GREAT PEOPLES OF THE
ANCIENT WORLD
I
E
^.
I
GREAT PEOPLES OF THE
ANCIENT WORLD
BY
D. M. VAUGHAN, M.A.
WITH COLOURED FRONTISPIECE
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP,
NEW IMPRESSKJ
LONGMANS, GREEN AND (fl
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4
NEW YORK, TORONTO
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS
1927
All rights reserved
trt Great
PREFACE
THIS book has been written to introduce its readers
to the life of ancient times. The first part consists
of the eight descriptive chapters (mostly in story
form), and the second of a brief historical summary,
bibliography, a few notes, a map and a time chart,
for the use of teachers and any older readers who may
care to take it up. It is hoped that this arrangement
will stimulate the pupil's interest, while providing any
teacher who may feel the need of it with a little
help in sketching in background, linking up the
periods described, or dealing with questions provoked
by the stories.
While the material has been for the most part put
into the form of life-histories of imaginary characters,
every care has been taken to make the pictures of
events, customs, dress, etc., as accurate as possible,
by verifying all details from historical and archaeo-
logical sources. In this connection my warmest thanks
are due to Professor J. L. Myres, of Oxford, whom I
have had the privilege of consulting on several points ;
Professor T. E. Peet, of Liverpool University, who has
kindly helped me with the chapter on Egypt; and,
above all, to Professor Garstang, Director of the British
School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, who has given me
invaluable advice and criticism on the work as a whole,
vi PREFACE
and supplied me with materials (particularly for
Chapter V.) which would otherwise have been inacces-
sible to me. The shortcomings of the book must be
attributed entirely to my own inability to make the
best use of the help so generously given.
My grateful indebtedness to authors and publishers
for the use of illustrations kindly supplied from their
works is acknowledged beneath the blocks.
DOROTHY M. VAUGHAN.
LIVERPOOL,
September, 1924.
CONTENTS
CHAPTFR PAGE
I. THE WANDERING PEOPLES i
II. THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON . . . 11
III. THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS OF CRETE . . 27
IV. PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 44
V. IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES . . . .70
VI. THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS . . 94
VII. ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE .... . 113
VIII. THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE ... -131
HISTORICAL SUMMARY . . . , 155
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS, WITH BIBLIOGRAPHY. 168
INDEX 177
vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FAGF
Anubis weighing the heart of the scribe Ani in the Great
Scales against the feather symbolical of the Law. British
Museum Papyrus. (Coloured Plate) . . . Frontispiece
Men of the desert arriving in Egypt i
Scythians taming horses . 8
Hammurabi . . . n
Shamash appearing over the mountains . 16
Ishtar, Lady of Battles 17
Babylonian Temple (restored) 18
Bringing offerings in a temple 19
Cuneiform signs, showing differences in different times and
places . . 20
Hammurabi before Shamash 25
A Minoan lady's dress 29
Octopus vase found at Gournia . 31
Shrine of a Goddess with offerings of shells, models of flying-
fish, doves, dresses, etc. Found (in fragments) at Knossos 33
The great staircase at Knossos 35
Storehouse at Knossos . 39
Leaping over a charging bull 40
Ship with horse . 42
Gardener at work drawing water 45
Egyptian toys 46
A Nile boat 47
Fowling and fishing 49
Syrian Chiefs before Thothmes III . . 50
Tribute-bearers $!
Hauling a statue 53
An Egyptian party 6 X
Great Temple of Amenhotep III. at Luxor 62
Foreign slaves of the Egyptians . . 63
viii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
PAGE
Amenhotep III. enthroned 64
Map of Syria 70
A Hittite soldier 72
Lion Corner-stone from Marash, with Hittite writing carved
upon it 75
Walls of Hattusa? .... . 78
The Lion Gate of Hattusas . . 79
Procession of Hittite Deities carved in the rock 82
Hittite musicians 83
Rameses II. goes to battle, with his pet lion beside his chariot 85
A Hittite captured by the Egyptians ... ... 86
Hittite carving in Assyrian style . .... 92
The High Place of Gezer . . ... .... 97
Philistines defending their waggons ... . . 101
Head of Philistine ... 102
A Phoenician galley 107
An Assyrian carving of Arabs and camels 116
Winged bull guarding the doorway of an Assyrian palace . . 118
A Lion let loose for the hunt 122
Ashur-bani-pal in his chariot .123
The King spears a lion ... 124
The symbol of Ashur in various forms ... . 125
Assyrian army besieging a town ... 126
Crossing a river .... ... 127
Blowing up the skins 128
Ashur-bani-pal and his Queen feasting among the trees . . 129
Open-air altars . 135
Towers of the Ishtar Gate ... 137
One of the " Immortals " 138
Darius and his conquered enemies. (The" Rock of Behistun.") 144
A room in the palace at Susa . 145
Persian decoration in coloured tiles 147
Gold coin issued by Croesus .148
Persian gold coin. (Dane.) . . 149
Greek and Persian fighting -154
Sketch-map showing mam lines of migration . 157
Map of the Nearer East in Ancient Times 158
Time Chart at end of book
A 2
" Let us now praise famous men . . .
Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms,
Men renowned for their power .
Leaders of the people by their counsels, . .
Such as found out musical tunes,
And recited verses in writing ;
Rich men furnished with ability,
Living peaceably in their habitations :
All these were honoured in their generations,
And were the glory of their times.
There be of them that have left a name behind them,
That their praises might be reported.
And some there be which have no memorial ;
Which are perished, as though they had never been."
ECCLESIASTICUS, xliv.
"These are the researches of Herodotus of Halikarnassus,
which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay
the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the
great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians
from losing their due meed of glory."
HERODOTUS, Bk. i.
Men of the desert arriving in Egypt.
(From Breasted's " Ancuttf Times." Ginn & Co.)
GREAT PEOPLES OF THE
ANCIENT WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE WANDERING PEOPLES
IT is always pleasant, at the end of a journey, to meet
some one we know. And to-day we have to travel many
hundreds of miles to the eastwards, far away from our
own land, and at the same time to go back through four
thousand years towards the beginnings of man's life
on earth. Of course such a tremendous journey will
take us into very strange times and places ; so probably
you will be glad to meet some one you know about
when we arrive.
When our minds have travelled through all these
miles and years, we are in a land of low rolling hills,
bare and treeless, far from the sea, and looking at first
empty of people. There are no towns, no smoky
chimneys, no walled gardens or ploughed fields with
hedges round them. But in the distance we see a group
of tents, and a number of sheep and goats are grazing
near. Then shepherds come from the encampment
2 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and begin to round up part of the flocks, ready to be
driven away from the rest. Several of the tents are taken
down and packed on the backs of donkeys. Other
donkeys are loaded with what seem to be the belongings
of a few people who are leaving the little camp and going
away by themselves, and those people are saying good-
bye now, outside the biggest tent, to the relatives they
are leaving behind. It is Abraham and his little band,
going out from his country and his kindred and his father's
house, into a land he had never seen.
We can all read the story of Abraham in the Book of
Genesis, so there is no need to tell it again here. But
have you ever thought of it, not simply as " a Bible story,"
but as a picture of real life in far-off times and countries ?
That is how we are going to think of it now.
Abraham and his family belonged to a great race
of men called Semites, whose home was in Northern
Arabia. Everybody knows that a great deal of Arabia
is desert ; for miles and miles there may be nothing but
bare rock or blown sand, where no rain falls, no rivers
rise, and nothing can grow. But there are other parts
where people can live. On the hills there is mist and
rain or even snow sometimes, and the moisture that
falls collects here and there in hollows and forms pools,
or fills the dry torrent-beds with streams that soon dry
up again, so that for a while grass and plants spring up
and flourish. In these parts people can keep flocks
and herds, or even cultivate the ground for part of the
year ; but as the animals eat up the pasture and drink
the pools dry very quickly, they have to be always on
the move In the days we are thinking of, they had
no roads or railways to travel by ; they had not even
horses or camels for a long time, but only sheep and
oxen and asses ; and they had no maps or compasses
to guide them, but steered by the hills and other land-
marks in daylight, and at night by the stars that shine so
THE WANDERING PEOPLES 3
brightly in the clear desert air. They did not wander
aimlessly about ; they knew where the stretches of pasture
lay, and travelled from one to another according to the
season.
People who live in this way do not want to be
burdened with heavy possessions, so their dwelling is
a tent, made from the animals' skins, or cloth woven
from their wool, and their furniture consists of a few rugs
and mats and cushions to sit or lie on, and leather bags
and bottles for the milk foods on which they chiefly live.
Abraham and thousands of others lived this simple
nomadic life, in the desert and on its fringes, and in the
same lands men are living in the same way to-day.
When we first hear of Abraham he is travelling about
with his father Terah, his wife, and a nephew Lot, whose
father was already dead. Terah was the head of the
family, and would guide and rule the little band as long
as he lived ; later on Abraham in the same way was the
head of his party. This was the only government these
Semitic tribes knew, as long as they had no settled
homes ; they went about in family groups, and the father
or grandfather of each family was its only master. But
when they began to settle down and build cities, where
a great many families lived together, they had to arrange
matters rather differently, and have one chief or king
to be ruler over all the heads of families.
We do not hear of Abraham ever living actually
in the desert, and if we follow him in his wanderings we
see that he moves about among great settled nations.
Almost the first thing we read is that the family belonged
to the neighbourhood of Ur, later called " of the
Chaldees," which is one of the oldest cities on earth.
It was over two thousand years old in Abraham's day,
and had been built, with several other famous towns,
by a very civilized people, the Sumerians, who lived about
the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris (which were
4 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
separate in those days). It was a very important place,
and had famous temples in and near it, where they
worshipped a god of the Moon ; they were strongly
built of brick and finely decorated.
Then we read of Abraham going down into Egypt,
and having to do with the Pharaoh there, whose name,
however, we are not told. Egypt had long been settled
and civilized, and the Pyramids were already old at this
time. In Canaan Abraham found many lesser kings
ruling in their cities, and he bought the only piece of
ground he ever owned, the field where he made his wife's
grave, from some Hittites who were settled in that
country. The Hittites belonged to a nation that was
going to be great and famous in a few centuries, but in
those days they were only becoming known to the
civilized peoples, and that is why their king is called in
the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, Tidal King of
" Goyyim," which is a Hebrew word meaning Foreigners
or Strangers. Tidal (whose name in his own language
was Tudhalia), King of the Strangers, was an ally of
three other kings in a great battle ; they were the kings
of Ellasar and Elam (a country near the mouth of the
Tigris), and " Amraphel King of Shinar," the Hebrew
way of naming Hammurabi of Babylon, a very great
king whom we shall hear more about later. So Abraham
and the other kingless wanderers of Arabia were by no
means living in an empty world, but were in touch with
the chief nations of the times in which they lived. Indeed,
the Semites played a very important part in history, for a
reason we shall now see.
We know that Abraham believed that God had
specially promised him that his descendants should
one day leave the desert with its hardships and own a
pleasant country of rich fields and flowers " a land
flowing with milk and honey " where they would be
much better off; and the promise was fulfilled when
THE WANDERING PEOPLES 5
-several hundred years later the Children of Israel came
out of Egypt by the way of the wilderness and settled
down in Canaan. But the Jews were not the only
people who left the desert and came to dwell in a " good
land " in this way, though they were the only ones who
had any religious beliefs about doing so. The Canaanites
and the Amorites and the men of Babylon and Assyria
were all Semitic peoples who had come out of the wilder-
ness at different times ; and when we remember what
life in the desert was like, we are not surprised to find
that all through history men have tried to push their
way out of North Arabia into the fertile countries round
about.
They did it in two ways. Nearly all the time the
Semites were coming gradually to the desert edges and
settling there, a few at a time, in this way. Even in the
earliest times they used to call at the towns and villages
as they passed near them, in order to exchange spare
animals or sheepskins for metal weapons or anything
they wanted and could not make for themselves. Then
they noticed that people in one town often admired
some article which came from another place, whether
it was for sale or not, so they took to buying things
which they did not want themselves, simply to sell again
in another village. In this way some of the Semites
became traders, and special parties or " caravans " used
to make extra journeys, not in search of pasture, but
carrying goods for sale. In order to travel faster and do
more business, the merchants then began to leave their
wives and families and flocks in some safe convenient
place near their starting-point, and in this way their
first settlements were made, either in the cities that were
already there, or in new ones built by the Semites them-
selves. They also came out of the desert every now and
then in great numbers, when a series of dry seasons had
made pasture scarcer than usual, or had dried up some
6 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
of the wells. At these times there would be a regular
invasion of the fertile countries, to which the people
already settled there naturally objected, even if they
were themselves Semites and the descendants of men
who had done just the same thing a few centuries before.
In later days the Jews thought that the times and ways
of Abraham were the best they had ever known, but as
a rule the settled peoples rather looked down on the
nomads. There is an Egyptian story which shows this
in rather an interesting way. It is called " The Romance
of Sinuhe," and describes the adventures of an Egyptian
noble who, having some reason to fear the king's anger,
fled away and took refuge in the desert. The Egyptians
had built a fort to protect their land from the " sand-
dwellers," as they called them, but Sinuhe managed to
escape past the guards by night. Next day, when nearly
dead of heat and thirst, he heard the lowing of cattle,
and a band of men from the desert came up and saved
him. They gave him water and boiled milk, and took
him away with them. Wishing to get as far from Egypt
as possible, he was handed on from tribe to tribe, and
at last came to the lands of a chief who was already
sheltering some other Egyptian refugees. This chief
was very good to him, gave him a rich piece of land for
his use, and married him to his daughter. In return
Sinuhe helped him in his wars, so that all his enemies
" trembled in their pastures by their wells." Thus the
Egyptian lived for many years as a regular bedouin sheikh ;
his friend and protector sent him daily rations of bread
and wine, cooked meat and roast fowls, much butter,
and milk prepared in every kind of way ; and he spent
the time fighting, hunting, helping travellers, rescuing
the lost, and punishing robbers. He was once challenged
to single combat by a native champion who was jealous
of this fortunate foreigner ; Sinuhe was victorious,
killed his enemy, and took his tent and his cattle and
THE WANDERING PEOPLES ^
all his possessions. His sons grew up and prospered
likewise.
But as he grew old he became homesick for Egypt
and its comfortable ways. He wanted cool clothing of
fine linen, a proper bed to sleep in, baths and ointments
and such things, which were unknown in the desert.
Above all, he hated the idea of dying among the bedouins,
and being buried like one of them, wrapped in a sheep-
skin, in a sandy grave, instead of having a splendid funeral
and a fine stone tomb such as his countrymen had. So
at last he wrote to the king, asking permission to return
home ; and it is quite pleasant to know that he was
welcomed back, and nothing worse happened to him
than to be teased by the other nobles at court about
his foreign manners.
# # * * #
The Semites of Arabia were not the only wanderers
without kings. Far away to the north, in the southern
parts of the countries which we now call Russia and
Siberia, there lay another great stretch of country where
people could best live by constantly moving about.
On this vast grassland, many hundreds of miles from east
to west, lived a great number of nomadic tribes who are
called the Aryan or Indo-European peoples. They
were better off than the Semites in several ways. Their
home was much bigger than Arabia, so that they had
more room ; in fact, it was so large that when they had
spread all over it, the tribes at opposite ends never saw
each other, and grew very different in their language and
religion, though there was always a family likeness between
them. Then their land was nowhere so barren as the
worst parts of Arabia, and in places was very fertile, so
that some were able to settle down and cultivate their
own country, and we find that they were fonder of
farming and less interested in trade than the Semites.
Near by there were forests, so that they learnt to fell
8 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
trees and make houses and carts with the timber. Lastly,
and perhaps most important of all, in the eastern parts
of this grassland there roamed herds of wild horses,
which the Aryans gradually learnt to tame and use.
They rode them, harnessed them to their wooden carts,
and had the milk of the mares for food, so that they could
travel more quickly than the men of Arabia with their
donkeys and slow-moving herds of sheep and goats.
But in spite of these advantages the Aryans were no
more content to stay in their own land than the Semites
were. Some parts of it were certainly poor and barren,
Scythians taming horses.
(From Minns' " Scythians and Greeks." Cambridge Press.)
and no doubt there were times of drought when the
tribes who lived there found that they could stay no
longer because of lack of rain, just as in Arabia. We all
know what happens when a few people in the middle of
a crowd begin pushing to get out ; they disturb every-
body, even those on the edge. The Aryans seem to have
been disturbed from within rather in the same way, and
so we find the outermost tribes pushing or being pushed
southwards, towards the very regions which the Semites
tried to enter. Thus, although at first the Northerners,
as we shall call them, were a long way from Mesopotamia
or Syria or Egypt, in time those lands were attacked from
THE WANDERING PEOPLES 9
both sides. (The map opposite page 158 with the arrows
will help to explain this.)
We might wonder why the Aryans did not spread out
over the flat lands northwards and westwards, instead
of turning southwards towards the great mountain barrier
of Greece and Asia Minor and Iran. Probably they had
two very good reasons. First, though they had no books
or newspapers or cinemas to tell them about foreign
countries, they must have known that the lands to the
south were warmer and pleasanter than those to the
north. Secondly, they depended a great deal on their
herds, and did not want to change their way of living,
though some of them had to do so by degrees. There
were mountains to the south, certainly, but you can take
cattle and horses up one valley and down another across
hills ; and in the north in those days there were dense
forests, where it is no use trying to take droves of animals.
As a matter of fact, some Aryan tribes did make their
way northwards and westwards ; but they went into
lands where history does not begin till a good deal later,
and so we do not hear about them.
We have no stories about the Northerners in their
own old home, like those about Abraham and Sinuhe ;
they could not read or write, and for a long time were
not visited by any one who could do so, and so the stories
of their early days were forgotten. But as the centuries
passed, there came out of that dim unknown land some
of the greatest races in history. The chief of these in
ancient times were the Persians, the Greeks, and the
Romans ; and though there is no space in this little book
to tell anything of the Greeks and Romans, the stories
of these three nations and their doings are some of the
finest that ever were written.
If you look at the page before the beginning of this
chapter, you will see quoted there the opening words of
the oldest history-book in the world, the History of
io GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Herodotus. Herodotus was the author who wrote
down in that book the account of a famous war between
the Greeks and the Persians, which we shall hear some-
thing about later. He was the first to tell that great
tale, but who will be the last to tell it no one knows ;
for it is one that will never be forgotten while the world
lasts. The same is true of some of the Roman stories.
But they are all more interesting if you know something
of what happened beforehand ; and that is really why
this book has been written.
CHAPTER II
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON
WE have heard already of the king who ruled Babylon
in the days of Abraham ; here is a picture of him, with
Photo W. A. Manseil & Co. (British Museum.)
Hammurabi.
" Hammurabi, the minister of Ami, the servant of Bel, the
beloved of Shamash, the shepherd who delighteth Marduk's heart ;
the mighty king, the king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad,
king of the Four Quarters of the World, the king who hath
built anew the shrines of the great gods . . . the founder of the
land ... am I."
i:
12 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
some of the titles of honour which he used. In his time
Babylon was becoming a great city, though it was not
yet a very old one. It had not been one of the ancient
Sumerian towns like Ur (p. 3), but had only become
important when some of Hammurabi's ancestors made
their way out of the desert, conquered part of the
Euphrates valley, and took Babylon for their capital.
But it remained a very important place all through ancient
times, partly because it was in a splendid position for
trade, and partly because of the good start which this
wise king gave it.
Let us imagine that we are travellers visiting the city
one day while Hammurabi is king. We are standing
looking round us in an open square, where a market is
being held. It is crowded with people buying and selling,
and here and there merchants from a distance are unload-
ing the donkeys they have driven in, laden mostly with
dates and rolls of woollen cloth. The folk around us
vary in looks, in dress, and in speech. Some of the
men are shaven, and wear a short skirt and a mantle
thrown over the left shoulder, reminding us of a High-
lander's kilt and plaid. They are the conquered
race, the Sumerians, and they still speak their own
old language, but there is no longer any ill-feeling
between them and the tall, bearded Semites who mingle
with them, closely wrapped in long robes. Indeed,
the Sumerians were at first the more civilized people,
and their conquerors have been wise enough to make
friends with them and learn all they could from them.
As we watch the crowd, we see that the women move
about freely and are not kept shut up in their houses.
Some of the rich ladies are very gorgeous with their
flounced dresses and gold ornaments, ear-rings, finger-
rings, and heavy bangles, and their little train of slaves
in attendance. We notice that nearly every well-dressed
gentleman has some small object tied to his wrist by a
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 13
fine cord. A group of prosperous-looking traders are
standing near us, discussing prices and prospects, and
planning to go partners in a business venture to Egypt.
Another man joins them, and holds his hand up proudly
to show his friends what is fastened to his wrist, so we
see it too. It is a new seal-cylinder, which the jeweller
has just finished for him ; a small rounded piece of
dark-green serpentine, about an inch and a quarter
long, beautifully engraved with a scene from the Baby-
lonian sacred stories, and threaded on a length of fine
gold wire. All his friends admire it, but one of them
points out that the wire is not quite securely fastened,
and the owner says he will have it seen to at once. It
would be very serious if he lost it, for the impression of
a man's seal is the same thing as his signature or private
trade-mark, and with it he signs the letters which a
secretary probably writes for him because he cannot
write himself, receipts his bills, stamps his goods, and
perhaps even u locks up " his house or shop by securing
the door with a pat of clay sealed with his sign for locks
and keys are unknown.
One of the other merchants now leaves the group and
hurries away, and we observe how respectfully two
lightly-clad working-men, lounging outside a beer-shop
close at hand, make way for him. In Babylon distinc-
tions of rank are very strictly observed. Men of a higher
class had certain privileges, but on the other hand they
were liable to be more severely punished for certain
crimes, and they were obliged by law to pay their doctor
a higher fee.
Now we hear two ladies chatting behind us. One of
them describes a fine wedding-feast at which she has
lately been a guest, and speaks of the handsome dowry
which the bride's father had given her a beautiful set
of gold ornaments, a house and garden of her own, and
several slaves. She asks her companion if she knows
i 4 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
whether it is true that the daughter of a well-known
citizen has really decided to join an order of temple-
votaresses instead of getting married as every one expected.
But the other lady does not know, and confesses that she
is too anxious about her husband's affairs to be interested
in such gossip. It seems he is a merchant who has been
unfortunate in business of late, and only this morning
news has come that his agent, travelling with valuable
goods, has been robbed and murdered by the wild men
of the desert, which means another heavy loss. After
this tale of woe it is pleasant to overhear a poor woman
joyfully telling a friend that her husband, who was
only a slave when she married him, has just saved up
enough to buy his freedom, and is now his own master.
