SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 663
counterpart of the Sinic World's never violated southern fortress in an
Anatolia1 which had no morphological affinity at all with the Sinic
World's latter-day southern extension, though it had a partial affinity
on this physiographical plane with the Sinic World's original nucleus
in the North.

Both the extent and the limits of this physiographical correspondence
hetween Anatolia and Northern China come to light when we remind
ourselves that the chain of mountain-girt fluvial plains, extending from
the Wei Basin on the west to the Lower Yellow River Basin on the
east, had played, in the genesis and growth of the Sinic Civilization,
the part played hi the genesis and growth of the Hellenic Civilization by
a chain of landlocked seas extending from the Aegean on the south to
the Sea of Azov on the north.2 The Aegean reach of this saline inland
waterway had been the original home of a maritime Hellenic Society
which had come to birth between the Aegean's Asiatic and European
shores; and the Asiatic half of the birthplace of Hellenism—which was
to figure on a pre-Diocletianic Roman imperial administrative map as
the province of 'Asia'—occupied the western extremity of the Anatolian
Peninsula up to the western fringes of the Central Steppe. Thus the
Anatolian citadel of a post-Diocletianic Roman Empire included the
Asiatic half of the Hellenic World's original nucleus; but, on the other
hand, it did not include the European half of this homeland of Hellen-
ism, while it did include a Central and an Eastern Anatolia which, so
far from having been parts of the Hellenic Civilization's original patri-
mony, had been the homelands of a Hittite Civilization which had
neither been annexed to the Hellenic Society's political domain nor
exposed to an intensive play of Hellenic cultural radiation until after
the overthrow of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great.
The Anatolian citadel of the Roman. Empire was thus composed of
one-half of the original homeland of Hellenism in combination with
the whole of the original homeland of the Hittite Civilization; and we
have already noticed in previous contexts3 that, in the eventual struc-
tures of both a Hellenistic Orthodox Christian World and an East
Roman avatar of the Roman Empire, the centre of gravity came to rest
in a ci-devant Hittite Central and Eastern Anatolia that were occupied
by the East Roman Empire's Anatolic and Armeniac army corps
districts, and not in a ci-devant Hellenic Western Anatolia, where a
Thracensian army corps district occupied the area once covered by the
Roman province of Asia.

In Late Roman Imperial history an Anatolia whose cultural heritage
was thus partly Hellenic but predominantly Hittite was the scene of
decisive events corresponding on the politico-military plane to the
historic defeat in AJ>. 383 of the Hunno-Tibetan barbarian assailants
of the Sinic southern fortress; and the salvaging of Anatolia in the fifth
century of the Christian Era was as signal an achievement of contem-
porary Roman imperial statesmanship as the loss of North-West Africa
was a nemesis of local Roman sins of omission hi the past.

1 See VI. vii. 357, n. 4. 3 See DC viii, 711-12.

3 In II. ii. 79-80 and IV. iv. 342.