of men, the Prophets, to whom we must

now direct our attention. These Prophets mark the appearance of new

and remarkable forces in the steady development of human society.

20.THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

20.THE LAST BABYLONIAN EMPIRE

AND

THE EMPIRE OF DARIUS

We have already mentioned how Assyria became a great military power under Tiglath Pileser III and under the usurper Sargon II. Sargon was not this man’s original name; he adopted it to flatter the conquered Babylonians by reminding them of that ancient founder of the Akkadian Empire, Sargon I, two thousand years before his time. Babylon, for all that it was a conquered city, was of greater population and importance than Nineveh, and its great god Bel Marduk and its traders and priests had to be treated politely. In Mesopotamia in the eighth century B.C. A.D. we are already far beyond the barbaric days when the capture of a town meant loot and massacre. Conquerors sought to propitiate and win the conquered. For a century and a half after Sargon the new Assyrian empire endured and, as we have noted, Assurbanipal (Sardanapalus) held at least lower Egypt.

But the power and solidarity of Assyria waned rapidly. Egypt by an

effort threw off the foreigner under a Pharoah Psammetichus I, and

under Necho II attempted a war of conquest in Syria. By that time

Assyria was grappling with foes nearer at hand, and could make but a

poor resistance. A Semitic people from south-east Mesopotamia, the

Chaldeans, combined with Aryan Medes and Persians from the north-east

against Nineveh, and in 606 B.C.—for now we are coming down to exact

chronology—took that city.

There was a division of the spoils of Assyria. A Median Empire was set

up in the north under Cyaxares. It included Nineveh, and its capital

was Ecbatana. Eastward it reached to the borders of India. To the

south of this in a great crescent was a new Chaldean Empire, the Second

Babylonian Empire, which rose to a very great degree of wealth and

power under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar the Great (the Nebuchadnezzar of

the Bible). The last great days, the greatest days of all, for Babylon

began. For a time the two Empires remained at peace, and the daughter

of Nebuchadnezzar was married to Cyaxares.

Meanwhile Necho II was pursuing his easy conquests in Syria. He had

defeated and slain King Josiah of Judah, a small country of which there

is more to tell presently, at the battle of Megiddo in 608 B.C., and he

pushed on to the Euphrates to encounter not a decadent Assyria but a

renascent Babylonia. The Chaldeans dealt very vigorously with the

Egyptians. Necho was routed and driven back to Egypt, and the

Babylonian frontier pushed down to the ancient Egyptian boundaries.

Map showing the relation of the Median and Second Babylonian (Chaldæan)

Empires in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great

From 606 until 589 B.C. the Second Babylonian Empire flourished

insecurely. It flourished so long as it kept the peace with the

stronger, hardier Median Empire to the north. And during these

sixty-seven years not only life but learning flourished in the ancient

city.

Map: The Empire of Darius (tribute-paying countries) at its greatest

extent

Even under the Assyrian monarchs and especially under Sardanapalus,

Babylon had been a scene of great intellectual activity. Sardanapalus,

though an Assyrian, had been quite Babylon-ized. He made a library, a

library not of paper but of the clay tablets that were used for writing

in Mesopotamia since early Sumerian days. His collection has been

unearthed and is perhaps the most precious store of historical material

in the world. The last of the Chaldean line of Babylonian monarchs,

Nabonidus, had even keener literary tastes. He patronized antiquarian

researches, and when a date was worked out by his investigators for the

accession of Sargon I he commemorated the fact by inscriptions. But

there were many signs of disunion in his empire, and he sought to

centralize it by bringing a number of the various local gods to Babylon

and setting up temples to them there. This device was to be practised

quite successfully by the Romans in later times, but in Babylon it

roused the jealousy of the powerful priesthood of Bel Marduk, the

dominant god of the Babylonians. They cast about for a possible

alternative to Nabonidus and found it in Cyrus the Persian, the ruler

of the adjacent Median Empire. Cyrus had already distinguished himself

by conquering Croesus, the rich king of Lydia in Eastern Asia Minor.

He came up against Babylon, there was a battle outside the walls, and

the gates of the city were opened to him (538 B.C.). His soldiers

entered the city without fighting. The crown prince Belshazzar, the

son of Nabonidus, was feasting, the Bible relates, when a hand appeared

and wrote in letters of fire upon the wall these mystical words:

_“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,”_ which was interpreted by the prophet

Daniel, whom he summoned to read the riddle, as “God has numbered thy

kingdom and finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found

wanting and thy kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians.” Possibly

the priests of Bel Marduk knew something about that writing on the

wall. Belshazzar was killed that night, says the Bible. Nabonidus was

taken prisoner, and the occupation of the city was so peaceful that the

services of Bel Marduk continued without intermission.

PERSIAN MONARCH

Thus it was the Babylonian and Median empires were united. Cambyses,

the son of Cyrus, subjugated Egypt. Cambyses went mad and was

accidentally killed, and was presently succeeded by Darius the Mede,

Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, one of the chief councillors of Cyrus.

THE RUINS OF PERSEPOLIS

THE GREAT PORCH OF XERXES, AT PERSEPOLIS

The Persian Empire of Darius I, the first of the new Aryan empires in

the seat of the old civilizations, was the greatest empire the world

had hitherto seen. It included all Asia Minor and Syria, all the old

Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Egypt, the Caucasus and Caspian

regions, Media, Persia, and it extended into India as far as the Indus.

Such an empire was possible because the horse and rider and the

chariot and the made-road had now been brought into the world.

Hitherto the ass and ox and the camel for desert use had afforded the

swiftest method of transport. Great arterial roads were made by the

Persian rulers to hold their new empire, and post horses were always in

waiting for the imperial messenger or the traveller with an official

permit. Moreover the world was now beginning to use coined money,

which greatly facilitated trade and intercourse. But the capital of

this vast empire was no longer Babylon. In the long run the priesthood

of Bel Marduk gained nothing by their treason. Babylon though still

important was now a declining city, and the great cities of the new

empire were Persepolis and Susa and Ecbatana. The capital was Susa.

Nineveh was already abandoned and sinking into ruins.