We leave the market-place and stroll along one of
the streets, which are mostly straight, cutting each other
at right angles. The government sees to it that the
people keep them clean. The houses are built of brick,
one story high, and roofed with brushwood laid upon
poles and covered with beaten clay. People often sleep
on the flat house-tops in hot weather. The lower
courses are usually of hard kiln-baked brick, but the
upper parts are of brick which has only been dried in
the sun, and as there has been heavy rain recently repairs
are needed here and there. A very severe law made
at this time shows that Babylon suffered from jerry-
building. We see no stone houses, for here the rock
lies far below the rich soil which the rivers bring down
year by year, too deep to be quarried. We venture to
peep into one small house, and find that the furniture
is very simple several chairs of a sort, a bed in one
corner, a big double water-jar which filters the water
in it, some plates, and two or three bowls. But the
pottery is not very pretty or interesting, and the family's
chief treasure seems to be a big copper pot.
As we go on our way we meet two men leading a large
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 15
animal with some difficulty up the street. The beast
creates quite a sensation, though you and I know it well ;
small boys call to each other to come and see it, and even
grown people look at it with curiosity. They call it
" the ass of the east," or " ass of the mountains," and
wonder whether it is really as strong and useful as an
ox or a donkey ; for in Babylonia men are just beginning
to know the horse.
The street leads down to the river bank, and we find
another busy scene, for boats of various sizes and shapes
are passing up and down, or loading or discharging cargo.
They bring corn and dates, timber from far upstream, and
jars of oil. Two boatmen, managing a heavily-laden
craft unskilfully, bring her into collision with another,
tied up to the quay ; some damage is done, and a hot
dispute follows as to whose fault it is, for the boatmen
have to make good any losses to the owner of the cargo.
Very likely there will be a lawsuit about it, so, not wishing
to be summoned as witnesses, we hurry away. Some
distance off, a tower excites our curiosity, and making
our way towards it, we soon find ourselves at the gates
of Babylon's chief temple, E-sagila, the " lofty house "
of the great city-god Marduk.
Before we go in, we had better pause for a moment
and think about religion in the ancient world generally,
for we must not imagine that it meant then what it means
to us to-day. Religion in these far-off times had often
very little to do with questions of right and wrong, and
was largely concerned with what we might call ways of
" managing " the gods, and obtaining good gifts from
them by various means. Most early peoples believed
that there were mighty unseen beings in the world who
controlled nature and human life in one way or other,
sending sunshine or rain, good harvests and increase
of cattle, or perhaps victory in war or 6ther good fortune.
If the god was angry, he would send evil instead ; and
i6 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
in any case he would only help and fight for the city or
tribe who worshipped him. To please such deities, a
man did not need to live what we should call a good life,
he had only to offer the proper sacrifices and go through
the ceremonies which the god expected. Some gods
and goddesses were even believed to demand from their
worshippers acts which we should consider positively
sinful, such as wild drunken feasts in their honour, or
the cruel sacrifice of little children. In Babylon, however,
men had outgrown this stage, and thought that the great
gods at least were lovers of justice and righteousness ;
but they believed in lesser spirits as well, who were evil
and cruel.
The most important of the gods worshipped in
Babylonia were Ami, the god of the sky, Enlil, the earth-
spirit, and Ea, who ruled the waters. Enlil, whose
chief temple was at a city called Nippur, was at first
considered the head of all the gods, and was therefore
called " Bel," or Lord ; but in Babylon men gave this
title to Marduk, and held him in the highest reverence.
Ea was said to have come up from the sea to teach men
how to live in civi-
lized ways. Ham-
murabi's subjects
also adored Shamash
the sun-god, who
was thought of as the
rising sun coming
forth from the gates
of dawn and appear-
ing over the moun-
tains, and also as a
righteous judge and lover of just dealing (see p. 25).
There was a god of the moon as well, Sin, who had a
great shrine at Ur. * A god of storms was known as Adad ;
and a gloomy, destructive deity Nergal, with his wife
Shamash appearing over the
mountains.
( From Ward's " Seal-Cylindtrs of Western Asia.")
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 17
Ereshkigal, was said to rule the underworld where the
spirits of men went after death. The other gods had wives
as well as Nergal, but they were not considered very
important, and the chief goddess was always Ishtar,
the queen of love and war.
Many stories were told of these divinities. Marduk,
it was said, had won his place as chief over the three older
gods (Anu, Ea, and Enlil) because in the war with
Chaos at the beginning of all things he slew the dragon
Tiamat and made the earth ready for men. Afterwards
mankind so displeased their makers that Bel sent a great
Ishtar, Lady of Battles.
(From Ward's " Seal-Cylinders of Western Asia.' )
flood to drown them all, but Ea, kindest of the gods,
saved one man and his family alive. One tale told how
Ishtar, whose husband Tammuz had died, made her
way down to the dark realms of Nergal, and passing the
seven gates of his seven-walled citadel, at last rescued
Tammuz from him and his cruel queen. Another related
how Ishtar once loved the hero Gilgamesh, and then,
hating him because he scorned her, sent all manner of
i8 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
evils upon him. After fighting lions and passing through
many other trials sent by the angry goddess, Gilgamesh
came to the Islands of the Blest, and was near obtaining
immortal life both for himself and mankind, but failed
in the end. The Babylonians had very gloomy views
about death and the hereafter. They thought that unless
a man were properly buried with a supply of food and
drink beside him, he would wander on earth as a restless
Babylonian Temple (restored).
(By permission of the Medici Society, Limited.)
hungry ghost. In spite of this idea, however, they did
not make very durable or elaborate tombs. But as a
rule they thought that the spirit went to Nergal's kingdom,
the " Land of No Return," a dull, misty place somewhere
beneath the earth, where all the spirits, bad or good,
lived a shadowy half-life together.
Now let us enter the temple of Marduk. It consists
of the great step-like tower or ziggurat, and several other
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 19
buildings, enclosed in a large courtyard. All the build-
ings are of brick, but they stand on a high mound, out
of reach of the floods. To the Babylonians a temple
was, so to speak, the palace of the god, where he lived,
unseen, very much the same sort of life as the visible
king, needing fine rooms, splendid furniture, and the
service of many priests, just as the king required a royal
household. In the central shrine stands the great image
of Bel-Marduk, before which the chief ceremonies arc
performed. Every ruler of Babylon in turn has to grasp
the hands of this statue before he can be considered the
rightful king, and again at every New Year's feast through-
out his reign. The courtyard is crowded, and does not
suggest our idea of a holy
place. Here and there wor-
shippers are bringing animals
for sacrifice, and oil to pour
on the altar. There is a little
crowd round a flat slab or
" stele " of stone on which is
engraved the king's great code
of law ; men are consulting it
before engaging in lawsuits, or
finding out the legal rate of
wages due to them, or per-
haps, fearing they have broken
one of its regulations, are
anxiously looking to see what
is the penalty. In one place men are waiting in twos
and threes to have business contracts or other legal
documents drawn up by the priests. This is partly
because it is not every one who can write, and partly
because it is the priests who know the proper forms,
and will make the contract legal and binding, having a
religious sanction. We watch them at work ; the con-
tracting parties say what they have agreed to, and the
Bringing offerings in a
temple.
(From Ward's " Seat-Cylinders of
Western Asva.")
20 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
priest writes it down on a moist clay tablet with a sharp
stylus in " cuneiform " or wedge-shaped characters ;
Old Babylonian. Assyrian. New Babylonian. Meaning.
f Hf- "god."
|Pf MOT! ^T "house."
Cuneiform signs, showing differences in different times
and places.
(From Bntisk Museum Guide.)
the others then produce their seals and stamp it. The
tablet is then baked to harden it. If the document is a
letter, it is powdered with dry clay, wrapped in a clay
envelope and addressed, before being baked.
After seeing this we are not surprised to find priests
sitting as judges to hear legal cases, in another part of the
building. Sometimes the king himself acts as judge
when the matter is serious or important. We pause and
listen to one or two of the cases which the priests are
trying. One concerns the rent of a field which was to
be paid out of the crop, and is not forthcoming. Another
is an inquiry as to who shall bear the loss of several
missing sheep ; the shepherd who is responsible says a
lion carried them off, but the owner does not seem to
believe this explanation. In a third case, a gentleman is
suing a surgeon for damages, because he has treated
some eye-trouble for one of his slaves so unskilfully that
the man has lost his sight altogether, and is, of course,
useless to his owner. Stranger still to our ideas, we come
across a merchant who is borrowing money from the
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 21
temple revenues through one of the priests ; for the
temples owned lands and flocks and herds, and the priests
carried on banking business with the money they received.
In fact, in Babylonia and all Semitic lands, the temples
were centres of trade and money affairs, as well as of
religion, and this helps to explain why the Jews, even two
thousand years later, saw nothing wrong in using their
sanctuary for business purposes.
Still exploring, we find a school, where the priests
again are teachers. Some of the scholars are learning
to read and write, not only their own, but the ancient
Sumerian characters, in which many of the sacred books
were written. Others are being taught the stories of
the creation of the world and the doings of the gods.
Mathematics are also being studied, for the Babylonians
had a regular system of weights and measures, and used
the division of the circle into 360 degrees, just as we do.
The priests also teach astronomy, but it is a good deal
mixed up with astrology that is, the art of foretelling the
future by the stars. And here is a man who is expounding
a very strange subject to his class. He is showing them
another method of divination, very much practised in
Babylon. It was believed that the future could be fore-
told by studying the markings on the liver of a sheep
slain for sacrifice ; these markings vary in each animal,
and were supposed to have certain meanings. The future
priests are learning how to interpret these by means of a
model, rather like a modern palmist's or phrenologist's
chart. These practical, businesslike people still hold a
strong belief in magic, and besides knowing how to fore-
tell the future, a priest has also to learn the incantations
and ceremonies which he would have to use if called
upon to drive away one of the demons who were sup-
posed to bring ill-luck or sickness.
It is getting very hot here amongst the crowds and
in the stuffy buildings ; let us go down to the quays again
22 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and take boat on one of the canals, to get out into the
country. Soon we are away from the town and passing
by pleasant country houses with gardens and orchards.
We are on one of the main canals, and meet many other
boats, some rather like rafts, some round like coracles.
One kind of boat, made of skins stretched over a wooden
frame, always carries a donkey. We ask why, and our
boatman tells us that these skiffs come from the Tigris,
and that the owner means to sell the timber, which is
scarce in Babylonia, and carry the skins, and anything
else he may buy, home again on the donkey's back.
The country is a perfect network of canals, large and
small ; some are no more than ditches leading water
away to the fields. It does not rain much except in the
winter, and without irrigation the fertile soil would bear
no crops. Here and there we pass simple machines,
worked by oxen, for raising the water from the streams
to the level of the plough-land. Fishermen, sitting on
the banks, seem to catch plenty of fish.
We leave the main canal, and after a while, turning
a corner, we find we can go no further, for the canal
bank has slipped in, and all traffic is stopped. On the
far side of the obstruction quite a number of boats are
collected, waiting to continue their journey. Most of
the boatmen take the delay calmly, but two tired-looking
travellers are pacing up and down on the bank, looking
anxious and impatient. When they see our boat they
beckon to us ; we draw in to the side, and they come and
ask whether we would object to waiting here while our
boatman takes them on to the capital, for they are wit-
nesses in an important trial, specially summoned by the
king, who has bidden them travel day and night. As
we are only sight-seers, we agree gladly, and leaving the
boat we climb the bank to get a better view.
The country is flat and well-cultivated. Date-palms
grow in large numbers, but they are almost the only
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 23
trees to be seen. There are villages dotted about, little
groups of mud-brick houses, or huts made of bundles
of reeds tied together. Men are ploughing with a wooden
plough drawn by oxen. A little way off we catch sight
of a body of men approaching. As they come nearer,
we see that they are nearly naked, and are yoked together
two and two like animals, in charge of several drivers.
They are the public slaves, convicts or prisoners taken
in war, and they are kept busy on forced labours for the
city. They have been sent to dig out the canal, that the
boats may pass once more. As they halt and set to
work, we notice one man particularly, because of his
weary, sullen face ; he is evidently not used to hard out-
door work in the hot sun. One of the boatmen tells
us that a few weeks ago he was a royal official, but being
found guilty of defrauding the king and oppressing the
poor he was deprived of his office and sent to hard
labour. Hammurabi, " beloved of Shamash," the
righteous god, is not a king to tolerate injustice to his
people.
We leave the slave-gang at work and turn away from
die canal, and at last, following the directions of a
peasant, we strike a track that will take us back to the city
on foot. 'Before long we meet a party of soldiers on the
march, armed with bows and arrows, axes, lances, and
short curved swords. Soon afterwards we overtake
some men who are driving a few sheep and cattle towards
Babylon. It is their way of paying taxes, for money is
not much used yet. The animals will be added to the
royal flocks and herds, in which the king takes a great
interest. The royal shepherds have to keep accounts
and bring them at times to be inspected. At sheep-
shearing time there is a great gathering held. All this
reminds us that it is not long since the race that now
rules in Babylon were tent-dwellers and shepherds like
Abraham. In the same way their habit of burying the
24 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
dead in a simple grave, wrapped in a mat of plaited reeds
(before they learnt to use two large jars placed end to
end as a coffin), reminds us of that kind of funeral, the
prospect of which was so disliked by Sinuhe.
At last we are back in Babylon, and we feel that we
should like to see this King Hammurabi, of whom we
have heard so much. But on inquiring where we can
see him we hear that he is away at the war, fighting his
old enemies in the south. He has to spend a good deal
of his time in fighting, we are told, but for all that he
finds time to do much for his people's welfare. Babylon
is proud of her king, and well she may be. He has cut
a great new canal to bring unfailing water for Sumer and
Akkad, and he sees to it that the old ones are well kept,
each village doing its share. He has had a fine granary
built, and fortifications where needed. He is a very
active ruler, and messengers are always hastening with
his clay-tablet letters to and fro in his kingdom, so that
his officials are kept under strict control and do their duty
properly. Above all, it is his wish to give justice to every
one, and to protect the weak, the widow, and the orphan.
That is why he has made his scribes write down the ancient
laws of the country, together with some new ones, and
has set the great code in Marduk's temple for all to
see.
We glanced at the stone before in passing, but now,
before night falls, let us go back to E-sagila and look at
it once again. There it stands, with its columns of letter-
ing crowned by the carving of King Hammurabi himself,
standing reverently before Shamash, the god who had
taught him to love righteousness. It is a finer monument,
surely, than any picture of battle and conquest. This
king is not one who delights in war, though he is a
good fighter at need, and he never boasts of his conquests.
Instead, he is proud to say of himself, " I collected the
scattered peoples ... in abundance and plenty I pas-
THE GOLDEN AGE OF BABYLON 25
tured them, and I caused them to dwell in a peaceful
habitation.'*
Hammurabi before Shamash.
(From British Museum Quid* to Babylonian Colbctio*.)
With Hammurabi's death the best days of Babylon
26 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
came to an end. The city kept its great trade, because
of its position, but was constantly beset by enemies, and
often in subjection to a more warlike nation. Centuries
later she blossomed out afresh for a short time in great
splendour, and then we shall hear of her doings again.
But for the present we must leave Babylon and pass on
to another famous land.
CHAPTER III
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS OF CRETE
SOME five or six centuries later than the days of Abraham
and King Hammurabi, and rather nearer to our own land,
a little town lay on the shores of a beautiful bay in Crete.
The people who lived there had a lovely view before
them, whichever way they turned. To the north was the
clear blue bay with its rocky shores, one island peeping
over the shoulder of another near the opening, and the
wide sea beyond. Inland there were first the fields in the
valley, and then the hillsides steep, bare, stony slopes
in places, but elsewhere covered with woods. West-
ward, in the distance, rose a higher peak, Mount Dicte,
with a crown of shining snow. No one knows what
the town was called in those times, but nowadays it is
spoken of as Gournia ; and in one of its narrow streets,
many centuries ago, there lived a carpenter and his wife
and children. The man's name was Theras, and he
worked busily at his trade, sometimes for his neighbours,
and sometimes for the nobleman who lived in the big
house in the middle of the town. There were three
children, a boy about ten, whose name was JEthon ; his
sister JEthra, about seven ; and a brother called Merion,
who was only a baby still. Their mother, of course, was
kept busy looking after them and the house.
The life of this family was in some ways very like
ours, in others, of course, very different. The street in
which their house stood was very narrow, because
27
28 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
people did not use horses or carriages in Crete at that
time, and broad roads would have been just a waste of
space, besides letting in too much of the hot summer
sun ; so it was only five feet wide, but it was well paved
with stone. The house was built of stone below and
brick and timber above ; its wall rose up straight from
the street without any garden or railing. Inside there
were six or seven rooms, rather oddly arranged, because
the house, like a great many others in this hilly land,
stood on a slope, and had two storeys in front and three
at the back. So Theras could get into the big cellar
which he used as a workshop and storeroom either down-
stairs from the kitchen or by the back door which opened
straight into it. You could not see much from the front
windows, because of the houses so close opposite, but
from the back you could look out over the bay and see
the fishing-boats go in and out, and sometimes a bigger
ship taking shelter from a storm.
If you and I could somehow fly back through the
centuries and visit that house, I think we should find it
very small and empty. The first thing we should miss
would probably be the fireplace, for in Crete it was
warm enough to do without a fixed hearth, a brazier
full of charcoal gave all the heat that was needed even in
winter. Even in the kitchen there was no range, but
just a place where you could make a fire of sticks to heat
up a big three-legged pot. Their cooking was very
simple. They ate a good deal of fish, which was easily
to be had, and fruit, and drank wine or water.
In the living-rooms there was not much furniture.
There was probably oiled parchment in the windows
instead of glass, but there may have been little curtains
across them. There were small tables and low seats,
but the Minoans, as the Cretan people of that time are
called, very often just sat on the floor. There were no
books like ours on the shelves, though the Minoans could
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS
29
read and write ; no piano, no photographs, no mechanical
contrivances of any kind. Theras had made most of the
wooden furniture himself, for in those days people did
far more for themselves than we do now. At night
they used oil lamps, flat open dishes with one or two
wicks floating in the oil ; some had handles for carrying
about, others stood on
tall carved standards.
Theras and the
other Minoan men
dressed very simply,
in a waist-cloth held
up by a thick belt, and
a pair of boots, with a
cloak about their shoul-
ders at times. Theras
had a " best " waist-
cloth of beautiful em-
broidered material, and
a belt with a gold clasp.
His wife's dress was
more elaborate ; she
wore several skirts,
with the shortest out-
side, and a very open
bodice with short
sleeves. She was very
proud of having the
slenderest waist in the
street. Both she and
Theras wore their hair
in long ringlets, two or three of which were done up with
hairpins in a little topknot, but she put on a hat with
ribbons when she wore her best dress, while her husband
went bareheaded.
and JEthra had a very happy life. They did
A Minoan lady's dress.
(From Annual of British School at Athtns.)
30 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
not go to school, because at that time very few people
learned to read and write, and scarcely anything else
that we learn in school was known or taught at all.
History, for instance, was the stories about old times
that the oldest people you knew would tell you when
they were not busy ; probably they had heard them from
the oldest people they knew when they were young.
Geography was what the sailors said about the lands
they had seen on their voyages ; and if you wanted to
learn foreign languages, you had either to go abroad
yourself or make friends with some poor man who had
been stolen from his home across the sea and brought
here to be a slave. But, on the other hand, you had to
know how to do many things by yourself that we do by
machinery nowadays.
So ^Ethra spent most of her time in the house with
her mother, learning to cook and spin and weave and
embroider. JEthon was learning his father's trade,
and could handle all the tools, which were very like a
modern carpenter's, except that they were made of
bronze, and the hammers had stone heads. When his
father was out working he sometimes wandered round
to see the potter, and watch the bowls or vases coming
into their beautiful shapes on the flat whizzing wheel.
There were two potters whom he used to visit. One
made the ordinary plain ware for cooking and household
use ; the other had a bigger workshop and employed
several men, and he made all sorts of pottery in quaint
and pretty shapes, decorated with patterns of flowers
and sea-creatures. At this workshop there was one old
man in particular, whom JEihon loved to watch as he
painted the vases before they went to the baking-kiln.
The younger workmen rather laughed at this man,
because he went on making designs in colours, that had
gone out of fashion. But ^Ethon would stand by him,
delighted to see the gay colourings, and sometimes would
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 31
ask him to paint a vase or bowl in a certain pattern
" Put a big octopus on it 1 right in the middle with his
legs all curling round him ! Oh yes, and there are his
eyes and some bits of seaweed near his mouth and
are you making a whole procession of fish round the
edge ? That's simply splendid ! "
For -flJthon was very fond of the sea, like most Minoan
boys, and he often went down to the shore and played
there, swimming, pick-
ing up shells, peeping
into rock - pools, and
watching the strange
and beautiful creatures
that lived in the clear
blue waters. Indeed, |
he often said he would
rather be a sailor than
a carpenter. Many of
his father's friends had
boats, and sometimes
they would take him
with them when they Octopus vase found at Gournia.
went fishing. One day
he was taken quite a
long voyage right out of the bay and round the coast
to a bigger town than Gournia. Here he saw men
diving from the rocks for sponges, and was also shown
how they made a beautiful purple dye by crushing a
certain kind of spiky seashell. On the way back it
was rather windy and rough, and the boatman told him
such weird stories about storms and pirates and fights
with sea-monsters that he was quite glad to get home.
So for a little while he said no more about being a
sailor.
Sometimes when his father was not busy he would
take -ffithon for a walk inland, towards the hills. Every
B 2
(By permission from Hall, " <E?ean
Arckaology." Metkuen, 1915.)
32 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
year the fields were gay with flowers, in the short spring-
time between the rains and the hot scorching summer.
In the autumn there was the vintage to watch, or the
noisy processions with which the villagers celebrated
their " Harvest Home." Or you might meet men going
out to hunt, up on the hills where the wild goats lived.
^Ethon would have liked to follow them ; but his father
seemed to think he might meet worse things than goats.
There were certainly wild bulls, and Theras hinted that
there were also spirits and Little People in the high
woods, whom it was best not to intrude upon.
There were no Sundays in Minoan life, and nothing
that we should call a church to go to. But in the middle
of the town there was a little open space with a low wall
round it, and within, under a tree, was a shrine where
there was a small image of a goddess, with a snake twined
about her arms, and doves clustering about her. In
front stood a low three-legged table, that served as an
altar, and had several vases marked with the holy sign
of the Double Axe upon it. Their mother sometimes
brought the children here and showed them the proper
way to do reverence to the " Lady of the Wild Creatures,"
the kind Mother-goddess who loved trees and birds and
the animals of land and sea too.
In this way life went on happily enough for Theras
and his family. But at last there came a dreadful day
that ^Ethon never forgot. Strange ships appeared in
the bay, and their crews were seen making ready to land
and attack the little town. It was decided that every-
body should bury or hide their valuables, and that the
women and children should take refuge in the woods,
while the men made an effort to drive away the pirates.
So ^Ethon saw his father taking up part of the floor in
the passage and hiding his tools there as the safest place
he could think of, while his mother collected some food
and wraps and some of her most precious jewellery.
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS
33
Then they set out in the twilight from their home. Theras
bade them good-bye and went off to meet the other men
at the nobleman's house, where they were to have weapons
given out to them ; and they never saw him again.
jEthon led -flithra by the hand, and his mother carried
the baby, crying softly as she walked, and with the other
Shrine of a Goddess with offerings of shells, models of flying-fish,
doves, dresses, etc. Found (in fragments) at Knossos.
(From Annual of the British School at Athens.)
families they made their way into the woods, and pre-
pared to camp out there.
The first night was quiet. But in the morning the
pirates made their attack, and they could hear in the
34 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
distance the noise of the fighting, though they could not
see what was happening. Then came silence again, but
the strange ships still lay by the beach, and no one came
to tell them they might venture home again. Then
there were new noises, shouts of triumph and drunken
singing ; and as twilight fell for the second time, they
saw smoke and flames rising from the town, and the sea-
rovers, laden with plunder and driving their captives
before them, staggering back to their ships and pushing
off.
Gournia was never properly rebuilt after this, for
practically all the men had been killed or taken prisoners,
and there was nothing for the women to do but find
shelter as best they could in other places, ^thon's
mother made her way by degrees to the chief town on
the island, Knossos, where she had relatives. Unfor-
tunately she had an accident on the journey, through
catching her foot on a tree-root. She herself was not
hurt by the fall, but the child in her arms was, and walked
lame all his life because of it, though she made a pilgrimage
as soon as she could to the holy cave on Mount Dict6,
and left an offering there, hoping that the kind goddess
would straighten the little twisted foot. But that was
the last of the family's misfortunes, at least for a long
time.
We will pass over their early adventures in Knossos,
and begin the story again twenty years later, when the
mother is dead and the children are all grown-up men
and women. JEihon is a sailor now, and has seen many
foreign lands. yEthra is married to a man who has a
post as a clerk in the king's service, and she has a little
boy and girl of her own. Merion, still lame, of course,
lives with them, learning to be an artist in stone, and
promising very well.
Knossos was a much bigger and finer place than
Gournia. It stood on a low hUl beside a little river, and
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 35
in the middle was the dwelling of the king who at that
time ruled all Crete and some of the neighbouring shores
and islands as well. His name was Minos, and so
many wonderful stories have been told about him that
we do not know what is true and what is not. But he
certainly lived in a very beautiful palace of shining white
stone with all his servants and courtiers round him, and
foreign peoples sent him tribute. He had a navy too,
Photo by H. R. Hall
The great staircase at Knossos.
(From H. R. Hall's " Ancitnt History of th* Niar East " (1924).
Meihuen 6- Co., Ltd.)
and in his days Crete was safe from pirates, and many
towns flourished all round the coast.
King Minos had several dwellings, but he liked
Knossos best, and lived there in great style with the
queen and the court. The palace did not look very im-
posing from outside, because it was built on a hillside
36 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
like many of the ordinary dwellings, and straggled about
on the slope, full of long corridors and stairs and terraces
a regular " Labyrinth," in fact. In the middle there
was a great paved courtyard, lying open to the sky on
the highest part of the knoll, with the buildings arranged
round it. On the left as you came in a wide stone stair-
case led down to the part where the royal family lived.
There were three splendid pillared halls here, painted
with beautiful pictures on the walls ; one of these was
specially kept for the queen and her ladies, but they
were not shut up there all the time, as in many other
countries. Near at hand were blocks of small rooms for
the servants of the palace, and here lived not only cooks
and bakers, waiting-women and messengers, and the
king's clerks and secretaries, but potters, masons,
carpenters, jewellers, stonecutters, painters, and so on.
They were all kept busy repairing and decorating the
building, turning out fresh ware for use and ornament,
and making pretty things for the courtiers to wear, for
men as well as women were fond of bracelets and collars
and other jewellery.
JEthra and her husband and children and brother
all lived here among the royal household. Merion was
very happy learning and working among the palace
artists, and when he grew older he did some very fine
work, which was greatly admired. The courtiers and
even the king himself grew to know the lame sculptor
as he limped about the corridors, adding a touch here
and there to the carvings, or seeing that the slaves put
in its proper place some heavy standard lamp of stone
or great ornamental jar, fresh from his workshop. This
was a pleasant room quite near the royal apartments,
on the level of the central court, and sometimes the little
princes would come and watch him working with his
men, and tease him to make them little toys, just as his
brother had done with the potter at Gournia, years ago.
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 37
He did not see much of jEthon now, as he was mostly
at sea, but he always came to the palace when he was
at home, full of tales of adventure, and bringing little
ornaments and trifles from abroad for his sister and the
children.
jSJthra's husband, whose name was Procles, was mostly
busy in the rooms on the far side of the courtyard, where
the government work was carried on. Here was the
throne-room, where King Minos sat in state to receive
guests and ambassadors from foreign lands, a great
many of whom came to the court at Knossos. Near by
were the offices where Procles and other scribes worked,
noting down the payment of tribute, keeping lists of the
shields and weapons in the king's armoury, and checking
the palace accounts. Sometimes they wrote on little
tablets of clay, simply pressing the shape of the letters
on the soft clay with a sort of undivided pen, and some-
times they used ink and wrote on a material more like
our paper ; they could write more quickly in this way,
but the documents did not last so well. Procles' special
work had to do with the arms and other supplies for the
fleet, about which King Minos was, of course, very
particular, as so much depended on it. Procles was
sometimes able to pass on very useful practical sugges-
tions made by his sailor brother-in-law, so that he was
well thought of by his superiors in the office.
^Ethon in the meantime led rather a wild wandering
life. At first he sailed in other men's ships, but after-
wards he had one of his own. It was rowed by twenty
men, sitting at great long oars, but it had a single high
mast amidships with a big square sail as well. The
rowers sat on deck, with an awning over their heads, and
all sorts of strange cargoes came to Knossos in the stuffy
hold below (see p. 42). Sometimes JEthon made short
trips to the neighbouring islands, taking out sponges
and purple-dyed cloth, and bringing back perhaps marble
38 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
for the carvers in the palace. On the mainland (which
we call Greece) there were wealthy families whose
ancestors had once lived in Crete, who were always glad
to buy delicate pottery and luxuries which their new
country did not provide yet. At other times he sailed
to the Keftiuan coast (the south part of Asia Minor) or
to the Syrian ports, where Minoan vases and jewellery
were much in demand and fetched good prices. Once
or twice he went to Egypt, and very much admired all
he saw there. Sometimes too, when there was no profit
to be made by peaceful trading, he and two or three
other ship-masters would join together and raid some
little out-of-the-way harbour, seizing any gold or valuables
they could lay hands on, and carrying off boys and girls
to be slaves in the palace. From one such voyage he
returned with a quantity of plunder, a pretty young wife,
and a great sword-cut on his head ; and after that he
hired out his ship to another man and stayed quietly at
home for a while.
Of course he lost no time in introducing his wife, whose
name was Clymene, to her new relations at the palace.
They started one fine morning from ^Ethon's little house
by the harbour, and walked along the wide paved road
up the valley to Knossos itself. He showed Clymene
the big gateway with the guard-house, at which the king
went in and out, but they had to get in by what you might
call the " tradesmen's entrance " to the palace, a smaller
courtyard to which supplies and tribute were brought,
just beside the storehouses and the clerks' rooms. They
found Procles in his office, and he welcomed them warmly,
and said they had come on a lucky day, for there were
to be sports that afternoon which they could all go and
watch. They took a walk round, to show Clymene the
great store-chambers and the wall-paintings and some of
Merion's lovely carvings, and then went to have dinner
all together in Procles' home.
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 39
In the afternoon they all made their way to the little
open-air theatre just outside the palace, where the sports
were to be held. The king and queen and the royal
children were there, with the lords and ladies in their
gay dresses sitting about them, all chatting and laughing
together. The sports consisted chiefly of a display of
Storehouse at Knossos.
(Photo H. R. Hall : by permission from " gean Archeology." Methuen, 19x5.)
boxing and wrestling, and the crowd grew very excited,
clapping and cheering to spur on the men who were taking
part. Afterwards musicians appeared, and a kind of
solemn dance was performed. Procles said there would
soon be a much more exciting show, at which there
would be bulls, and -ffithon said he would bring Clymene
to see that too.
So some days later they came to the palace again and
40 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
met ^Ethra and Procles, and went to the bull-ring together.
Clymene was secretly a little frightened, and shrieked
once or twice as she watched, for she had never seen the
cruel sport before. But the Minoans apparently liked
it even better than boxing matches, for there were
crowds of people watching from all the roofs and terraces
Leaping over a charging bull.
(Bronte figure from Iht Ashmolean Museum : by kind permission of Sir Arthur Evans.)
round from which the ring could be seen. Two boys
and two girls, younger than Clymene herself, were put
into the ring together with a big angry bull. They had
no weapons, for they were not trying to kill the bull,
which was a sacred animal, but to escape being killed
by it. When a bull puts down his head to charge, he
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 41
cannot see in front of him till he raises it again ; and
just in the moment when he was rushing blindly forward,
the boy or girl who was being attacked made a spring,
seized the lowered horns, and by turning a somersault
just as the bull gave the toss, went clean over its back
and landed safely behind it, amid roars of applause.
There were no accidents that afternoon, but Clymene
felt sure there often must be, and nearly cried to think
of the unhappy captives who were dragged away from
their homes as she had been, but instead of finding a
kind husband were made to risk their lives in this dreadful
way.
There was a good deal of talk at this time in the
palace about a new animal that was being used in other
countries, chiefly for drawing chariots, and it was said
that the king wished to import some into Crete. So
when j*Ethon's ship returned safely, he set off on a fresh
voyage to Egypt, meaning to bring back some of the new
creatures with him. Though he always enjoyed going
to Egypt, he hurried home this time, because he wanted
his ship to be the very first to bring a horse to Knossos ;
and so it was. In honour of this, Merion cut him a new
seal-stone, with the ship and the horse carved upon it.
-^Ethon rather teased him about the picture at first,
saying that the horse was not really bigger than the ship,
and that it had not walked alongside the boat but
travelled in the hold ; but he was very proud of the seal
all the same, and very sorry when one of the children
borrowed it to play with and lost it. After this horses
became fashionable in Crete, and ^Ethon traded regularly
to Egypt, bringing them back in exchange for dried fish
and fruit, jars of wine and oil, pottery, jewellery, and
so on.
At length, when all our Minoan friends were growing
old, a sad thing happened. Knossos, like Gournia, was
attacked by sea-rovers from the northern lands and
42 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
destroyed. It seems strange that King Minos with his
fleet did not prevent them from burning his palace and
plundering all his treasures, but somehow he was not
able to. Perhaps he had already sailed away on his
last voyage, into the far western seas ; for one story tells
us how he went to Sicily with all his fighting ships and
his soldiers, in pursuit of a man who had done him a
Ship with horse.
(Seal impression with design completed : from the Annual of the British School
at Athens.)
great wrong, and there he was murdered by his enemies,
and never saw broad Knossos and the hills of Crete
again. So the sea-rovers landed and marched up the
valley, and killed the few soldiers at the palace gates, and
then had their own way, for the place was not fortified.
Merion left his workshop with two great stone jars stand-
THE SUBJECTS OF KING MINOS 43
ing in it, one just finished, the other only begun, and
hurried away to try and protect Clymene, for ^Ethon
was at sea at the time, on one of his Egyptian voyages.
Procles put down his pen and went to help plan some
way of defending the palace, but it was too late. Neither
of them ever finished the work they had begun so cheer-
fully that morning ; and soon Knossos was in flames,
the Northerners were making off with their prisoners and
loot, and the few Minoans who had escaped were scattered
about the island seeking help and shelter.
So when JEthon came home he found neither brother
nor sister, wife nor child, and he vowed vengeance on
the raiders who had wrecked his home for the second
time. But there was nothing to be done, for the sea-
rovers had quite disappeared. At last it was decided
that he and several other ship-captains should take on
board some of the survivors, and some people from other
towns who were afraid it might be their turn to be
attacked next, and sail away to look for the king and his
fleet. If they could not find him, they would land and
build a new Minoan town in some far-off country where
pirates did not come. And so JEthon and his companions
said good-bye to Crete for the last time, and from the
western headlands those who stayed behind saw their
ships disappear towards the sunset.
CHAPTER IV
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
ABOUT the same time that JEthon and his relations were
living in Knossos, an Egyptian family were passing a
very pleasant peaceful time on their estate, which lay
some distance up the valley of the Nile, not far from the
capital, Thebes. The master of the house was a gentle-
man called Sennefer ; his wife was a lady named Ast.
They were both quite young, and had two little children,
a boy and a girl. These two had rather long names,
each being really a short sentence with a religious mean-
ing. The boy was called, in honour of one of the great
gods of Egypt, " Ra is Content " ; the little girl had
been named after a favourite goddess, " Hathor First."
But you will probably be glad to hear that they always
went by the pet-names of Lion and Kitten respectively.
Besides his wife and children, Sennefer also had his
grandfather living with him, a very old gentleman
indeed, called Aahmes.
Sennefer came of a well-to-do family and owned a
handsome estate, with a good many peasants and slaves
living on it. The house stood in its own grounds, just
out of reach of the summer floods, at a spot where
the bed of an old dry stream led up from the green, flat
valley through a cleft in the bare hillsides to the desert
that lay above. It was only built of mud-bricks, but
was well planned for the hot climate, with shady rooms
and cool colonnades, and flat roofs where the family
44
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
45
could take the air and enjoy the view. The walls were
painted with all sorts of patterns in gay colours, and here
and there bright awnings were stretched across open
spaces to keep off the hot sun. The furniture, too, was
cheerful and pretty, upholstered in rich stuffs, and with
a good deal of gilding about it. Round the house lay
a big garden, with borders of flowers and shrubs, a
vineyard, and a kitchen-garden. There were two fish-
ponds as well, with lotus-plants and tall papyrus-reeds
growing round them. Of course these ponds were
Gardener at work drawing water.
(From Maspero's u Life in A ncunt Egypt and Assyria." Chapman & Hall, Ltd.)
favourite playing-places with the children, and Ket
their slave-nurse spent quite a lot of time in reciting
magic spells over Kitten three times a day, to prevent
her from falling in or coming to any other harm. She
never did fall in ; but perhaps the gardeners who were
always working about had something to do with it as
well as Ket's charms.
The children were very much petted by their parents
and friends and had many toys and games given them.
ferent
games.
46 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Kitten owned quite a family of dolls ; they were rather
stiff creatures, carved out of wood, but they wore elaborate
curly wigs and grand dresses just like those of real
grown-up people. She was very fond, too, of a little
wooden figure of a cat, which though only a few inches
long had eyes of sparkling crystal and metal teeth, and
could open and shut its mouth. Lion had a toy chariot
and horses, and jointed figures of slaves at work, as well
as balls and dif-
kinds of
When he
was seven his
father gave him a
real live monkey
for a pet, and after
that he felt too
grown-up to play
with mere toys,
and gave most of
them to Kitten,
who was only four.
About the
same time, too,
he discovered that
sometimes, when
the porter who sat
in the little room
Egyptian toys.
(From the British Museum.)
beside the entrance was sleepy or busy, it was possible to
slip past and explore what was outside the garden. Quite
close by there was one of his father's farms, kept by the
chief steward of the estate. Here all sorts of interesting
doings went on, The cattle and sheep were driven in
from the distant pastures to be counted, the harvest was
brought to be threshed and piled in the granaries, and
the slaves performed all kinds of gymnastic feats as they
pressed the grapes at vintage-time ; while the scribes
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
47
stood about with their tablets, keeping a record of all
the work done and making lists of the livestock. Alto-
gether there were several hundred animals on the estate
cattle, donkeys, sheep, and pigs. There were ducks and
geese and water-fowl too, and besides these there were
some rare birds, not to be seen on every farm by any
means, which lived on dry land and laid eggs every day.
They came from Syria, and Grandfather Aahmes had
brought home some of the first that ever were seen in
Egypt, in his soldiering days long ago.
As Lion grew older he ventured farther afield, and
A Nile boat.
(From Wilkinson's " Ancitnt Egyptians." J. Murray.)
often used to make his way to the banks of the great
river, the Nile itself. Near the stream the peasants
were always at work, busy in the fields or at the simple
machines that raised the water up to the top of the bank
where it was needed. There was constant traffic up
and down to Thebes. Some great noble or priest might
pass towards the capital in a splendid gilded boat, with
carven prow and gay awnings, even its huge square sail
of some rich coloured cloth. Pharaoh himself might
be seen setting out on a journey in his great carved and
48 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
painted vessel, the " Star of the Two Lands." Strange
foreign merchant-ships went by, carrying rare goods
from overseas, and manned by sunburnt Phoenicians,
or gaily-clad Keftiuans from the Isles of the Very Green
at the Back of Beyond men of Crete and the -flEgean.
Lion's father owned a private Nile-boat, but the boy
had never been a voyage in her yet, though he hoped to
go some day. But he did not want to go to sea ; very few
Egyptian boys did. He would have liked to be a soldier
like his great-grandfather, but had no desire to meet
with adventures such as his father had told him of, in
a story about a shipwrecked sailor, sole survivor of the
crew, who was cast ashore on a lonely island. Here he
found plenty to eat, but soon was terrified by the sight
of a huge bearded serpent, whose body was a precious
stone crusted over with gold. However, the serpent
greeted the sailor kindly, saying, " Who hath brought
thee, little one ? who hath brought thee ? " and fore-
told, being very wise, that the man would soon be rescued,
and the island would then disappear. And so it
happened ; and the sailor returned home with great
riches and was honoured by Pharaoh himself.
Lion fully believed in the big blue serpent of this tale ;
he also believed that when his father set off to hunt big
game in the desert with his hounds, he might meet with
far more fearsome creatures than mere lions. Lion was
not old enough to be taken on these long excursions,
but Sennefer sometimes took him when he went spearing
fish in the streams near the house, or killing birds with
a throwing-stick in the marshes. At these times he had
with him, instead of a dog, a cat to retrieve the game.
Lion was very fond of his parents, but Great-Grand-
father Aahmes was more of a hero in his eyes, for though
he was now very old and feeble he could tefi most thrilling
stories of the battles and adventures of his younger days.
He had fought under the most warlike Pharaoh that had
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
49
50 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
yet ruled Egypt, Thothmes III., who had carried on
great wars in Syria, which in his days did not belong to
any important king, and he had seen many wonderful
things there.
Lion's favourite story, which he used to ask for again
and again, was about the first great battle which King
Thothmes had fought in Syria, at Megiddo, near Mount
Carmel, against the Prince of Kadesh and his allies.
Aahmes, too, was always willing to tell how after the king
had held a council of war with his captains the troops
advanced in single file, " man behind man, and horse
behind horse," through a narrow ravine across a line of
low hills, to take the enemy by surprise. His Majesty
himself went at the head of the line to encourage the
troops, because the plan of attack was a very dangerous
one. It was Aahmes' first
campaign as well as the king's,
and the night before the battle
he could not sleep, but lay in
his tent listening to the sen-
tries as they tramped up and
down, crying, " Firm-heart !
Firm-heart ! be watchful, be
watchful!" The next day
they joined battle, the king
going out early in his chariot
of polished metal with all his
weapons of war, strong and
glorious like a god upon
earth. The Syrians were de-
feated and fled for refuge to
Megiddo, and there Aahmes had taken prisoner one of
the men who had not been in time to get into the town
before the gates were shut, just when he was about to
be hauled up into safety by a rope of clothing which his
friends had let down from the city wall.
Syrian Chiefs before
Thothmes HI.
(From Fhnders Prfrfe's " History of
Egypt." Mtthut* 6* Co., Ltd.)
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
Megiddo had surrendered after a time, and Aahmes
had seen the captive chiefs " smelling the ground "
before Thothmes' feet, and had watched the piling-up
of the heaps of rich tribute which they brought. There
were hundreds of chariots, adorned with gold and silver,
many suits of splendid armour, gold and silver vases
and dishes, blocks of lapis-lazuli and green malachite,
inlaid furniture, statues and ornaments of ebony and
ivory ; slaves too, and droves of cattle, and food for the
army, corn and wine, honey and oil and fruit. All this
spoil, except the provisions, was counted and sent to
Egypt, and Aahmes could point to some beautiful Syrian
vases in the room where he sat, which had fallen to his
share. So famous did the wars of Thothmes III. make
Egypt, that not only the lands he actually conquered but
the great nations round sent him
presents, and soon men were
coming from Babylon and Assyria,
the kingdom of the Hittites, and
even far-off islands in the Very
Green Sea, bringing precious offer-
ings to this mighty king.
Lion liked, too, a story of the
king's going by sea into Phoenicia,
which had rebelled against him,
and of the great hunting of a herd Tribute-bearers,
of one hundred and twenty ele- (From Fhnd ^ 5 Pttrie , s , Hts .
iory
Co,
Methut* &
phants, which took pkce after the
fighting was over, beside a river in
North Syria. There had been a very exciting moment
when the biggest of the elephants turned savagely upon
the king and one of his generals, Amenemheb ; the
latter was nearly caught, but managed to save himself
and the king by getting between the rocks in the bed
of the stream, where the elephant could not follow,
and cutting off its trunk as it felt about for him. The
52 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
king in his gratitude gave Amenemheb a splendid
present of gold and robes.
There had been very little fighting since Thothmes III . 's
time, for all the neighbouring countries now feared Egypt
But the payment of the tribute still went on, and slaves
and treasure of all sorts poured in year by year. Some
of the slaves in Sennefer's house were Syrians, and from
them Lion sometimes heard the other side of all this tale
of glory. Being only slaves they dared not say too much,
but sometimes what they said made him imagine a little
of how it felt to see your house plundered and set on fire,
and your crops and fruit and cattle seized by foreign
soldiers, and to be dragged away yourself to work for the
conquerors in a strange land. However, the Egyptians
were not as a rule cruel, and the slaves were in some ways
better off than the native peasants. These lived on hard
fare in poor mud hovels, and had to toil incessantly in
their fields ; they had heavy taxes to pay, and were beaten
by the tax-collectors' servants if they were not ready with
their dues when the time came, and sometimes they were
carried off by force to serve in the army or provide labour
for the king's great buildings. Yet they always seemed
wonderfully cheerful, in spite of these hardships.
It was no wonder, however, that many peasant families
wished their sons to give up the dull hard life of farm-
work and earn their living in an easier way as scribes.
Writing was quite an art in Egypt, and to be a scribe
required a special training. So there was a little school
in the village, where the boys learnt to understand and
make the tiny drawings or " hieroglyphics " which were
the oldest kind of writing (see frontispiece), as well as the
shorter " hieratic " form. In their papyrus copy-books
they wrote down moral stories and wise sayings, so that
they learnt something of good behaviour and manners
at the same time as writing. The boys next learnt com-
position in different styles, essays and business letters
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
S3
54 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and so on, as well as simple mathematics and astronomy.
No doubt the parents thought it all very grand when they
saw their sons' neat exercise books, with the master's
corrections in the margin, and the date at the head of
each exercise. But perhaps the boys did not think the
same, for they were kept hard at work, and a good deal
of the teaching was given with a stick, so that when
lessons were over the whole village heard the yells of joy
with which they rushed out of school.
Boys who did well at school went on as apprentice-
pupils to a temple or a government office where many
scribes were employed. Here they helped in copying
letters and business documents and adding up figures
till they were fit for more responsible work. Some of
the scholars from Sennefer's village had done very well
and risen to high positions in the king's service ; but
others had not been so clever or so fortunate, and one or
two had found no better work than to go about writing
letters for people who had not been to school, for a small
fee. One of these occasionally visited his home on his
wanderings, and Lion knew him well by sight, a slightly
deformed man, laden with the scribe's outfit reed pens
and a penknife, paints, a pestle and mortar to grind them
with, a palette to mix them on, and a water-vessel to
moisten them with, all packed in a leather bag.
Lion did not go to the village school, but did lessons
at home with a tutor ; the tutor was rather a prosy
man, and Lion sometimes thought school would be
jollier. Besides what the village boys learnt, the tutor
told Lion something of the history of his country,
and the stories of the gods whom the Egyptians
worshipped. He described how the world had been
created, and at first was ruled by Ra, the god of the sun,
but when men became troublesome Ra had given his
kingdom to his descendants the Pharaohs, and went back
to the sky. Each day Ra crossed the heavens in his
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 55
shining sun-boat, fighting and conquering the dragon of
darkness, and each night the bark was towed back through
the underworld to the starting-place. Then there was
Osiris, who also had been a lung on earth, and was
treacherously slain by his wicked brother Set. Isis, the
wife of Osiris, had searched far and wide for his body
which Set had hidden, that she might give it proper
burial, and at last her son Horus grew up and avenged
his dead father, who reigned for evermore as the king
of the world below. The tutor's own patron god was
Thoth, the heavenly scribe ; Lion's patron was Ra, the
Sun-god himself. Other gods were Anubis ; Ptah, the
god of artists and skilled workmen ; Hapi, the spirit of
the Nile, who did so much for Egypt. There were god-
desses too : Hathor, the goddess of joy and love, and
Maat, the spirit of truth or justice.
The tutor had a big sheet of papyrus, several feet
long, on which there were pictures of many of these
deities, amongst a lot of writing. Lion, and sometimes
Kitten too, used to look at it with great interest. There
was a picture of a goddess with stars all over her body,
who held up the sky ; there was Ra in his boat, a man
with the head of a hawk. Horus, the son of Osiris, had
a hawk's head too ; the wise Thoth had that of an ibis,
Anubis that of a jackal. Hathor had a cow's head, and
another goddess that of a lion or a cat. There was even
a goddess in the form of a hippopotamus ! The children
asked why they should be pictured in this way, but the
tutor could only say that it was the custom and had always
been done. One of the pictures showed the gods in
the act of judging a man after death, by weighing his
heart in the scales of justice (see frontispiece). If he were
evil, his heart would be devoured by a horrible monster ;
but if he were good, he would be allowed to go to the
" fields of peace " in the kingdom of Osiris. This was
very like the best and pleasantest parts of Egypt, and
56 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
there good men lived in comfort, enjoying " love of wife
and rest of heart," and spending their time much as
they had done in their happiest earthly days.
Lion also learnt in his lessons that the history of Egypt
did not begin with King Thothmes III., as he had rather
fancied from his great-grandfather's tales, but went back
many hundreds of years. Once, the tutor said, the
Valley and the Delta had been two lands, and men had
lived in separate tribes under different chiefs. Then
a chief called " The Scorpion " made himself ruler of
all the Valley, and one of his successors, who was said
to be called Menes, conquered the Delta as well, and so
was the first " Lord of the Two Lands." Soon had come
the great kings who built the Pyramids, and many mighty
rulers had followed. In fact, Lion used to get con-
fused among the various " dynasties," as the families
of kings were called ; there had already been eighteen of
them. It was a good thing for Lion that he did not live
in the last days of Egyptian history, when he would have
had thirty dynasties to learn about 1 Fortunately for
schoolboys, there was very little known about some of
them. (Girls did not go to school, so it did not matter
to them.)
The tutor also had to tell Lion something that patriotic
Egyptians did not like to mention, namely, that for a
long time the country had been ruled by some cruel
foreign conquerors called the " Hyksos " (in English,
the " Shepherd Kings "). But at last there had risen up
a native king named Aahmes and driven them out. It
was after this king that Grandfather Aahmes was named.
The Egyptians had hated the Hyksos, but they had learnt
one or two things from them, chiefly about war. The
Hyksos had introduced horses and chariots, and when
they were driven out, the next kings had used the strong
army that had fought against them in making war in
Syria. Then Lion knew what was coming the triumphs
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 57
of Thothmes III. ; and the tutor did not need to go on
with the lesson.
Lion read stories and poems too sometimes ; and one
day he was given some verses of a poem to learn by heart.
At first he did not want to, but when he found that it
was in praise of the great king Thothmes, he set to work
with a will. In the poem, the god Amen of Thebes
was supposed to rejoice over the deeds which he had
helped the Pharaoh to do ; and that evening Lion
delighted his great-grandfather by reciting to him these
verses :
" I have given to thee might and victory over all lands ;
I have set thy will and die fear of thee in all countries,
Thy terror as far as the four pillars of heaven.
The chiefs of all lands are gathered in thy grasp ;
I have struck down thine enemies beneath thy sandals,
Thou hast smitten the hosts of rebels according to my command.
The Earth in its length and breadth, Westerners and Easterners
are subject to thee.
Thou treadest down all lands, thy heart is glad.
I have caused them to see thy Majesty as a young bull,
Firm of heart, sharp-horned, unapproachable.'*
*****
That was almost the last time that Lion saw Aahmes,.
for a few days afterwards the old gentleman was taken
ill and died. There was great sorrow and mourning in
the household, and preparations were at once begun for
the funeral. Sennefer went and saw the priests and made
all arrangements, and while the body of Aahmes was being
embalmed and made ready to be wrapped in the yards
and yards of linen bandages in which all mummies were
swathed, a gorgeous coffin was prepared and the last
touches were put to the rock-hewn tomb. Aahmes
had had the tomb hollowed out and partly decorated
during his lifetime, for like all his countrymen he thought
his burial a very important matter, because in some
mysterious way the life after death depended on the body's
having a proper, lasting home and all its usual necessities
58 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and comforts. They saw nothing gloomy in attending
to these matters in advance, and so besides choosing his
tomb Aahmes had ordered an outer coffin of carved stone
and had chosen some of the furniture which he wished
to have placed beside it when the time came. But still
there was a great deal to be done during the seventy days
while his body was with the embalmers. An inner
coffin of wood was prepared and painted with religious
emblems in beautiful colours. Sculptors and painters,
working by light reflected with mirrors into the depths
of the cave-tomb, added the final decorations in the form
of a long inscription telling of Aahmes ' deeds and the
honours he had received. Furniture, too, was made ready,
jewels, robes, ointment-boxes, walking-sticks, so that the
dead man might have all the luxuries he had been used
to in his lifetime.
Even these were not all the things which were needed
for his welfare. The Egyptians had rather confused
ideas about the life after death, and they made ready for
several possibilities. They put food and furniture in
the tomb because it was the dead man's home, his " house
of eternity," as they said, where he somehow went on
living, even though his body never moved or spoke again. '
But there was also the idea about the judgment in the
hall of the gods, and the life in the fields of Osiris. So
they had spells and sentences from their sacred writings
copied out and put into the coffin all ready to hand, to
be a help to the dead man in giving his answers in the
hall of judgment. Amulets or charms, too, were provided,
to protect him from the dangers he might meet as he
travelled to the underworld. Then, even in the happy
" fields of peace," there was work to be done, in ploughing
and reaping, and so on, and men of high rank or wealthy
people, who had never done a day's farmwork in this
life, did not mean to begin it in the next. So they made
little figures of stone or pottery and engraved a magic
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 59
spell upon them and put them also in the tomb, calling
them Ushabtis or Answerers, because when Aahmes, or
whoever it might be, was summoned to do his share of
the work, they would come to life, answer the summons,
and do the task for him.
At last everything was ready, and one day the children
saw the funeral procession set out. The tomb lay as
usual on the west bank of the Nile, under the setting sun,
so the journey had to be made partly by water. The
mummy of Aahmes in its brightly painted coffin, the
priests, and the near relations crossed in one boat,
friends and mourners in a second, and a third was filled
with servants bringing the tomb-furniture . and pro-
visions for offerings and the funeral feast. They landed
and finished the journey on foot, the mummy being
drawn on a sledge up the rocky path by the cattle which
were going to be sacrified. The women all wept and
wailed aloud as they walked. When they reached the
tomb, the priests offered the sacrifices and went through
certain ceremonies which prepared the dead man for his
future life. Then the mummy was left in an inner
chamber with his furniture and all his possessions around
him, and the long passage between it and the outer hall
was blocked up, to prevent robbers coining to steal the
jewels and ornaments. The family and friends feasted
in the outer hall before they went home, with solemn
music and dancing, and then the tomb was quiet, except
when the relatives came to bring offerings of food to the
dead man.
After this sad event the family settled down again,
and soon life was going on much as before. Indeed, it
was even gayer, for Grandfather Aahmes had been rather
old-fashioned in some ways, and did not quite approve
of some of the luxurious manners which were spreading
in the country, now that it had become so rich. Ast,
the children's mother, began to give parties again, in
60 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
which Kitten was now old enough to take a great interest.
On these occasions the servants had a very busy time
beforehand, cleaning the gold vessels and ornaments,
cooking, and preparing little bouquets of lotus-flowers to
present to the guests on their arrival, and pats of perfumed
ointment to place on their heads. Kitten used to watch
her mother dressing. The slave-girls who waited on
Ast would bring up a beautiful dress of pure white linen,
so fine as to be almost transparent, all freshly laundered,
and get out her best curly black wig and her choicest
necklaces and ear-rings from the big gilded chests in which
the family kept their possessions. Then Ast would sit
down at her dressing-table, with its array of mirrors and
ointment-pots, while the maid arranged her hair, mani-
cured her hands, blackened her eyebrows, and (if it was
to be a garden-party and she expected to be out in the
sun) painted her eyelids green, to soften the glare.
Sennefer also wore a fresh white robe, covered his shaven
head with a wig, and if it was to be a formal occasion
and he wanted to look stately and dignified, fastened a
stiff-looking false beard beneath his chin ; for like all
Egyptians he was clean-shaven.
The children were allowed to come amongst the
visitors for a time at the beginning of the party, and some-
times received presents from them. When the guests
had all arrived, some on foot, some in small light carriages,
they were entertained till dinner was ready with music
and dancing by the slave-girls, while light refreshments
were handed round. The music was provided by a
small orchestra of four instruments a big harp, a lyre,
a lute, and a flute. Kitten liked the music very much,
but she noticed that a good many of the ladies seemed
to prefer chattering and examining each other's jewellery
to listening.
Later, all the grown-ups went into the big dining-
room, with its graceful pillars in the form of lotus-plants,
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
61
and its gaily-painted walls. At one end there was a
shallow stone tank, with the prettiest bowls and ewers
in the house standing round the edge, for use later.
Along one side were ranged great jars of wine, all
wreathed with flowers ; flowers were arranged on the
tables too. The guests sat down at small tables, and
were provided with thin cakes of bread to wipe their
(British Museum.)
An Egyptian party.
Photo R. B. Fleming.
fingers on instead of napkins. These were very necessary,
for when the slaves handed round a roast goose or a dish
of vegetables or whatever it might be, these elegant
ladies and gentlemen simply tore off or scooped up as
much as they wanted with their hand, and ate it without
the help of forks and spoons. When the meal had
ended, with a sweet course of rich cakes, the slaves brought
the ewers from the tank and poured water over the visitors*
62 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
hands. Afterwards there was more music and dancing,
and sometimes the children could hear the fun being
kept up till late at night.
When Kitten was ten and Lion thirteen, a new
Pharaoh came to the throne, called Amenhotep III., and
he was very soon obliged to go to Nubia up the Nile to
crush a rebellion of the negroes there. Sennefer took
Great Temple of Amenhotep III. at Luxor.
(From British Museum Guide to Egyptian Collection.)
part in this expedition, and returned bringing not only
gold and cattle and negro slaves as his share of the spoil,
but the good news that as a reward for his services he
had been given a nominal post in the royal household,
which meant that he bore a title of honour and had the
right to go to court. So after this, every now and then,
his Nile-boat was ordered out and freshly painted, the
family's luggage was piled in big wooden chests on the
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE
cabin roof, with the best chariot on top, and away they
would go on a visit to Thebes.
Thebes was becoming a very splendid place at this
time, for Amenhotep III. never fought another war after
the one in Nubia, but gave his attention to building
magnificent temples and beautifying not only his capital
but other cities of his land. His great works are in
ruins now, but people
still go in hundreds to
see them when they
visit Egypt. His own
palace has disappeared ,
because it was built
only of brick with
wooden pillars like an
ordinary house, but no
doubt it was a very
gorgeous place, stand-
ing amongst wonderful
gardens planted with
trees and shrubs
brought from abroad.
In its grounds there
were cages for the wild
animals which were
often sent as presents"
by foreign princes, and
*** of * Egyptians.
(From Fhnders Petrie's " History of Egypt."
Methuen 6- Co., Ltd )
a great artificial lake
over a mile long, on
which Pharaoh and his favourite queen went sailing in
their state barge. The cool, bright rooms inside were.
splendidly furnished, with gold and gilding in profusion.
Slaves, sent as tribute from all parts of the empire,
stood about waving bunches of flowers or huge fans
of ostrich feathers to freshen the air, or waited on the
courtiers and guests. Amongst the Egyptians, with their
c2
64 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
spotless white robes relieved by ornaments and amulets
of the lovely blue glaze that was their speciality, there
moved brightly-clad foreigners, tribute-bringers, young
princes from Syria brought here by Pharaoh's command
to be educated, ambassadors from foreign kings. To
|entertain them while
they waited for ad-
mission to the royal
presence, there were
musicians and dan-
cers , comical-look-
ing dwarfs from the
negro lands, pet
monkeys, and so on.
Sennefer had a
great tale to tell his
family after he had
for the first time
seen Amenhotep in
his palace, sitting in
state, surrounded
with elaborate cere-
monial. He was now
not in his war-hel-
met and his cam-
paigning gear, but
wearing his royal
attire and most
splendid jewellery,
and seated on a
canopied throne with
a rich carpet before it. The arms of the throne were
sphinxes, the seat was upheld by carved figures of
has Asiatic and negro subjects, the names of his con-
quered foes were written on his footstool, so that he
trod them under his feet. In his hands he held a whip
Amenhotep III. enthroned.
(From Flinders Petne's " History of Egypt."
Methuen 6- Co., Ltd.)
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 65
and a crook, insignia of his office, as well as the symbol
of long life. The canopy over his head was upheld by
lotus-flower columns, and decorated with a row of the
royal snakes which the kings of Egypt wore in front of
their double crown. Those who were admitted into
the presence of this gorgeous figure had to bow low,
shading their eyes as if dazzled by the sight.
Amenhotep the Magnificent, however, did not only
show himself to a few favoured subjects in this way.
He might be seen passing through the streets of Thebes
in his chariot drawn by fiery horses, on his way to perform
a solemn ceremony in one of the temples, or to visit one
of his new buildings and see how the work was going on,
or perhaps setting out on a hunt. He was very fond of
hunting, and once had a number of" scarabs " (ornaments
in the form of a beetle) made and distributed to his
courtiers, to celebrate his having slain one hundred and
two fierce lions in the first ten years of his reign. You
may think how eagerly the children looked from their
windows to get a glimpse of him on these occasions,
Indeed,everythingabout the town was fascinating to them,
the crowded streets, the quays, the market where trade
was carried on by barter, the perfume-maker trying to
exchange a pot of ointment for a set of fish-hooks, the
jeweller's wife trading two strings of beads for a fat fowl,
and all of them trying to get the better of the foreign
sailors who wandered about sight-seeing and buying
trifles to take home with them. Perhaps if they had only
known they may have seen -ffithon from Knossos on one
of his horse-buying journeys !
Time went on, and the children grew up. Kitten,
like all Egyptian girls, was considered old enough to be
married at what we should think a very early age, and
became the wife of a young man named Zanuni, one of
the king's lesser secretaries. Before this, one of the
Syrian princes who were living at court had wanted to
66 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
marry her, but neither her father nor the king liked the
idea of Egyptian ladies marrying foreigners. Amenhotep
would not allow even the King of Babylon to have an
Egyptian princess for a wife. But he had no objection
to Egyptians marrying foreign ladies, and indeed set the
example by having several wives from abroad. One of
these, a princess of Mitanni, arrived with a train of over
three hundred attendants, not long after Kitten's marriage;
and she and her husband were present at the wedding
festivities, and received one of the " scarabs " that were
issued in honour of the event.
Zanuni's work as a " true royal scribe " was very
interesting, for Amenhotep received many letters from
his officials and governors abroad, as well as from rulers
of other countries. These were written in Babylonian
in cuneiform characters on baked clay tablets. One
day there would be dispatches from the governor of
some Syrian town, with news that a great quantity of
tribute had been sent off and should arrive in the capital
shortly, or perhaps containing the less pleasant tidings
that a revolt had broken out, and asking for extra troops
to put it down a Sudanese regiment preferred, because
the Syrians were particularly afraid of the negro troops.
Or the letter might be from some foreign king, sending a
polite message and ending up with a request for a present
of gold, which he believed was as plentiful as dust in
Pharaoh's land. Zanuni had other work as well as the
foreign correspondence, however. He had a post in
his later life in connection with the home government,
and did his work so well that he received the great honour
of being publicly presented with gold by the king. He
and Kitten drove in their chariot to the palace, and there,
while the king and some of the royal family looked on
from a balcony, collars of gold were hung about Zanuni's
neck till he almost bent under the weight, and his own
private scribes made a list of what he received. (I ought,
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 67
perhaps, to explain that in Egypt at this time gold was not
used in the form of money, and so this was not a pay-
ment but an honour.)
Unfortunately, the great days of Amenhotep the
Magnificent did not last for ever. He reigned in peace
and prosperity for a long time, but when at last he died,
there were bad times in store for his country. By that
time Sennefer and Ast were both dead, and Lion, living
quietly on the estate, did not hear so much of what was
going on, but Zanuni and Kitten, who were still at court,
had rather a sad old age. This was because Amenhotep 's
son, who succeeded him, had rather strange and novel
ideas, and tried to make great changes in religion, which
put the country into a very disturbed state.
Now it might have been a very good thing for the
Egyptians to give up believing in the old confused tales
of their many gods, and worship the one great Spirit
in whom the new king wished them to believe. But
they were fond of their old religion, and the new ideas
were rather difficult for simple folk to grasp all at once.
The priests, of course, were strongly against the new
teaching, because it would have put an end to their great
power and wealth ; this was particularly true of the
priests of Amen of Thebes. The young king disliked
the worship of this god so much that he changed his
name, Amenhotep, the same as his father's, to Akhenaten,
because the name Amen formed part of it. He also sent
men round the temples to paint over or cut out the name
of Amen wherever it appeared, even where it was only
part of his father's name. Finally he built a new city
far down the Nile, towards the Delta, to be the capital,
and leaving Thebes and its angry priests, went to live
there with all his court.
Zanuni and his wife and their three children went
with the others. They were sorry to leave Thebes,
where they, of course, had many friends, und they did
68 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
not really care much for the new religion, though they
admitted that some of Akhenaten's ideas, and the hymns
and prayers which he composed, were very beautiful,
But the thing that chiefly worried Zanuni and the other
officials was that the king was so absorbed in these matters
and in the work of his builders and artists, that he would
pay no attention to state affairs. The army and every-
thing else was neglected. The letters from Syria became
very gloomy ; they said very little about sending off
tribute, and a great deal about revolts and intrigues among
the native princes, and the harm that was being done by
fierce tribes from the Syrian desert who were raiding
the land. They begged constantly for advice and troops
from Egypt ; and the king did not seem to care 1 One
day, for instance, there was a letter from the governor of
Jerusalem, telling very bad news, and having a postscript
begging the scribe who read it to the king to say plainly
to him that his whole land was going to ruin. It fell to
Zanuni's lot to deliver this unpleasant message ; but it
made very little impression on the king, and things
went on as before.
It is rather a pity to have to say good-bye to our
Egyptian friends at such a sad time ; however, this period
of disturbance did not last for very long, and the children
of Kitten and Zanuni lived to see brighter days again.
Akhenaten died and left no son, and so the husbands
of two of his daughters reigned after him in turn. The
first tried to keep up the new religion, but the second
decided that it was a hopeless attempt, and went back
to the old ways. Like Amenhotep IV., he changed his
name during his reign to show that he had changed his
opinions, but the change was in the opposite direction ;
from Tutankhaten he altered it to Tutankhamen. He
is the king whose tomb was recently discovered, and who
has been so much talked about since, but he was not a
strong or successful ruler, and the confusion lasted till
PHARAOH AND HIS PEOPLE 69
a soldier became Pharaoh and took the government
firmly in hand.
After this the country revived, and wars of conquest
began once more. Lion had never liad a chance of
imitating his Great-Grandfather Aahmes and following
any warlike Pharaoh to battle, neither had his sons or
grandsons ; but his great-grandsons had such an oppor-
tunity, and you can imagine them if you like fighting in
the great battles which we shall soon hear about. These
battles were fought against the king of the Hittites ;
and he and his people are the next whom we must visit
and make friends with.
CHAPTER Y
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES
ABOUT the year 1370 B.C., a Babylonian merchant named
Akia was travelling with a few servants through North
SYRIA
(To illustrate chapters V and VI)
OAB f> Mam route or
Armies
Miles
...
Syria. He was returning from Egypt by way of ths
Hittite city of Carchemish, hoping to do very profitable
70
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 71
business in that great rich town. But he never reached
it. For this was the time when Akhenaten was Pharaoh,
and under his weak rule there was much disorder in the
countries which Egypt was supposed to govern. Akia,
knowing this, earnestly wished that he and his men were
safe in Carchemish ; and he was scarcely surprised
when, almost in sight of the town, they were stopped by
a band of soldiers and roughly questioned in a language
he did not understand. One of his servants, a native
of those parts, whispered to him that they were raiders
from Hatti Hittites, that is, not from Carchemish, but
from the wilder lands beyond Taurus to the north.
He knew their language, and began to interpret for his
master. But in the meantime another of the servants,
a cowardly fellow, tried to slip away and hide from the
soldiers ; he was pursued and caught, and in a moment
the two parties had come to blows. Akia himself was
unarmed and helpless, and soon his men were dead or
scattered, his goods were seized, and he himself was
following his captors towards their far-off home.
They tramped away northwards, and the unhappy
merchant grew more and more hopeless as he watched
and listened to the Hittites. Their speech sounded
rough and strange to him ; they did not even all speak
alike. They were heavily armed with axes and long
spears and short straight swords, and carried big shields
wider at the top and bottom than in the middle. From
beneath their tall pointed caps their long hair fell in curls,
contrasting strangely with the shaven heads of the
Egyptians, that were fresh in Akia's memory. He
decided that he had fallen amongst a very rude and war-
like people, and only hoped that they did not mean to
sacrifice him to their gods as soon as they reached home.
On the third day they came to a large town by a river,
called Marash. Alkia was glad to find himself in a
prosperous-looking city, with temples and fine buildings
CHAPTER Y
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES
ABOUT the year 1370 B.C., a Babylonian merchant named
Akia was travelling with a few servants through North
SYRIA
(To illustrate chapters V and VI)
39 38
Syria. He was returning from Egypt by way of the
Hittite city of Carchemish, hoping to do very profitable
70
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 71
business in that great rich town. But he never reached
it. For this was the time when Akhenaten was Pharaoh,
and under his weak rule there was much disorder in the
countries which Egypt was supposed to govern. Akia,
knowing this, earnestly wished that he and his men were
safe in Carchemish ; and he was scarcely surprised
when, almost in sight of the town, they were stopped by
a band of soldiers and roughly questioned in a language
he did not understand. One of his servants, a native
of those parts, whispered to him that they were raiders
from Hatti Hittites, that is, not from Carchemish, but
from the wilder lands beyond Taurus to the north.
He knew their language, and began to interpret for his
master. But in the meantime another of the servants,
a cowardly fellow, tried to slip away and hide from the
soldiers ; he was pursued and caught, and in a moment
the two parties had come to blows. Akia himself was
unarmed and helpless, and soon his men were dead or
scattered, his goods were seized, and he himself was
following his captors towards their far-off home.
They tramped away northwards, and the unhappy
merchant grew more and more hopeless as he watched
and listened to the Hittites. Their speech sounded
rough and strange to him ; they did not even all speak
alike. They were heavily armed with axes and long
spears and short straight swords, and carried big shields
wider at the top and bottom than in the middle. From
beneath their tall pointed caps their long hair fell in curls,
contrasting strangely with the shaven heads of the
Egyptians, that were fresh in Akia's memory. He
decided that he had fallen amongst a very rude and war-
like people, and only hoped that they did not mean to
sacrifice him to their gods as soon as they reached home.
On the third day they came to a large town by a river,
called Marash. Akia was glad to find himself in a
prosperous-looking city, with temples and fine buildings
72 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
along its streets : it made him feel safer. The place
was already full of soldiers, and fresh bands were pouring
in. Some had prisoners with them, some were loaded
with booty, and even those who had gained nothing but
A Hittite soldier.
(From Garstong's " Land of the HMites." Constable <& Co., Ltd.)
a wound in the fighting seemed cheerful. Akia saw
that he had been brought to the headquarters of the
victorious Hittite army, but he had no idea in what
war they had been engaged. He noticed that the troops
seemed well organized and under good discipline
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 73
The morning after their arrival, Akia was taken by the
leader of the company who had captured him to a large
building in the centre of the town, which he took to be
the palace of Marash. Here a man in military dress,
who was evidently an important officer, asked him his
name, nationality, business, and so forth ; speaking
through an interpreter. When he heard that the captive
had just come from Egypt he showed great interest,
and asked question after question. How did the people
like Pharaoh Akhenaten and his strange doings ? Did
the country seem prosperous ? Was the army in a good
state, and had he heard any talk of war ? What were
men in the Syrian towns saying about politics ? Akia
answered warily, not knowing who his questioner might
be, but his replies seemed to give satisfaction. Then a
messenger came in, announcing the king's arrival in the
town, and the officer dismissed the prisoner and his
guards, and hurried away to attend on his royal master.
That evening a lesser official came with the interpreter
to the house where Akia and his captors lodged, and he
learned what was to be his fate. He was given to under-
stand that the Hittite king, $ubbiluliuma, who had large
dominions and was, indeed, the greatest monarch who
had yet governed tjatti, needed scribes who could write
the cuneiform script, to help him in his correspondence
with foreign princes (for in those days all kings wrote
to each other in Babylonian). If Akia would become
one of the king's secretaries, good ; if not well, he could
imagine the rest. Akia asked for time to think it over,
and left to himself he sat down and wept.
He had heard a good deal of this king ubbiluliuma,
and very little that was to his credit. The Egyptians
called him " Saplel of Kheta," and distrusted him for
his intrigues among their Syrian vassals. Men of other
nations all spoke of him as a crafty, ambitious monarch,
who aimed at being as great as Pharaoh, but was too
74 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
cautious 'to fight him, remembering Egypt's warrior kings
of earlier days. Much of his power had been gained by
wiles and trickery, and evidently he had very little respect
for international law, if he countenanced the kidnapping
of other kings' subjects in this way. Akia remembered
having heard that once, when certain Babylonian
merchants had been robbed in Egyptian territory, the
king had written to Pharaoh and complained, and the
merchants had been compensated for their losses ; and
he wept afresh to think that no help could come to him
from Babylon, since probably no one there would ever
know what had become of him. He did not like the idea
of taking service under Saplel, an intriguer and stirrer-up
of strife, or of living among a people whom he considered
rather uncivilized in their ways ; but he had really no
choice, and when the officer returned he agreed to all
that was proposed.
When that was settled, Akia ventured to ask a few
questions, and learnt that the army was passing through
Marash on its way home from a successful campaign
in the land of Mitanni, which was in great disorder, its
king, a rival to Saplel, having recently been murdered.
Akia now understood better why the officer who had
questioned him in the morning had shown such interest
in Egyptian affairs ; Pharaoh was a friend to Mitanni,
and might be expected to come to the help of its prince
against the Hittites. He also heard that they would all
be leaving very soon, for between Marash and the Hittite
capital lay great mountains, and if they did not start
soon the passes would be blocked with snow. The
Babylonian shivered at the very thought, and asked if
he might have some warmer clothes than the thin robes
and sandals in which he had set out from Egypt. This
was promised him, and the two men left.
The next morning a soldier arrived with orders for
Akia to join the king's retinue at the palace. He also
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES
75
brought him a set of garments such as the Hittites wore
a warm tunic, a thick cloak, a close-fitting cap, and a
pair of strong warm boots with curious turned-up toes.
Akia put the things on ; he did not admire the costume,
but realized that it was sensible if ungraceful. Then they
set out for the court.
As they approached the palace, they found the streets
Lion Corner-stone from Marash, with Hittite writing
carved upon it.
(From Garstong's " Lend of the Hittttes." Constable.)
thronged with people, and only made their way with
difficulty to the entrance. Just as they reached it, the
doors were thrown open, and a file of soldiers came out
and began to clear a space before the portico and open
a path among the crowd. Akia's guide saicj something
to him which, of course, he did not understand, thrust
him among a group of men standing beside one of the
stone lions that guarded the doorway, and joined the
76 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
other soldiers. To Akia's great surprise, he heard some
one at his elbow speaking in his own language, and
turning round, found another Babylonian standing
beside him ! In an ordinary way he would not have
cared about meeting this man, for he recognized him as
the agent of a business firm in Babylon, who had been
sent to Syria, and had defrauded his employers and
disappeared, some years before ; but he was too glad to
hear his own tongue again to care who spoke it, so they
talked together as they waited.
Akia's acquaintance, it seemed, not daring to return
to his native town, had wandered northwards and taken
service as a scribe with one of the lesser Hittite princes,
and was now waiting with the rest of his master's train,
to witness a memorable scene of triumph for King
$ubbiluliuma. For that very hour the Prince of Mitanni ,
Mattiuaza, was expected to arrive in Marash, fleeing from
his enemies to take refuge with the Great King, and
rumour said that it would end in his marrying a Hittite
princess and ruling Mitanni as her father's vassal.
Soon the doors were opened again, and there was
a stir among the crowd. Then the Hittite monarch
appeared Subbiluliuma, the Sun, the Great King of
IJatti, the Valiant, as his subjects called him. Akia, you
maybe sure, looked at him with great interest a tall, hardy,
shrewd-faced man, dressed and armed like the officers
about him, only in a richer style. He and his aides-de-
camp came right out and set off at a smart pace down the
street, a bodyguard of soldiers fell in behind, and the
men who had been waiting outside the doors, including
Akia, followed as well. They left the town and halted
by a bridge over the river of Marash, and soon a little
procession of three chariots was seen approaching, and
in a few moments had drawn up beside the royal party.
Their trappings were torn and soiled, and they were
splashed with mud ; both the horses and their drivers
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 77
looked weary. From the first a man stepped down,
stiffly, as if he was very tired ; his scanty clothing was
disarranged and travel-stained, his long hair all in dis-
order, yet he moved with dignity. It was Mattiuaza,
the fugitive prince of Mitanni. He approached the king
and made a deep reverence before him ; Subbiluliuma
took him by the hand and raised him up kindly, and they
talked earnestly together for a few moments. At first
Akia could not hear what was said, and would not have
understood if he had heard, but at length the Great
King raised his voice, so that all might hear his last words,
" I will make you a child of mine, and place you on the
throne of your father ; and the gods know, that what I
say, I fulfil." Then a great cheer was raised, while the
soldiers lifted their spears and clashed them together.
After this they all returned to the town, and when the
bodyguard was dismissed at the palace entrance, Akia's
soldier-guide took charge of him again, and the two
Babylonians had to say good-bye. They met again,
however, before the army left Marash, and Akia had his
first lessons in the Hittite language and writing from his
fellow-exile. He was very glad of this, because he was
tired of being shouted at as if he were deaf, as always
happens to foreigners who do not understand what is
said to them. The rumours his acquaintance had heard
proved to be well founded, and one of his first tasks was
to make a copy of the treaty by which Mattiuaza, in return
for SaplePs help and the gift of his daughter's hand,
promised to be his faithful ally in future. Akia had already
been brought before the king and questioned by him,
again chiefly about Pharaoh and his
noticed that the news he gave, of disordj
and revolt in Syria, afforded great sat
lord.
Soon the army left Marash, ;
the king's own city. Akia neve
78 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
through the wild Taurus
mountains in the bitter
cold of early winter. He
marvelled at the endur-
ance of the Hittites, who
seemed to feel neither
cold nor fatigue. One
day they toiled up a great
pass,with snow-clad peaks
towering above them on
either hand. At the top
they halted, and cleared
away the snow from a
stone altar, guarded at
each side by the carved
figure of a crouching lion,
and there the king offered
up a sacrifice, to win the
favour of the storm-god,
that their march might
not be delayed. After
descending from the
mountains they kept on
northwards across a high
plateau. To Akia, accus-
tomed to the rich valleys of
the south, it seemed bleak
enough, but his com-
panions said it was good
farming land, where cattle
and hardy horses were
reared. He was begin-
ning to understand their
speech well now, though
the different dialects still
puzzled him a good deal.
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 79
At last, one day, they saw in the distance the mighty
walls and towers of a city, and the men raised a shout,
for these were the defences of IJattusas their home.
Akia gazed at them astonished ; he had not thought the
Hittites capable of such works, and compared with the
The Lion Gate of Hattuia?.
(From Garstang's " Land of the Hittito." Constablt & Co H Ltd.)
usual low mud-brick buildings of his own distant land,
the lofty stone ramparts seemed to him as wonderful a
sight as any he had seen, even in Egypt. The troops
entered by a big gateway, cleverly constructed of several
8o GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
massive stones built into the wall and cut to form an arch ;
at each side was carved a great snarling lion. A warm
welcome awaited the men from their wives and children,
and the sight of all the greetings that passed made Akia
feel miserably lonely for a time. But he was used to
being a stranger in foreign towns, having travelled a good
deal, and he quickly forgot his loneliness in the interest
of his fresh surroundings.
The new official was comfortably lodged and well
treated, and soon settled down happily enough. His
work was quite interesting ; he attended on the king in
his business hours, and helped to translate the letters
from foreign princes, and put the replies back into
Babylonian again. At times he could help his royal
master by telling him something he wished to know
about the southern countries which he had visited in
earlier days. When the king did not want him, he was
employed with many others in the royal library or among
the archives, cataloguing and copying records, and sorting
the state papers or rather the state clay-tablets indexing
them, and putting them away in their proper pigeon-
holes for reference. He often found very interesting
reading here, for among the tablets were accounts of
previous wars, copies of old treaties, and so forth, and he
began to realize that the Great King ruled a far more
ancient and mighty kingdom than he had supposed.
Though he never liked cunning old Saplel, he served him
faithfully, and in a few years was rewarded by the gift
of a good house near the palace, and by being married
to the daughter of a well-to-do family in the town.
In his spare time Akia found much interest in explor-
ing the neighbourhood and studying the ways of those
about him. The fortifications of the city never ceased
to fascinate him, and he spent many hours wandering
about them and watching the workmen who were con-
stantly employed in repairing and strengthening them.
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 81
He saw how cleverly the builders had taken advantage
of the steep slopes and broken ground on which the city
stood, making it almost impossible for an enemy to
approach. There were two walls, one inside the other,
each of great thickness, and several gateways besides
the lion-guarded entrance by which Akia had first
arrived. These were all built in much the same way,
with a guardroom at each side and strong square towers
above ; one was carved with the figure of some great
warrior. At the south end of the town the double wall
ran along the top of a natural ridge, through which they
had made a narrow tunnel, lined with great stones, to
enable the defenders to sally out secretly in times of
siege. Here and there within the walls small crags and
hillocks stood up among the streets, and these were
themselves carefully fortified, one being the citadel.
The defences were not only repaired but extended and
improved, and both they and the chief buildings of the
town were gradually adorned as befitted the capital of
a great and rising state, ruled by such an ambitious king.
The life that went on within the walls was still more
interesting to the stranger from the south. On the
weary journey northwards, Akia had felt that he was
coming to the very world's end ; and now he found that
the world was a much bigger place than he had thought,
and IJattusas was more like the centre than the end of it.
For in its streets and market-places there were men from
all the lands of the west and north, the king's allies from
the ^Egean shores, with their heavy iron armour and
weapons, and merchants bringing such goods as Akia
had never seen furs of dark shaggy animals, lumps
of amber from the coasts of a northern sea, and gold
ornaments of strange device. There were big fair-
haired- men, captives from the Hittites' northern wars,
who were kept for a while and trained before being sent
to garrison the Syrian towns at the other end of Saplel's
82 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
empire. Envoys came to the court, wearing strange
clothing and speaking the strange tongues of lands that
Akia had never heard of before ; and he began to realize
how the power of Hatti stood between the rich and ancient
lands he knew and the hungry, restless peoples of the
north.
Procession of Hittite Deities carved in the rock.
(From Garstang's " Land of the Hittites." Constable 6- Co., Ltd.)
Akia, of course, inquired about the religion of the
Hittites, and found that they chiefly worshipped a great
Mother-Goddess and her holy son. The soldiers'
favourite deity was the war-god Teshub, the god of
storms, whose sword was the lightning. On certain
feast-days Akia had to go with the other court officials
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 83
to a very sacred place outside the town, where ceremonies
were performed before all the Hittite deities, whose
figures were carved along the rocky walls of a natural
recess in the hillside. They formed a long procession,
standing in some cases on the backs of wild animals,
or even on the bowed heads of their worshippers, and
Hittite musicians.
(From Garstang's " Land of tlu Hittitts." Constabl* 6- Co,, Ltd.)
attended by their priests and priestesses. Akia was
quite willing to befieve that they were very powerful
gods, but he thought that as a work of art the sculptures
were irot as fine as those he had seen in Egypt. But of
course he did not say so.
In the same way Akia did not think the king's palace
84 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
or his feasts and entertainments as grand as those he had
seen or heard of in other lands. He never cared much
for the music the Hittites played, whether on flutes and
trumpets, guitars bedecked with ribbons, or a bagpipe
made out of a dog's skin. He thought the Hittite way of
writing, which they used on their monuments (see p. 75),
very clumsy. He had never been fond of the chase,
and had no wish to join the king's hunting-parties and
rush about in a rocking, swaying chariot over the wild
country round, in pursuit of lions or deer or wild cattle.
In fact, this Babylonian merchant, with his knowledge of
the fine ways of Egypt, found the life of liatti in many
ways rather rough and unrefined. When a son was
born to him he gave him his own name, Akia, and as the
child grew up he often told him about Babylon and
other foreign lands. He tried to impress on the boy that
he was only half a Hittite, and need not think liatti the
finest place on earth, as his playmates did. But he did
not live to see his son grow up, as he caught cold and
died during one of the bitter winters he had always
dreaded.
So Akia the Younger, though he bore a Babylonian
name, and had learnt to speak and write Babylonian so
as to be able to succeed to his father's post at court, became
a regular Hittite. He, in turn, married a ladyof Hattusas,
and their son was called by the Hittite name Zidanta,
and scarcely knew that his family had any connection
with Babylon at all. By this time old Saplel, the
diplomatist and intriguer, had been dead for some
time, and his second son Mursil was spending the early
years of his reign in war, and triumphing over his enemies
on every side. He was a wonderfully clever general,
and every year there were fresh victories to be recorded
in the archives. Akia the Younger was kept quite busy
making copies of the accounts of his campaigns for the men
of future times to read, and in the evenings he used to
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 85
delight Zidanta with tales of the king's great deeds, which
he had learnt in this way. Zidanta listened, too, to the
talk of his uncles, his mother's brothers, who were in
the army, about King MursiPs skill and bravery in
battle, and he decided to be a soldier when he grew up,
instead of following the peaceful profession of his father.
His Hittite uncles were delighted to see him thus growing
up " like a young wild-ox," as they said, and in time he
Rameses II. goes to battle, with his pet lion beside his chariot.
(From Maspcro's " Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria." Chapman 6> Hall, Ltd.)
became an officer in the chariot-corps, and earned great
praise for his courage and skill.
In the later years of King MursiPs reign a new war
began. A warlike young Pharaoh, Rameses II., came to
the throne of Egypt, and wanted to win back some of
the lands which his ancestors had held before the Hittites
had become so powerful. The chief battle of the war,
however, was not fought till Mursil was dead and Zidanta
was getting quite a middle-aged man. In 1288 B.C.
86 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
the new king, Mutallu; gathered together a great host
from his own lands and the lands of all his vassals and
allies, and marching southwards met Rameses at Kadesh
on the Orontes. A terrible struggle took place, with
great loss on both sides. Zidanta fought with great
valour, and on returning home was given an estate near
the capital, in recognition of his services, raised to a
higher rank, and married to a lady at court, Gilukhipa,
the daughter of a
high official there.
To the end of his
days Zidanta loved to
tell the story of the
great fight at Kadesh ;
how the king sent out
men with orders to
pretend to be de-
serters and mislead
the Egyptians with
false news,
but they were
suspected and
forced to con-
fess the truth,
so that the
plan failed ;
how in spite of this the day went well for the Hittites
at first, and Rameses himself, pet lion and all, was sur-
rounded by their chariots, and only rescued by his own
men in the nick of time. Zidanta had to admit that in
the crash of the final charge the heavier Hittite chariots,
manned by three men apiece, did not prove so superior
to the lighter Egyptian ones, with only two men each,
as had been hoped. Then he would tell how at last
the Hittite army had been forced back, and had tried to
cross the river as best they could, to take refuge behind
A Hittite captured by the Egyptians.
(From King's " History of Babylon." Chatto & Wittdus.)
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 87
the walls of Kadesh ; how some were captured, some
shot down by the archers as they swam, and some drowned
in the stream amidst all the confusion. And here Zidanta
could not help smiling, though it was all so sad, as he
recalled the spectacle of one of the allied princes who
was dragged out of the river, more dead than alive, by
his servants, and held up by the heels to drain the water
out of him. He always declared that the Egyptians also
lost so heavily that it was hardly worth their while to call
it a victory, as they did.
The war went on after this for some time, even when
a new king, Hattusil III., came to the throne. But after
several years Flattusil decided to make peace with Egypt,
as he had many other enemies. Zidanta, who had seen
a great deal of service and was growing old, was now
allowed to exchange his command in the army for an
honourable but less active position near the king. When
Hattusil suggested that the two countries should leave
off fighting and make an alliance instead, Rameses was
not sorry, and soon it was decided that ambassadors
from both sides should meet in Syria and discuss the
terms of the treaty. Zidanta was chosen to be one of the
Hittite ambassadors, and took a great part in the long
negotiations that followed.
By this time he and Gilukhipa had several children,
including two sons, whose names were Shanda and
Laria. Shanda, the elder, was a bright, lively boy, who
always took a particular interest in his father's tales of
travel and war. He was full of questions about foreign
lands and people, and especially the Egyptians, whom
his father now knew both as foes and as friends. Shanda
wanted to hear again and again how
sadors looked, how they spoke and
all that they had said and done,
much, he said, as to travel anc^feWJXreign counl
and Egypt above all. Two wisenRifrom
88 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
at this time living at court, a physician and a sorcerer,
who had come to cure the king of an illness some time
before. Their talk interested Shanda, particularly when
he found out that his own ancestors had come from that
famous city. But nothing could alter his desire to visit
Egypt, and when he saw one day the departure in state
of the envoys who were taking the final copy of the great
treaty to Thebes, he cried bitterly because he was not
old enough to go with them.
This copy of the treaty, by the way, is worth describ-
ing. It was written in Egyptian and Babylonian, and
inscribed on a tablet not of common clay but of silver.
The seals of the Hittite king and queen and of the sacred
witnesses they had invoked were likewise engraved there.
No doubt King liattusil wished Pharaoh to realize that
his new friends and allies were a people not only rich
in silver, which was still very rare in southern lands, but
skilled in fine workmanship as well.
Both sides kept faithfully the promises they had made
in the treaty, and after a time it was arranged that the
alliance should be strengthened by a Hittite princess
becoming one of King Rameses* wives. The lady was
to be taken to Egypt by her royal father and a great train
of attendants and soldiers. Now was Shanda 's chance,
and you may imagine with what eagerness he set out
with the others. The journey was in itself a great
adventure, and Shanda enjoyed it all, caring nothing that
they travelled in winter with all its hardships, to the
great astonishment of the warmth-loving Egyptians.
The splendid company made its way over the mountains
to Marash, by the very road that Shanda's great-grand-
father had travelled as a prisoner so many years before.
Fronpk there they passed on southwards through the
l^dtf of HattusiPa vassals in North Syria, who all received
the Great King arid his daughter with pomp and
splendour. At all^h cities they visited, now called
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 89
Aintab, Aleppo, Hamath, and Horns, a guard of honour
was sent out to meet them at some distance, and as they
neared the gates the people too came running out ta
welcome them with dances, songs, and shouting, the
women being particularly anxious to get a glimpse of the
beautiful royal bride. When they left, they were escorted
by horsemen towards the next town in the same way*
Kings were not often seen travelling about in those
days, except when they went to war, and you may imagine
what excitement the visit caused, and how the folk of the
little white villages on the hills came crowding down ta
see the procession pass !
Leaving the Lebanon behind, they came to the
coast, and most of the party now saw the sea for the first
time in their lives. To avoid a very dangerous part of
the way, where the road was nothing but a rough flight
of steps in the cliff-side (called the Ladder of Tyre),
they took ship for a short distance. But the princess did
not like this at all, and was glad to land again and ride
up the Plain of Esdraelon, away from the roaring waves.
Near Mount Carmel they w r ere met by a body of Pharaoh's
troops, and escorted in triumph through the southern
plains and across the barren isthmus to Egypt.
Shanda's dearest wishes were now fulfilled. He saw
the wonderful Nile, and the vast buildings and monu-
ments, new and old, that lined its banks ; he looked on
the face of the great soldier-king, now growing old, of
whose prowess at Kadesh years ago his father had sa
often told him. He watched solemn ceremonies in dark
mysterious temples, and took part in the pageantry and
feasting that accompanied the wedding. The presents
of robes and jewellery which he and all the rest of the
party received filled him with delight, and he returned
to IJattusas laden with souvenirs and full of admiration
for Egypt and all its ways.
Shanda was not the only Hittite to feel this enthusiasm.
9 o GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
To copy Egypt soon became the leading idea in the towns
of Hatti, particularly among the younger people, and
Egyptian styles in art, in dress, and in ways of living were
all the fashion. Some of the elders, including Zidanta,
did not approve of this, and held that the old-fashioned
national customs were good enough, but they were
laughed at as being behind the times.
Rameses was charmed with his Hittite bride, and in
a few years had the opportunity of repaying kindness to
her family. A younger daughter of King Flattusil,
Princess Bintresh, was taken very ill, and was thought
to be possessed by an evil spirit. So first an Egyptian
sorcerer was sent, to try and drive away the demon ; but
he failed. Then there came to Hattusas a great pro-
cession of white-robed priests, who bore with them the
holy image of Khonsu-the-Plan-Maker-in-Thebes, the
moon-god of Egypt, who in his sacred bark had travelled
across the sea and over the wild mountains to heal the
suffering princess. In the presence of the king and
queen and a great assembly of courtiers, amongst whom
stood Zidanta and Shanda, the lady was brought before
the god, and cured of her illness ; the evil spirit departed,
and great rejoicings followed.
But this great event, which caused such joy in the
palace, was a source of trouble in Zidanta's house. For
Shanda now talked so much of Egyptian superiority in
this thing and that, that his father, who had never for-
gotten the times when Egypt was the Hittites' bitter
enemy, could bear with him no longer. They quarrelled
fiercely, and Shanda left home for ever, vowing that
Egypt was the finest country on earth and he would go
and live there. However, on his way southwards, he
decided to visit Carchemish, and there he met a relative
of his mother, a wealthy merchant of the town, who was
very kind to him. Having no son of his own, he suggested
that his young cousin should join in his business and
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 91
marry his only daughter. Shanda, who was beginning
to realize how foolish he had been, was glad to accept
this good offer, and so we leave him for the present,
settled in Carchemish, and far better off than he deserved
to be!
Zidanta, now an old man, never quite recovered from
this blow, but his younger son was a great comfort to
him for his remaining years. Laria had none of Shanda 's
extravagant ideas, but was a quiet, steady-going young
man of the old Hittite type. He had no ambition beyond
living quietly on the family estates, and doing his duty in
the army when called upon. He took part in one or two
small frontier campaigns, but never distinguished him-
self, for he was in no way as able a man as his father.
The same was true of many young men of the time :
the Hittites did not seem to be the great people they had
been. Indeed, Laria lived to see the beginning of the
downfall of the Great Kings of Hatti and the empire
they had ruled. There were no more wars with Egypt,
but new enemies appeared Assyria on the south-east,
fresh invaders from the northern grasslands, the Phrygians
and others, on the west. About 1230 B.C. a great famine
afflicted the country, and although corn was sent from
Egypt to relieve the distress, many people died, Laria
among them. Before the end of the century his sons
had fallen one by one, some in warfare against the
Assyrians, others fighting against the northern invaders,
who had at last succeeded in sweeping across the land
of the Hittites as they pressed on to the south. Hattusas
itself was no longer a great city, and with its fall there
perished the last of the family of Akia the Babylonian,
who had so greatly prospered there.
No, not quite the last ; we are forgetting Shanda,
far away in Carchemish. His sons, like those of Laria,
had to fight in a vain defence of their land against the same
great attack from the north, but, more fortunate than
92 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
their cousins of Flattusas, they survived the struggle,
and their children were among the inhabitants of
Carchemish wheir after some time it was rebuilt in great
splendour. Perhaps their portraits are carved somewhere
in the wonderful procession of sculptures which adorned
the central square of the town. They may even have
Hittitc carving in Assyrian style.
(From Garstang's " Land of ike Hittites." Constable 6- Co., Ltd.)
been related to the royal family who are so charmingly
pictured there the king and queen going out to meet
their victorious troops, the children behind them playing
with tlieir toys, and finally the baby, carried by its nurse,
and followed by its pet animal led along on a string 1
Here, then, we will leave the last descendants of Akia,
living happily, let us hope, in the rich luxurious city,
IN THE LAND OF THE HITTITES 93
with its splendid buildings and imposing walls. Car-
chemish was certainly a wonderful town. It stood in
an important position at the crossing of the Euphrates,
so that traders from all quarters passed through it, and
there was much business to be done. Where the river
itself did not protect it, the town was ringed with strong
fortifications resembling those of liattusas. Its standard
weight, the " maneh of Carchemish," was used in trade
all over Western Asia. Its wealthy merchants lived in
fine houses, comfortably arranged and beautifully
decorated ; they wore gorgeous fringed and embroidered
robes, and reclined at feasts on couches of ivory, made
from the tusks of the elephants which were still to be
found in the wooded country round. The soldiers who
fought for them carried weapons of iron, and their
wives and daughters were decked with gold and other
jewellery of marvellous workmanship.
Just as the northern Hittites had admired and imitated
the Egyptians, when once they became their allies, so
the southern Hittites, in Carchemish and other towns,
seemed to have copied the Babylonians and later the
Assyrians in a good many ways, though Assyria was
really their enemy. But to speak of Assyria brings us
to a new subject ; and that is, the lives of the other
peoples besides the Hittites with whom the Assyrians
had to do. So from Carchemish we turn southwards
once more, to the cities and kingdoms of Palestine.
CHAPTER VI
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS
WE have heard a good deal about Syria in the last two
chapters, but nothing of the descendants of Abraham,
whose Promised Land it was. Now, however, the
Children of Israel are going to appear in the land of
Canaan, and we can try to put together a picture of the
country and its peoples as they found it.
First of all, what was the Promised Land like to look
at ? It is a difficult country to describe shortly, because
there is so much variety in it the low plain along the
coast, rich sunny valleys inland, high bare hills or moors
in the south. From the hot deep trench where the
Jordan flows, far below sea-level, to waste its waters in
the bitter Dead Sea, you can look up and see snow
shining on Mount Hermon. It is a land of dry summers
and wet winters, and its people are used to both heat
and cold. Sometimes the hot summer days are tempered
by a cool wind bringing a mist from the sea, sometimes
they are made almost unbearable by dry dusty storms
from the desert. There are woods and orchards as well
as barren stony pastures, and in the spring it is gay with
the flowers which help its rich cornfields and olive-
yards and vineyards to make it " a land of corn and wine,
of oil olive and of honey."
But this " good land," so attractive to men who had
been used to getting a scanty living from the scattered
pools and pastures of the wilderness, was not lying empty
94
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 95
and waiting for them. Every one knows the list of its
mixed inhabitants, Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Hivites,
Jebusites, Perizzites, and others as well. We know who
and what the Hittites were scattered subjects of the
Great Kings of IJatti, who for some reason or other had
left their homes and settled in the south. The Canaanites
and the Amorites, as we said once before (p. 5), were
Semites who had come out of the wilderness long ago,
even before the days of Abraham, and were thoroughly
settled in the land. The Jebusites were the tribe whose
chief city was Jerusalem. The others were of less im-
portance. In the north, beside the coast, lay the rich
and ancient towns of the Phoenicians. So the Hebrews
when they arrived were not going to have things all their
own way.
Then, too, we know something more about Canaan or
Syria than the mere names of its inhabitants and where
they came from. It was the country whose princes had
fought against the great Thothmes III. and other
Pharaohs, and later had had to pay tribute and send
their sons to be educated in Egypt. The description
of their tribute shows us in what a rich, luxurious way
they must have lived. Their cities, Megiddo, Kadesh
Lachish, Gezer, and others, were great fortified places
on hillocks or mounds, " walled up to heaven," the
Israelitish spies said. Their leaders went into battle
clad in armour and driving richly-ornamented chariots.
They traded with foreign countries, and their own crafts-
men and artists could make all sorts of beautiful things
for use or decoration. No wonder the Israelites, after
their bondage in Egypt and their hard life in the wilder-
ness, felt small and helpless in comparison !
Within the massive walls of the Canaanitish towns
there lay a crowded maze of low, roughly-built houses,,
with irregular lanes and byways rather than proper
streets between them. It was nobody's business to keep
D2
96 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
the roads clean, and dirt and rubbish were swept out
from the houses and allowed to lie there. If a house fell
down or crumbled into decay, and a new one was needed
in its place, the owner did not dig fresh foundations,
but simply levelled the ruins and built on the top of them.
Thus in course of time the mounds on which the cities
stood grew gradually higher, and nowadays people who
go to Syria and the East generally, digging for ancient
remains, recognize these " tells," as tituy are called, by
their shape, and often find layer upon layer of ruins
inside them. But in ancient times the chief result was
to make slowly steeper the slope up which the women
had to carry their water-pots daily ; for though they had
rock-cisterns inside the town for use in times of siege,
they usually brought in their water-supply from wells
outside the walls, beside which stood also drinking-
troughs for the animals.
Many of the houses were arranged round their own
courtyards, into which the rooms looked, so that the
street-walls were blank and windowless. Ordinary
people's houses were probably plain and undecorated
inside, with very simple furniture, though nobles and
rich men lived in great style. In the kitchen premises
there would be big pottery jars for storing oil, meal, and
so forth ; a stone contrivance, rather like a slightly
hollowed pastry-board with a rounded rolling-pin, for
crushing corn ; a few bronze knives and tools. On
the walls of the rooms hung little images of gods and
goddesses, which to us look very clumsy and ugly. Unlike
the Egyptians, the Syrians wore brightly-coloured clothes,
and the men were usually bearded. They carried seals
like the Babylonians, and the women had many ornaments
of gold.
The images on the walls were usually those of a great
goddess called Ashtoreth, or Astarte, who was very much
like Ishtar of Babylon. The Canaanites also believed
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 97
in many lesser gods, the " Baalim," or Lords, who ruled
in the cornfields and vineyards and pastures. To
please these gods, so that they might be willing to send
abundant crops and increase the flocks and herds, the
The High Place of Gezer.
(By kind permission of the Palestine Exploration Fund.)
Canaanites performed ceremonies at their " High
Places " on the hill-tops. Here there would be an altar,
either one built up of earth or stone, or a natural flat
98 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
surface of rock with little hollows cut in it, into which
were poured offerings of wine or oil or blood from the
sacrifices. At times the people would offer up not only
animals, but even their own children, whose tiny bones
have been found buried in jars beside these altars. There
was generally a grove of trees at hand, where the chief
goddess was supposed to live ; if there were no trees
growing, a wooden pole or block was set up instead, such
as the Old Testament calls an " Asherah." Sometimes
there was a cave close by, in whose mysterious darkness
the priests gave signs and foretold the future. But the
chief feature was a great row of huge unhewn stones
standing on end. They seem to have been the holiest
thing of all, and were anointed with oil, and kissed in
adoration, till they were polished quite smooth in places.
Dreadful as this worship seems to us, we can easily
see how the Israelites were tempted to join in it. In
spite of Moses' teaching, they were very slow to under-
stand what the First Commandment really means, and
for a long time went on thinking that so long as they
gave the chief honours to their own God, it did not matter
if they worshipped others as well. So they did what
other ancient peoples often did tried to make friends
with the gods of their enemies and win them over to
their side, thinking that unless they could please the
Baalim as the Canaanites did, the beautiful rich land
would be struck with barrenness. They did not at
first know much about farming, and would naturally
think that the sacrifices and magic ceremonies were as
important as ploughing and sowing. This is why the
sect of the Rechabites thought all agriculture sinful,
and refused to taste wine or even settle down in houses
or cities ; they hated all these things because of the
idolatry that was connected with them, and tried to live
as they had done in the old desert days, when there
were no such temptations.
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 99
We do not know exactly when the Israelites arrived
in Syria ; perhaps it was during the time when the
Egyptian governors were complaining so bitterly to
Akhenaten about the raiders from the desert. In any
case, they were not the only people who were making
their way into the country about that time, though they
were the most successful in doing so. We read a great
deal about their wars with the Midianites and the men
of Moab and Ammon and Edom. These races were
related to the Jews, who admitted it by saying that
their enemies too were descended from the family of
Abraham. The Old Testament often calls them the
Children of the East ; we usually call them the Arameans.
Unlike the Hebrews, they were not escaping from
bondage anywhere, but simply coming out of the desert
because of drought and scarcity, as the Canaanites and
Amorites had done long ago (see p. 5). They did
not succeed in crossing the Jordan, but had to set up
their kingdoms to the east and south of it, on the desert
edge. Some of them occupied Damascus, which was
already a very old city. They could not go further north
than this, because of the Hittites who held the northern
towns.
Moab was the strongest of these little kingdoms.
It was very small, only about the size of our county
of Hampshire ; none of the Syrian states were large.
The country was rich both in crops and in sheep and
cattle, and we read how for a time the Moabites paid
tribute to the kings of Israel of wool and live animals
from their flocks. But later their king Mesha refused
to pay, and when the King of Israel with his allies came
against him and wasted his country, he offered up his
eldest son as a sacrifice to the Moabite god Chemosh
upon the walls of his besieged city. Mesha wrote an
account of his wars with Israel upon a great stone,
which has been found and read.
too GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Other enemies of the Israelites were the Midianites,
also " Children of the East," who came out of the
desert " like grasshoppers for multitude, and their
camels were without number, as the sand by the sea-
side," making sudden raids, slaying and plundering.
We read in the Book of Judges of Gideon's wars against
them, and how in revenge for his brother's death he
pursued Zebah and Zalmunna, kings of Midian, and
slew them, and took their purple robes and golden ear-
rings and ornaments, and the chains of golden crescents
that had decked their camels' necks. So even the
Midianites had certain kinds of wealth and luxury,
though they kept to the old nomadic ways.
Some of the most famous stories in the Book of
Judges are those which tell of Samson, and his share
in the long war between Israel and the Philistines.
If we wanted to, we could make up a name for the
Philistines like that of the Midianites and Ammonites
and others, and call them the " Sons of the West," for
they did not belong to Syria or the eastern deserts,
but had come into the land from quite a different direc-
tion. We heard at the end of the last chapter of a great
host of invaders, partly Northerners, partly some of the
settled peoples whom they had driven from their homes,
who forced their way after several attempts across the
Hittite Empire, wrecking Hattusas and Carchemish as
they passed. Some of them chose new homes and left the
rest to go on without them, but a great many made their
way through Syria right to the borders of Egypt. They
came partly in big wooden carts pulled by oxen, which
were drawn up round the camp to protect it at night,
and partly in ships. The Pharaoh who was reigning
at the time went out with his fleet and cavalry and defeated
them both by land and sea. But of course there were a
great many of them left even after the double battle,
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 101
and so he did what other Pharaohs had done with
invaders before made a bargain with them to give
them the homes they wanted, on condition that they
would be his allies and soldiers in future. In this way
the Philistines gained possession of their five towns,
Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath ; and after
this we can begin to speak of the south of Canaan as
Palestine, for it took that name from these new arrivals.
To make a picture of the people whom Samson and
David fought against, we must think partly of what we
know about the Northerners, partly of the Minoans,
Philistines defending their waggons.
(From Maspero's " Struggle of th Nations." S.P.C.K.)
and partly of some very famous people whom I expect
you have heard of, though they are not mentioned in
this book, the early Greek heroes who fought at Troy ;
for the Philistines' customs seem to be a mixture of all
three. Their ox-waggons remind us of the Aryans in
their old home, but the ships show that as the invaders
came southward they had had to learn a new way of
travelling. Perhaps among the wanderers who reached
Palestine there were Minoans who had left their homes
when the raids from the north began, like our imaginary
friend JEihon ; for the Hebrews always said that the
102 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Philistines came from Caphtor, which was probably
their way of saying Keftiu ; and when the Egyptians
talked about Keftiu, they meant either Crete or the shores
of Asia Minor not far away.
We think of the Minoans too when we read of the
Philistines crowding on the roof to watch their captive
Samson display his strength, while the lords sat in the
shade under the pillared portico, which Samson after-
wards pulled down upon them when he was brought
into the shade to rest.
It sounds very like
the people of Knossos
watching a show of
boxing or bull-leaping !
When they sent back
with the Ark models
of the mice and the
plague-swellings which
had afflicted them, they
were, perhaps, think-
ing of their ancestors'
custom of taking
models of diseased
limbs to the holy cave
on Mount DicdL As
for Goliath, he at once
makes us think of the
great warriors in the " Iliad," who, whenever there
was no general battle being fought between the
Greeks and the Trojans, used to have their armour
and weapons polished up and go out with their shield-
bearers before them to challenge one of the enemy to
single combat, while the armies looked on and cheered.
His great iron-headed spear is an example, too, of some-
thing which the Northerners brought with them into all
the Mediterranean lands the knowledge of how to forge
Head of Philistine.
(From Maspero's " Struggle of thi Nations."
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 103
iron. Before their times we always hear of weapons and
tools of bronze, but with their coming the Age of Iron
begins. We read in one place that the Philistines, when
they ruled over the Hebrews, would not allow any
smithy-work amongst them ; perhaps this just means
that they did not want the conquered people to learn
the new art, in case they should find out how to make
weapons as good as those of their masters.
In other ways the Philistines seem very soon to have
learnt to be like the people they lived amongst. We
do not know what language they spoke, but we never
hear of their having any difficulty when they wanted
to talk with the Hebrews. They seem to have worshipped
the same gods as the other peoples of Syria, though they
perhaps mixed up the stories about them with legends
from their ancient western home. We only know the
names of two of their special deities, Baal-Zebub, Lord
of Flies, whose priests were famous for their skill in
foretelling the future, and Dagon, who is often said to
have been a god in the form of a fish, though there is
no definite proof of this. They also worshipped a
goddess like Ashtoreth. But they held their ceremonies
in temples, and not at " High Places."
We usually think of the Philistines simply as soldiers,
because we hear so much of fighting in connection with
them ; some of them formed a bodyguard for King
David after he had conquered them. But their towns
were well placed for trade both by land and sea, and
they were sailors and merchants as well as warriors.
They sometimes turned pirates too, and perhaps that
is how they were able to carry on a great trade in slaves.
In time they grew to be just like the other peoples of
Palestine, and after King David's day we scarcely
hear anything more about them.
Saul, as every one knows, was the first king the
104 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Israelites ever had, and he lived in a very simple way,
like the old-fashioned chiefs of mere tribes. So when
David, who was only a successful soldier, came to the
throne, he found no royal city, no palace, no outward
signs of kingly splendour at all. But he was quite
willing to have all these things, and there were people
not far away who dealt in all sorts of luxuries, and were
eager to supply him with them. They were the merchant
princes of the rich Phoenician towns ; and so we read
that, as soon as David had captured Jerusalem from
the Jebusites and made it his capital, " Hiram King of
Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and
carpenters, and masons ; and they built him a house/*
This was the beginning of a long alliance and a great
deal of trade between the two states ; so we had better
find out more about King Hiram and his subjects.
Hiram was the first powerful king of Tyre, which
had now risen to be the chief of the Phoenician ports.
The most important of the others were Arvad, Byblos
(or Gebal), and Sidon, and they lay in a row along the
Syrian coast north of Philistia. Beside them were
patches of fertile land, cultivated till they were almost
gardens ; close behind them rose Lebanon with its
pinewoods ; before them stretched the western sea.
They were all very ancient cities, and indeed several
of them claimed to be the oldest town in the world, and
to have been founded by some god at the beginning of
all things. It was said that Isis had visited Byblos while
she was searching for the body of Osiris. Certainly
Byblos had traded with Egypt from the very earliest
times. Timber from Lebanon was sent to the treeless
Nile delta, probably in the form of rafts which could be
floated down by sea, and in return a great deal of
Egyptian papyrus came to Byblos and was exported
again from there. In later times, when the early Greeks
began to write and use papyrus, they called it by the
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 105
name of the town they bought it from, much as we speak
of " china " or " astrakhan " ; and so the Greek word
for books was " biblia," and we use it still when we call
our sacred books " the Bible."
Byblos stood close down by the shore, so that its
prince could sit "in an upper room of his dwelling,
leaning his back against a window, while the waves of
the great Syrian sea beat against the rocks below," as
an old Egyptian traveller described him. But Tyre
was actually on three little islands off the coast, which
were joined into one by great sea-walls, so that the town
was like a ship riding at anchor. Perhaps that is why
Ezekiel, when he prophesied the destruction of Tyre,
compared her to a splendid galley, richly equipped and
decorated indeed, but whose rowers would bring her
into deep waters where the storm-wind would break
her at last. The first settlers had lived on the mainland,
and the islands were occupied later, because they were
out of reach of an enemy. There were always suburbs
on the mainland, where the merchants had their summer
villas and gardens, and where the cemeteries lay. Even
the springs of fresh water were there, and the supply had
to be taken across the strait in boats daily. But of
course there were also cisterns on the islands, for use
in times of siege or bad weather.
Tyre stood a good many sieges in the course of her
history, but usually resisted them successfully. How-
ever, she and the other Phoenician cities were often
subject to some powerful state, Egypt or Assyria or
whoever was strongest at the time, for the Phoenicians
cared more for wealth than for independence, and were
usually willing to submit and pay tribute rather than
have their trade interfered with. Each city had its own
ruler, who in earlier days was often called a "judge,"
as among the Hebrews.
Tyre reminds us in one way of New York, for the
io6 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
town, being unable to spread, was closely packed and
crowded, and the houses were unusually high for those
days. Until David's friend Hiram I. built new sea-walls
and reclaimed a little more land round the island, there
was not even a market square. The streets were very
narrow, there were no gardens or open spaces, and even
the temples had to occupy as little room as possible.
The channels between the islands formed sheltered
harbours, where the galleys loaded and discharged their
rich cargoes, such as you can read about in the twenty-
seventh chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. Thronging the
narrow streets were to be seen men of all nations,
merchants and workmen, sailors and slaves, while in the
little crowded houses the Tyrian craftsmen were working
busily at their trades, weaving rich stuffs and dyeing
them purple, or making the fine objects of metal and
glass for which the town was celebrated. They had
probably learnt the secret of the famous purple dye
from the Minoans.
A very beautiful poem by Matthew Arnold, which
you are sure to read some day, ends up with a well-
known picture of a " grave Tyrian trader " who looked
out at sunrise from his ship
" Among the ^Egaean isles ;
And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine
And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted masters of the waves
And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail ; "
and made his way towards the far western seas and right
out into the Atlantic. But the Phoenicians themselves
had not long been masters of the Very Green (the east
end of the Mediterranean and the -ffigaean), for the great
days of their trade did not begin till the Minoans had
been, overthrown. However, during those few centuries
the Very Green was covered with their big oared galleys,
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 107
which were stoutly built of the good timber of Lebanon,
and could go long voyages and face rough seas. They
carried sails in addition to the oars, and the men-of-war
had a long beak projecting under water, which survives
in the " ram " of the modern battleship. Their pilots
were skilled navigators, and had learnt to steer across
the open sea at night by the stars, instead of creeping
along the coast in daylight only. In later times the
Photo W. A. Mansell & Co.
A Phoenician galley.
(British Museum.)
kings of great nations were glad to hire Phoenician
fleets for service in war, and one Phoenician captain
sailed a squadron right round j
Pharaoh Necho. By then the
way to the Greeks in the -flEgean
their trade in the western seas, JQst >~ the poem
When they were thus busy :' 4 """""
they founded colonies, little
io8 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
put in for repairs or food. Several of these became
great cities : Carthage, which was at last destroyed by
the Romans after a fierce war ; Gades, now Cadiz, in
Spain, and Tarshish or Tartessus not far off.
When the Phoenicians came to a likely place for trade,,
they landed and tied up their ships to the quay, or if
there was no harbour hauled them up on the beach.
Sometimes in lonely spots they made smoke-signals to
let the natives know they had arrived. Then they began
to display their goods, tempting the men with tools
and weapons, and the women with gay materials and
pretty ornaments. If the natives did not understand
their language, they trafficked by dumb-show, and some-
times the bargain was made by each side piling up the
things they were willing to exchange till each was
satisfied with the heap offered by the others. This was
honest enough, but matters did not always end so happily.
For the Phoenicians were great slave-traders, and often
they would lure the natives, particularly the women, on
board their ships, promising to show them some very
special goods, and then set sail and make off with their
unhappy captives.
They had very business-like " office methods " too.
The prince of Byblos, sitting in his window-seat over-
looking the sea, sounds rather like someone in a fairy-
tale ; but when an Egyptian came to him to buy timber,
he could call for his father's and grandfather's account-
books and look up the exact price they had been paid
when they sold timber to Egypt. Then, to make business
documents simpler, they usea a set of signs which were
almost like shorthand in those days, they were so much
easier to read and write than Egyptian hieroglyphics
or 'Babylonian cuneiform. It used to be said that the
Phoenicians inventecjjthese signs ; now this is no longer
believedi. But they certainly spread a knowledge of
.them in *he ,countriesjthey visited, and so put them into
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 109
the hands of the Greeks, who turned them into the
alphabet which they handed on to the Romans and to
modern peoples.
The Phoenicians were not a nation who invented
much, but they had a keen eye for goods that were likely
to sell well, and were quick to copy useful ideas and
attractive styles wherever they saw them. They knew
the fashions, in art and decoration as well as in dress,
of all the countries round, and passed them on from one
nation to another. No doubt the temple and palace
which they helped King Solomon to build in Jerusalem
would contain quite a mixture of the foreign ideas they
had suggested, and very likely travellers who knew many
other cities might have been heard saying as they looked
at the new buildings, " Why, that pi^ce of carving is
copied exactly from a famous Egyptian design," or,
" I saw just such a laver supported on oxen, in the new
temple at Carchemish," and so on.
The Israelites were very proud of Solomon's improve-
ments in the capital, though perhaps when they found
themselves set to work at hauling and hewing the great
logs which Hiram sent by sea in floats, and paying over
to him each year large quantities of wheat and oil, some
of them may have thought of Samuel's prophecy about
what would happen when they had a king to rule over
them. But they always honoured Solomon for his
wisdom and the splendours of his reign, which was
almost the only time of real peace and prosperity that
the nation ever knew. We need not say much more
about it here, because we can all read the account of
it for ourselves, in the early chapters of the First Book
of Kings.
Unfortunately the Israelites learnt more from their
friends in Tyre than how to build and decorate palaces
and carry on foreign trade. The Phoenicians worshipped
the same gods as the other Syrian peoples, and so the
no GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Hebrews were once more encouraged to worship Astarte
and the Baalim, particularly Melkarth or Moloch, the
special " Baal " of Tyre. Every one will remember how
Elijah had to contend with the priests of Baal on Mount
CarmeL The Jewish women too learnt the custom of
" weeping for Tammuz," mourning for the fair young
god (the husband of Ishtar or Astarte, who was said to
die with the flowers and leaves at the end of summer,
and return to life in the spring), as the Tyrian women
did in the lovely valleys on the mainland opposite their
island home. The influence of the Phoenicians too
helped to encourage the Jews, who at first had lived
simply, in the luxury and extravagance which the pro-
phets so sternly rebuked in later times.
After Solomon's death and the division of the kingdom,
the Israelites soon began to have trouble with a new
enemy, the " Syrians " of Damascus, as they always
called them, though they were really Arameans like the
Jews themselves (see p. 99).
Damascus was another very ancient city, and one
which, unlike many others of its age, lives on to-day.
It lies east of the Lebanon ranges, in a wonderful fertile
valley that stands out into the desert like a promontory
into the sea. Mount Hermon, a part of the Anti-
Lebanon chain, and a third range of lower, barren hills,
shut in a small plain, and from the heights on the west
there flow down " Abana and Pharpar, rivers of
Damascus," which Naaman the Syrian said were " better
than all the waters of Israel." Without them, particularly
the Abana, there could be no Damascus. This river
rushes down from Anti-Lebanon through a narrow
gorge, and then splits up into several streams which
wander about the little plain, providing irrigation almost
ready-made. They go no further, but end in a marsh,
and beyond that there is only desert. But within the
THE JEWS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS in
basin all is green and pleasant, with rich cultivated land,
orchards, and gardens famous for their beauty.
Here the desert caravans, with their strings of laden
camels, gathered like ships to some outstanding port,
and merchants from east and west met in its bazaars.
It was famous for its manufactures of steel and fine
cloths (damask), and remained so into the Middle Ages.
It was such a useful place for commerce that although
it is not easy to defend, and has several times been
destroyed in war, it has always been rebuilt. The
merchants of Israel seem to have had a special quarter
reserved for them in the town, by the treaty between
Ahab and Ben-hadad (i Kings xx.).
There was often war between the kings of Damascus
and Israel, in which sometimes one and sometimes the
other was successful. It was a pity they could not make
a firm alliance instead, and stand shoulder to shoulder
against the kings of Assyria, who at last overthrew them
both. Ben-hadad II., who defeated Ahab at Ramoth-
Gilead, and Hazael, who smothered the old king with
a wet cloth when he was ill, and took the throne, both
fought great battles against a powerful Assyrian king
named Shalmaneser III., and were more successful than
most kings who stood up against Assyria. But as we
know, both Damascus and Samaria had to yield in the
end, though it was not till Assyria had been overthrown
and Babylon had again become powerful that the people
of Jerusalem and Judah went into captivity.
On the whole, the history of the Jewish people is a
sad one. They came into the Promised Land and found
themselves surrounded by enemies. They had to remain
quiet in their hills while the armies of Egypt tramped up
and down Syria on their way to fight the Hittites. When
those wars and the great northern invasion were over,
the smaller nations Tyre, Damascus, Israel had their
ii2 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
chance for a short time. Then before long Assyria
was approaching, like a great grim giant, and threw a
black shadow right across the whole land.
But the importance of the Jews after all is not in
their wars and alliances with other nations, but in the
struggle for true religion which their greatest and wisest
men, the prophets, carried on. The land and its
customs meant great temptations for the people, to which
they often yielded. But still the best among them
stood up and preached what no other nation yet knew
one holy God who cared not for solemn assemblies and
burnt-offerings without righteousness and judgment, and
desired mercy rather than sacrifice.
CHAPTER VII
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE
ABOUT the year 645 B.C., a ruler in Asia Minor, by name
Ardys, King of Lydia, wanted to send a friendly message
to the great King of Assyria, Ashur-bani-pal. The
journey from Lydia to Assyria was then a dangerous one,
because wild invaders from beyond the Caucasus,
Cimmerians and Scythians, were roaming about. Their
main army had been defeated both by Ardys and by the
Assyrians, but bands of them were still to be met with,
so the royal messengers took a very strong bodyguard
of soldiers with them. Among these soldiers were two
young Greeks, Chilon and Archias by name, who
belonged to a city of Ionia on the -flEgean coast of Asia
Minor, and had been fighting for King Ardys for pay,
as the Greeks often did in those days. They were
brothers, and while the ambassadors were busy at
Ashur-bani-pal's court, they went about Nineveh together,
sight-seeing. On their return from this long journey
they were given leave to go and visit their family. Their
relatives and friends were of course eager to hear the
tale of their adventures, and one evening a little party
of people gathered in their house to listen to it ; and
this is what they heard. Chilon, who was the elder,
began.
" We were very tired when we reached Nineveh,
because we had been a good many days on the march,
and the country round there is very hot. So we were
"3
ii4 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
glad when the walls of the city came in sight. They
are high strong walls, with towers along them. There
is no sea near, but the town stands by a big river, where
a lot of boats go up and down. Sometimes this river
brings great floods from the hills, so, as the land is flat,
they always have to make a great mound first when they
wish to build a palace or a temple, to put it out of reach
of the floods."
Here Archias put in a word. " They would not
need to be so afraid of the river if they built better.
But there is not much stone in the country, and they use
brick for nearly everything, and sometimes the bricks
are not even baked in a kiln, but just hardened in the sun.
They put the sun-dried bricks inside the walls, between
two layers of properly baked bricks, but of course if
the water gets in at all the sun-dried brick softens and
sinks down in a mass, and breaks the outer face of the
wall open. So Assyrian buildings don't last long, and
you see ruins all over the country."
Then Chilon went on with his story. " We came
to a big gate, and showed the letters we had brought to
the men on guard, and they let us in and took us to the
palace. It is a huge palace and very grand in every way,
but we did not see much that night, for it was late, and
after we had had supper we were glad to go to our quarters.
In the morning our captain told us that the ambassadors
would not go before the king till the afternoon, so we
could do what we liked in the meantime, as long as we
didn't lose ourselves and reported for duty in good time.
" We wanted to see all we could of the town, and we
had a great piece of luck. Just as we were going out at
the gate of the palace, a man ran after us, calling to us
in Greek. He was an Ionian, from Ephesus I think
he said, who had been captured by the Assyrians when
fighting in the pay of the King of Egypt, and was now
in the Assyrian army. His name was Hippias, and we
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 115
liked him. He said he was very glad to meet Greeks
again, and was very kind to us all the time. He asked
his captain's leave to go out with us, and took us through
the chief streets to the market-place and showed us all
the sights.
" Nineveh is a huge place, with wide streets and
gardens inside the walls. There were men from every
country to be seen there, both traders and captives.
The Assyrians themselves are a dark race, with dark hair
and beards, all carefully oiled and arranged in little
curls. They wear long robes tied round their waists
with a girdle, and their princes and rich men are most
gorgeously dressed. Their robes are stiff with
embroidery in wonderful patterns, and they wear a
lot of ornaments on their arms and necks and in their
ears. They are a very rich people, for they have con-
quered almost every nation within their reach and forced
them all to pay tribute ; the palace and the whole city
are full of the spoils of war."
" They are a rich people certainly," put in Archias,
" but they are a very cruel people. It made my heart
sad that day to see the gangs of captives in the streets.
When they conquer a country, they bring away the natives
in droves like cattle, men and women and little children
together, and drive them off to some far-away land
in quite a different part of the empire. We met such
a drove passing through the town. Or sometimes they
keep them as slaves and force them to work at building
and so on ; there was a gang of prisoners hauling a
great block of stone to make some new decoration for
the palace, and I thought how they must hate doing it
for the king who had destroyed their own homes."
Chilon was not as tender-hearted as his brother, and
did not relish this interruption, so he continued as soon
as he could. " In the market-place they were selling
strange animals that we had never seen before, with long
ii6 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
legs and necks and humps on their backs. Hippias said
they had been captured from some desert tribe who had
joined in a rebellion against the king. A Phoenician
trader who knew him came and spoke to us, and said
he had just bought several for next to nothing, to carry
his goods to the next place he was visiting. This
Phoenician has been to Ionia, and speaks our language.
An Assyrian carving of Arabs and camels.
(From King's " History of Babylon." Chatto & Wtndus.)
His name was Yabin, and he too was very good to us,
and often took us about when Hippias was on duty.
It was he who told us about the rebellion, but I don't
remember exactly what he said."
" I do," said Archks promptly. " The king we saw
had a brother who reigned in Babylon, which is another
big city not very far away. This king did not like
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 117
obeying his brother in Nineveh, and raised a rebellion
against him, in which other princes joined. But he
was defeated and besieged in Babylon, and at last, when
he saw there was no more hope for him, he set fire to
his palace and was burnt there, with his soldiers and
his wives and children and all his possessions. For as
I said, these Assyrians are very cruel, and they torture
their prisoners, and this prince would rather die in
this way than be put to some horrible death by his
brother, while the crowd watched and jeered at him,
as they would have done. It had all happened not long
before we arrived, so we heard a lot of talk about it."
" What was the name of the king in Babylon ? " asked
one of the listeners.
" That I cannot tell you," replied Archias.
" Assyrian names are long and difficult to pronounce,
and I never learnt that one. But I can say the name of
the king in Nineveh : it is Ashur-bani-pal."
The others tried to imitate what he said, but
" Sardanapallos " was the best they could do ; so they
gave up the attempt, and Chilon went on with the story.
" That afternoon we all attended the ambassadors
when they went in to see the king. We were drawn
up to wait for them in the open courtyard of the palace.
It is paved with brick, and all the halls and galleries
open off it. At every door there stand two great stone
monsters : they have the bodies of bulls, but the heads
of men, and long wings outspread. Also they have
five legs apiec?e."
His audience were used to the idea of mixed monsters
in their own fairy-tales, but the thought of the five
legs amused them. But Archias struck in again. " It
is not such a bad idea really," he said. " Hippias
explained it to me. You see, these creatures each stand
at a corner, so that you only see them from two sides,
and the legs are cleverly arranged so that they look
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 119
Once again Chilon continued. " Our ambassadors
were lodged in a different part of the palace we had
our quarters with the guard. So they came into the
courtyard at last, and we marched behind them through
a great hall and several corridors, but when we came
to the throne-room, they left us to wait outside, so we
did not see the king that day. We waited in a long narrow
room, very lofty, and decorated with carvings and paint-
ings, pictures of the king's wars and triumphs and so on.
The furniture was very gorgeous, all covered in beauti-
fully dyed stuffs richly embroidered ; the wooden
parts were carved and inlaid with ivory panels. I think
some of it must have come from abroad, the carving was
in such different styles."
" Hippias said a lot of it came from Egypt," remarked
Archias. " They carried off a great deal of booty at
the time when he was captured. Some, of course, came
from Syria as tribute ; there are several countries there
who have paid tribute to Assyria for many years."
" Did you hear anything of the history of the
country ? " the young men's father asked. " How has
it come to be so powerful ? "
Chilon left this question to his brother to answer, so
Archias took up the tale.
" I did not hear very much," he said. " But Yabin
told me a little, and there was an old man, the father of
one of the guardsmen, who told us of the wars he had
fought in as a young man. He stood beside us one
afternoon while we watched part of the army set out to
attack a city that had helped the king's brother in his
rebellion, and we heard his stories while we waited.
But Yabin's stories went back farther than his ; he said
he had heard them from a man he knew who was one of
the royal librarians for though this king is so harsh and
bloodthirsty he is fond of literature, and has composed
a book himself. I visited the library one afternoon."
120 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
" Well, tell us about that afterwards," said his
father. " Now I want to hear what this Phoenician and
the old man said."
" Yabin said that the Assyrians were a people very
like the men of Babylon, and that they lived in much
the same way, but were always enemies. He said indeed
that most nations were enemies of the Assyrians, because
of their cruel tyrannical ways. He told me that their
kings usually spend all their time in war, and that three
times they have been masters of nearly all the countries
within their reach. The first of these great warrior-
kings was called Tiglath-Pileser, and he brought his
army to the shores of the sea where Arvad, Yabin 's own
city, stands. He was a great hunter, too, and slew lions
and wild bulls and elephants with his own hands, and
at Arvad he took ship and killed a great sea-monster.
Even the King of Egypt feared him and sent him presents.
He sent a crocodile and a hippopotamus from the Nile,
among other things, and they were taken to Nineveh to
be shown to the people. This happened hundreds of
years ago.
*' After this king there was little to tell for a long time,
and then more great fighters arose, and they too made
war in the west. They fought the kings of Damascus,
and two little nations called Israel and Judah. They
fought other wars as well, in the north and the east,
but Yabin did not know much about them.
" Then at last there rose up the ancestors of this
present king, who have made their country greater than
it ever was before. The old man I spoke of had fought
under one of them, called Sennacherib, the grandfather
of Ashur-bani-pal. He told us how once this king
had marched towards Egypt, because Pharaoh was
encouraging the kings of Judah and other places to
rebel and pay no more tribute to Assyria. Sennacherib
besieged a city called Lachish, and took it, while his
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 121
officers were sent to capture another town called, as
well as I remember, Jerusalem. But it was a strong
place, and they did not succeed, though they have
wonderful machines for attacking city-walls, which we
saw later.
" At last, the old man said, they tried to make terms,
for the king would wait no longer. The Tartan, as
they call their commander-in-chief, and the Rabshakeh
(one of the generals), and other officers met some men
from the city outside the walls. Our old friend was one
of the guard who went with them, and he says he still
remembers the people crowding on the wall to hear what
was said, looking hungry and afraid, and yet with such
hate in their eyes. Three men in long robes, not
soldiers, came out, and the Rabshakeh tried first to
persuade and then to terrify them into surrendering, but
they would not. It seems there was a prophet in the
town who had persuaded them that their city was sacred
and could never be taken ; and at last the army had to
go away and leave them. I admired those people ;
very few nations will face the Assyrians.
" That war against Pharaoh ended in a disaster.
For when the Assyrians came near to Egypt, they all
suddenly fell ill of the plague, and very few escaped alive.
Hippias too knew about this, but he told rather a different
story, which he had heard in Egypt ; he said the King
of Egypt marched out to meet Sennacherib, and as
the two armies lay opposite one another, there came
in the night a multitude of field-mice, which devoured
all the quivers and bowstrings of the Assyrians, and ate
the thongs by which they managed their shields. So in
the morning they tried to retreat, and many were slain
as they fled. But the kings of Assyria are very powerful
yet, in spite of this disaster, and indeed they say that
Ashur-bani-pal is the mightiest of them all."
" Did you ever see him ? " someone asked.
122 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
11 Not that day ; the ambassadors came out of the
throne-room, and we marched back to the courtyard
and were dismissed there. But the next day we saw him
set off to hunt lions. The kings of Assyria are all great
hunters. Indeed, they have killed so many lions that
there are very few left, so that they have to be caught
in the wilder parts of the country, and brought in cages
to be let loose where the king wishes to have his sport.
But let Chilon tell the tale now ; I am tired of talking."
So Chilon took up the story afresh.
" Hippias told us to
make our way to the great
entrance and wait there.
And this is true that I tell
you, though you will scarcely
believe it : there are great
watch-dogs chained at the
gate, and amongst them,
A Lion let loose for the hunt.
chained and kennelled in the
same way, there are two
men, chiefs who had fought
against the king for his
brother. They say the king has said that one day, when
he goes in procession to the temple to give thanks to
his gods for all his victories, he will have these two
men and several others harnessed to his chariot, to pull
it instead of horses.
" But that day he drove two very fine horses when
he went out. He is a kingly-looking man. He held
the reins himself, and two slaves stood behind him in
the chariot, one waving a fly- whisk, and one holding a sun-
shade over him. He had only a few men of his bodyguard
with him, the huntsmen with the hounds, and half a
dozen of the nobles in their chariots too.
" While he was away we saw more of the palace.
We noticed some beautiful carvings one day, the finest
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE
123
I have ever seen, showing the king at a hunting-party.
They were so lifelike that it was almost like watching
the real sport. There are beautiful gardens within the
palace walls, and separate buildings where the king's
wives live. He has a good many, and keeps them closely
shut up. But the ordinary women are allowed to go
about freely ; some of them keep shops and carry on
business for themselves."
Photo W. A. Mansell & Co.
Ashur-bani-pal in his chariot.
(British Museum.)
" They are better off than the queens, then," remarked
his sister, " Tell me, did you see inside any of the
ordinary houses ? How do they keep them ? "
" We were only once inside a private house," Chilon
answered. " The daughter of Yabin's friend the librarian
was being married, and he was invited to the wedding,
124 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and took us with him. I really cannot tell you much
about the house, it was crowded with people. But
we saw the wedding."
" Oh, tell us about that ! " said all the ladies at once.
" There was not much to see," Chilon said. " The
bride was wrapped in such a thick veil that you could
not see her, except that she seemed very richly dressed,
and all her ornaments tinkled when she moved. They
were married in the house, and there was not even a
priest there ; all that was done was that the bride's
Photo W. A. Mansell & Co. (British Museum.)
The King spears a lion.
father took her hand and the bridegroom's, and tied
them together for a time by the wrists ; then he said
a prayer for them. They seemed to think more of
the signing of the marriage-contract. A scribe wrote it
down on a tablet of clay, in their strange writing, and
the bridegroom and the bride's father signed it. Then
Yabin and some others signed as witnesses. One of
the witnesses could not find his seal and had to make a
mark with his thumb-nail ; it made him angry, for only
poor men do without seals.
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 125
" After that there was feasting and music till the
bride went away to her husband's house. Her family
and friends made quite a procession, with the slaves
her father had given her, and others carrying the furniture
and clothes and so on that were her dowry. We saw
them start off, all shouting and singing and waving their
torches, and then we had to go back to our quarters."
He paused, and Archias seized the chance of describ-
ing his visit to the royal library, where he had seen the
thousands of clay-tablets which Ashur-bani-pal had
caused to be collected, chiefly from Babylon, that his
scribes might study and copy them. The librarian
The symbol of Asshur in various forms.
(From Ball's " Light from the East." Eyre & Spotttswoode, Ltd.)
said that each had its place, and bore an inscription
saying that it belonged to the king, and calling down the
wrath of the gods upon anyone who should carry it
away. The king often sent to the library, usually for
the chronicles of his ancestors' great deeds, or for the
lists of signs and omens by which the future was foretold,
for he was devout and rather superstitious, and did nothing
without asking the will of the gods.
Here someone asked what gods the Assyrians wor-
shipped, but neither of the brothers could tell much
about that. Yabin had said that their religion was copied
from Babylon, like their laws, and their way of building,
126 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and writing, and many other things. Hippias had pointed
out to them the symbol of the special national god
Asshur, which was carried as a standard by the troops ;
but that was all they knew, except that there were several
temples in Nineveh, all with terraced towers.
Chilon then went on to describe what they had seen
of the great army of Ashur-bani-pal.
" Hippias told us that part of the army was to be sent
into the south, to lay waste a city that had rebelled with
the king's brother, and we went up on top of the wall
beside one of the gates to watch them go. First came
a company of horsemen carrying lances and short swords,
Assyrian army besieging a town.
(From the British Museum Guide to Assyrian Collection.)
and then a great number of archers on foot. Some
of these had heavy coats of mail, and helmets of different
shapes, but most were quite lightly equipped. Some-
times shield-bearers are sent with the archers, to protect
them while they draw their bows. They are said to be
very skilled in archery. The officers drove out in
chariots, but they do not often go into battle in them
now. They were splendidly armed, and the general
as he went stood up so proudly in his chariot, his left
hand resting on a magnificent sword-hilt, with a slave
behind him holding a bright fringed sunshade over him.
" The most interesting part was the train of siege-
engines. There were several machines for battering
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE
127
down walls great beams of wood tipped with iron,
and hung so that they would swing backwards and for-
wards. They were on wheels, and each had a shield over
it. These shields are of different shapes ; some are
made in the form of animals, and some have a little
turret where archers can stand, the better to shoot over
the walls of the besieged town. Besides these battering-
Crossing a river.
(From Badminton Library : " Surimmtng.")
rams they employ sappers to dig down beneath the
foundations, and scaling-ladders to " " "
In this way they have captured
yielded to an enemy before.
" We asked the old man
how they took these great
that they might come to on
128 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
they made bridges of boats laid side by side, or cut
down trees to make rafts, putting inflated sheepskins
beneath. All the foot-soldiers carry these sheepskins,
and each man blows his up, and putting it beneath
him plunges in and swims across to the far bank."
Here Archias broke in. " Talking of rivers," he
said, " I remember that the old man spoke of going down
the Euphrates in a fleet of boats which the Phoenicians
built and manned for that King Sennacherib, to fight
someone or other down
in the south by the sea.
But he also told a tale
of a sea-battle in the
same king's days against
pirates, who he said
were men of our nation,
lonians, and now I
really do not remember
clearly about either
story." Then turning
to his brother he added,
" But you have told the
end of the tale before it
was time, for the depar-
ture of the army was
the last thing we saw
before we came away ourselves. The night before that
there was the great feast when the king returned from
his hunting."
" Finish the story yourself then," said Chilon some-
what surlily ; and Archias did.
" Ashur-bani-pal came back from his sport the day
before we left in a very good temper because he had
killed lots of lions and gave our ambassadors his
answer' to .our king's message. In the evening he made
*a greats feast for us and for the officers who were going
Blowing up the skins.
(From Maspero's '
Assyria."
Life in Ancient Egypt and
Chapman > Hott.)
ASSYRIA THE TERRIBLE 129
to the wars. It was the most splendid affair I have ever
seen. Tables were set in the great hall, and the slaves
were busy all day bringing chairs and couches of ivory,
vessels of gold and silver, huge jars of wine, and game
and fruit of all kinds. These people eat and drink a
great deal. The king did not feast with us, but in the
gardens with the queen. But we had a magnificent
banquet. Musicians played, and slave-girls came in
Photo W. A. Mansell & Co. (British Museum )
Ashur-bani-pal and his Queen feasting among the trees.
and danced and sang for us, and we all had a very good
time."
" There seems no end to the wealth and power of
this king," said his father thoughtfully.
" So one would say," replied Archias. " Yet behind
the rich hangings I saw here and there that his painted
palace walls were cracking, and I think his empire
now is the same more show than anything else.
130 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Hippias spoke once or twice, when none of his officers
could hear him, of a dangerous enemy, the Medes,
who live in the eastern mountains, and are growing
stronger day by day. I do not think he loves his royal
master, and there are many in the army like him,
foreigners and men of conquered races, who would
scarcely fight for these tyrants with great good will.
And Yabin, who has travelled far and wide, says there
is no nation where the very name of Assyria is not hated,
so if the country were in danger, who would come to
her help ? for no one would care if she were wiped off
the face of the earth."
Archias was quite right in what he said. During
Ashur-bani-paPs last years, and after his death, the
power and daring of the Medes increased constantly.
The savage Scythians burst out of Asia Minor and swept
right across the Assyrian empire to the very borders of
Egypt, doing a great deal of harm. Egypt and Babylon
set up new kings of their own, and did not obey Assyria
any longer. Finally the King of Babylon made an
alliance with the Median king, who very soon fell upon
Assyria with all his forces. Before Ashur-bani-pal had
been dead twenty years, his empire had fallen to pieces,
and his capital, taken by the Medes, was a ruin. And
because of the continual wickedness of its people in
times past, the nations clapped their hands for joy at
the news, and there was none to bemoan Nineveh when
she was laid waste.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE
ABOUT ninety years after the visit of Chilon and Archias
to Nineveh (that is, about 555 B.C.) a little boy was born
in the city of Ephesus in Ionia, on the ^Egean coast of
Asia Minor. His parents were very delighted, and his
father declared that he should have the best education
that was to be had then. The Greeks of Ionia in those
days were beginning to be very interested in various
kinds of learning, and perhaps this man hoped that his
little son, whom he named Myrtilos, might grow up
to be a famous poet or man of science. But events
were happening just then that altered all these plans.
Perhaps you remember that Chilon and Archias,
who were also Greeks of Ionia, had been the soldiers
of Ardys, King of Lydia. This country lay just inland
from Ionia, and its capital, Sardis, was not far from
Ephesus. When Myrtilos was born, the King of Lydia
was a certain Croesus, whose name you have very likely
heard ; both gold and silver were found in his land,
and " as rich as Croesus " is a well-known saying. Un-
fortunately this king had more wealth than wisdom,
and in the end he brought about the downfall of his
country. On the far side of his kingdom from Ionia
he had for neighbours the Medes, who had destroyed
Nineveh and seized all the northern lands that had
belonged to Assyria. Beyond the Medes again, in the
hills east of the Tigris, lived the Persians, who were
13*
J32 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
a people very like the Medes. After a time a Persian
noble named Cyrus made himself king of both Medes
and Persians, and seemed likely to become very powerful.
This so alarmed the kings of Babylon, Egypt, and
Lydia, that they made a league to overthrow him.
Now Cyrus the Persian was a great warrior, and
Croesus did a very foolish thing when he began the war
without waiting for help from his allies. He was
encouraged by a prophecy that if he led his army across
the Halys (the river that separated his land from Media)
he would destroy a mighty empire, for it did not occur
to him that the saying might have two meanings. One
of his subjects warned him that he had better leave
the Persians alone, saying that they were a race who had
no wealth or luxuries, but wore leather clothing, lived
very plainly, and drank only water, so that even if he
conquered them he would gain nothing ; but the king
would not listen. Soon he was face to face with these
hardy warriors. They were famous archers, and it was
said that they shot so thick and fast in battle that the
flights of their arrows darkened the sun like a cloud.
They were so skilled in managing horses that some of
them had taught their steeds to help them in fight by
rearing up on their hind legs, striking out with their
front hoofs, and biting the men against whom they were
urged. Then, too, Cyrus had camels from the eastern
parts of his land to carry his baggage, and he placed
these where they might frighten the horses of Croesus*
cavalry. So the Lydians were defeated, their capital,
Sardis, was taken, and Croesus himself was made a
prisoner.
All this does not seem to have much to do with little
Myrtilos. But Ephesus and the other Ionian towns
were at that time in alliance with Lydia, and so Cyrus
decided to conquer them too. However, he had other im-
portant matters to see to at home, so he left this task to his
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 133
generals and went back to Persia, taking Croesus with him.
The Persians had learnt from the Assyrians how to
attack walled towns with siege-works and battering-
rams, and one after another the Ionian cities fell before
them. Ephesus fared no better than the rest, and so
it came about that Myrtilos, then just seven years old,
lost both his parents in one day, and fell into the hands
of a Persian soldier who found him. frightened and
crying, in his half-ruined home beside the broken
city-wall.
Now the Persians were not cruel conquerors like
the Assyrians, and this man felt sorry for the child.
He had had a little boy of his own, about the same age,
who had died not long before, so he made up his mind
to save the little Greek and send him to his home in'
Persia as a present for his wife. He was able to put his
small captive in charge of a family who were being sent
to Persia along with some other prisoners and the rich
booty from Sardis ; and in this way Myrtilos left his
Greek home and travelled far away, to be brought up as
a Persian boy.
It happened that not long afterwards Arsanes (for
that was the name of Myrtilos' protector) received a
wound that made him of no further use as a soldier, and
was allowed to go home ; so he was able himself to
see to the upbringing of his adopted son. He lived in
the old simple way on his farm, a short distance from
the capital, Susa, and there he taught the little Greek
such things as the Persians learnt. His first lessons
were in the Persian speech and religion. The parents
of Myrtilos of course had worshipped the gods of Greece,
and had begun to teach him their names and stories,
and the ceremonies he must use towards them. The
religion of the Persians was very different from that
of the Greeks, and Myrtilos now began to be taught
quite other beliefs.
134 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Arsanes told him that the world was created and
ruled by one Great Spirit, who was good and wise,
and wished his people to be the same. His name was
Ahuramazda, and he was helped in the government
of the universe by six other good beings of lesser power,
and a whole host of spirit-servants and messengers.
The sun and the stars and the moon, the wind and the
great rivers, fire, and the kindly earth that gave men food,
were all his servants too. He needed help because he
had a powerful enemy, Ahriman, who was always at
work in the world doing evil and preventing good.
Ahuramazda wanted men also to be on his side in the
struggle ; they could help him by living good lives,
by doing their work well, whatever it was, by managing
their farms and bringing up their children carefully,
by loyally serving the Great King, by taking care of
useful animals, and destroying harmful creatures and
weeds. To hurt a dog or a cow, the two most useful
of animals, was a very bad action, but to kill a wild beast
or a snake or even a destructive insect was a good deed.
It was men's duty also to see that earth and water,
and particularly fire, were kept clean and pure, and not
defiled by rubbish and dirt. All this, Arsanes said,
was the teaching of a wise man named Zoroaster, who
had lived not very long before.
Myrtilos quickly learnt these ideas, and liked them
very much. He soon made up his mind to be on the
side of Ahuramazda, and work and fight for the good
against all evil. He was glad to think that then, when
he grew old and died, his spirit would be able to pass
safely across the Bridge of Judgment that led from this
life to Ahuramazda's home of perfect happiness beyond,
instead of falling from it into the horrible gulf below,
where the spirits of Ahriman's servants went. He
liked to watch the Magi (as the Persian priests were
called) offering their sacrifices in the open air, on altars
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE
135
where a pure fire was kept burning continually. He was
quite glad too when it was decided that he should be
given a new Persian name, Mithridates, in honour of
Mithras, the bright spirit of the sun.
A Persian custom which pleased the boy greatly
was their habit of celebrating birthdays with feasts
and much rejoicing. In his own case there was a
difficulty about doing this, for he could not tell Arsanes
on what day of the year his birthday fell. However,
Open-air altars.
(From Maspero's " Passing of the Empires" S.P.C.K.)
it was arranged that he should keep the day on which
he received his new name as his feast-day in future.
As time went on, Arsanes and his wife had several
children of their own, and Myrtilos or rather Mithridates
was no longer the pet he had been at first. This
was partly so, because as he grew up he showed a difference
in character from the true Persians, and his foster-
father was a little disappointed in him. For one thing,
while he was brave enough, he did not care for soldiering,
and had no wish to go into the army. The fact was
136 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
that, like many Greeks of his day, he was what we should
call " of a scientific turn of mind," though he could
not study science as a modern boy does, for very little
was known of it. He asked far too many questions
for Arsanes' liking, and the latter was thankful that his
own sons did not copy him, but were content with the
old Persian training " to ride, and to shoot, and to
tell the truth."
At last, when Mithridates was about fifteen, something
happened which made a difference to all his after-life.
King Cyrus, a few months before, had conquered the
last king of Babylon, captured his city, and united
all his possessions with his own. Arsanes, who was
a well-to-do man and a most loyal subject, decided now to
make a journey to Babylon while the king was there,
see the wonderful city of which he had heard so much,
and perhaps pay his compliments to the king and offer
him a present, as the custom was. He took Mithridates
with him, to the boy's great delight, and the visit was
the second turning-point in his career.
Babylon had been many times destroyed and rebuilt,
but Cyrus had done it no harm when he took it, and the
city stood in all its splendour as its last great native
king, Nebuchadnezzar, had left it. Arsanes and Mithri-
dates saw there some of the wonders of the world at
that time. They climbed up the ziggurat of the great
temple, and from a seat half-way up they looked out
over the crowded streets, the vast walls, along which
several chariots could drive abreast, the busy quays,
the rivers and canals that shimmered in the sun, close
around the walls and far into the distance. Across
a dock-basin, on a high mound, stood the huge palace
that Nebuchadnezzar had built for himself and heaped
full of every kind of royal treasure ; they could see down
into its broad crowded courtyards, and up to the raised
terraces beyond where the royal gardens lay. Behind
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE
'37
these again rose the stately towers of the Ishtar Gate, that
formed the entrance into the royal and sacred part of
the city. Close at hand stood E-sagila, the ancient
shrine of Marduk, and other temples too.
After a few days Arsanes made arrangements to visit
the court and make his offering to the king, and promised
to take Mithridates with
him, as far as he was
allowed to go. Dressed
in their simple best, the
two set out from their
lodgings in the northern
part of the city, and
passed through the Ishtar
Gate towards the palace,
stopping to marvel at
the procession of lions
that seemed to advance t si
along the wall to meet
them, and the hundreds
of bulls and dragons
whose brightly-coloured
figures ornamented the
towers beside the gate.
From here they followed
the wide stone-paved
Sacred Way past the
chief temples of the city Towers of the Ishtar Gate.
tO the palace entrance,
, r , . , . '
and made their way
into the first great court. The place was thronged
with soldiers and officials, and the men who like
Arsanes had come to present their gifts personally to
the king, as the true-born Persians were allowed to
do instead of paying taxes. By degrees they worked
their way across to the central court, and so to the
(FromBreasted's"AncuntTt9n*$."
Gtnn 6- Co.)
138 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
innermost court of all,
One of the " Immortals." (See
also p. 145.)
(From Zitnmern's " Greek History for
Young Readers.' 1 )
with a golden
off which the Throne-room
itself opened. Here at last
Mithridates was stopped by
the soldier on guard ; so he
waited in the court while
Arsanes was led by an usher
into the presence of the
king.
The time did not seem
long, for there were so many
interesting things to be seen.
There was the crowd itself,
Medes and Persians, men of
Babylon, Greeks from his
own half-forgotten home-
land, an Egyptian envoy
with several negro warriors
in attendance. There were
foreigners from the far
eastern lands, and in one
corner stood a group of old,
bearded men in long robes,
Jews who had been brought
to Babylon as captives by
Nebuchadnezzar when they
were quite young, fifty years
before. They had come to
thank Cyrus for his promise
that they might return to
their own land. The soldiers
at the entrance too were
very imposing, with their
splendid dress and orna-
ments ; each carried a bow
and a quiver, and a spear
pomegranate at the butt-end. They
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 139
belonged to the king's bodyguard, known as the Ten
Thousand Immortals.
But Mithridates was almost more interested in the
building itself. The courtyard was open to the sky,
'and the sun, blazing down upon the glazed walls
with their gay patterns in blue and yellow, was quite
dazzling. Several doors opened off it, leading into
the living-rooms of the palace, which were richly orna-
mented, and had their ceilings supported on mighty
roof-beams of cedar. Every door was plated with metal,
and every doorstep covered with bronze. The boy
wandered right round the courtyard, taking in every
detail. Finally, tired with the heat and glare, he crept
back into the shadow of the wall and edged his way
along until he stood beside the big spearman once more.
And at last, just before Arsanes came out again, he
managed to peep into the cool, white-walled Throne-
room, and get a glimpse of the splendid figure within,
sitting upon the throne of Nebuchadnezzar, crowned
and gorgeously robed Cyrus the king, lord of the
greatest empire then on earth.
The sight of Babylon, with its fortifications, its
docks and quays, and all its other wonders, decided
Mithridates as to what he would do. His mind was
made up from that time to be an architect, and raise
splendid buildings and useful works in the lands that
would one day be conquered by the Great King. For
he quite believed what Arsanes told him, that a wise
and just ruler was one of Ahuramazda's greatest helpers,
spreading good works wherever he went, and that to
serve such a ruler was one of the finest things a man
could do. So he determined to make himself a useful
servant of the king by learning all that was known in
those days of the arts of building and engineering,
and with his foster-father's consent he stayed behind
in Babylon to study his business with an architect there.
140 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
A good many years passed, and great changes took
place in the royal house. Cyrus was Wiled while making
war in the far east of his empire. His son Cambyses,
who succeeded him, had a short and rather unhappy
reign. He went to Egypt to conquer it, and at first
was successful, but afterwards madness seized him there,
and he died on his way home. He had no son, so a
great Persian nobleman, Darius, became king, being
related to the royal family. He had some trouble
with rebellions at first, but afterwards reigned in peace
and did many great and useful works for his subjects'
benefit.
By the time Darius became king, Mithridates was
a grown man, and beginning to be known as a very
skilful architect. He was married, and had two little
sons of his own. The Persians, now that they were
such a great people, were anxious to have finer houses
and buildings of all kinds than they had had before,
and the nobles were glad to employ a man who could
build a handsome house in the Babylonian style, which
they greatly admired. So Mithridates had always plenty
to do, and at last his good work brought him to the
notice of Darius. This king did not wish to spend his
reign in war, but was anxious to do all he could to improve
the lands he ruled in peaceful ways, by encouraging
farming and trade, and spreading a knowledge of better
ways of living among his less civilized subjects. He was
just the kind of ruler that Mithridates admired, so the
latter was delighted when he was offered a post in the
royal service. He spent the next few years travelling
far and wide in attendance on the king, whom he helped
with practical advice and suggestions about such things
as roads and bridges and water-works, which were needed
in different parts of the empire.
His first journey of this kind was to Egypt. Darius
went there to put down a revolt, and was accepted as
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 141
king by the Egyptians. Then he set to work on a great
scheme to improve the trade both of Egypt and Persia.
He wished the Persians to have ships and take to trading
by sea, which they had not hitherto done, and he thought
it would encourage them if the voyage round Arabia
to Egypt and the Mediterranean were shortened by
cutting a canal between the Nile and the north end of
the Red Sea. There had been such a canal hundreds
of years ago, dug by command of one of the early Pharaohs,
but the sand had been allowed to fill it up, so the work
had to be done over again. The king also wanted to
show the Egyptians a Persian method of getting water
for the fields by digging channels underneath the beds
of streams. An example of how to do this was given
them in an oasis near Thebes, and a new temple was
built there at the same time.
So Mithridates had a busy time helping to plan these
undertakings and watching the progress of the work.
Besides, like every wise man, he wanted to go on learning
all the time, and improve his own ways of working by
studying other people's doings. He visited as many of
the great Egyptian buildings as he could, talked to
Egyptian architects, and collected ideas for plans and
decorations for future works. After a while the king
went home to see to other matters, leaving his architects
and engineers to carry out his plans. Soon, however,
he sent for some of them, because he had decided to make
a great expedition in the northern regions of his empire,
and thought he might need their help. So Mithridates
and one or two others left Egypt and set out to meet him
on his way through Asia Minor.
As he travelled through Syria, Mithridates stayed
with a Persian friend who was a royal official there,
and hearing from him that some rather interesting work
was being done in Jerusalem, he turned aside and visited
the town. Here the Jews whom Cyrus had allowed to
142 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
return to their homes were still busy building a new temple
to replace the one which Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed ;
they had not been able to work very steadily at it.
Mithridates knew some of them, having met them in his
apprentice days in Babylon (for all the Jews did not
return home as soon as they were allowed to go). They
told him that they had met with great difficulties since
their return, partly through the suspicions of the Persian
governor, who had thought, when he saw them rebuilding
the city walls, that they were planning to rebel. But
they begged him to assure King Darius of their loyalty
and their gratitude for all he had done for them. They
showed him the new temple with such pride that although
he had seen much finer buildings in other lands, he did
not like to hurt their feelings by saying so.
Then he went on again straight through Syria, past
Hamath and Aleppo ; there was no great city of Carche-
mish to visit now, for it had been destroyed in the war
between Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh Necho, nearly
a hundred years ago. Mithridates crossed the Taurus
Mountains by a new road, and arrived in Sardis just
before the king reached it. He now learnt that Darius'
plan was to cross over into Europe and make a raid
into the home country of the Scythians, who had once
invaded Asia Minor and done a great deal of harm there.
This was rather startling news, for the great northern
lands into which the king was going to plunge with his
army were very little known. Just across the Euxine
Sea, in a bitterly cold and snowy land, were the Scythians
themselves, a wild wandering people, whose moving
homes would be difficult to attack. Beyond lay unknown
regions, of which queer tales were told. There, it was
said, you would find strange races of men, some bald,
some with one eye only, some with goats' feet, who
climbed the mountains where no one else could go.
There was plenty of gold, but it was hard to come by,
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 143
being guarded by griffins ; and also the air in these
parts was always full of feathers, so that it was almost
impossible to find one's way about. No wonder some
of Darius' followers were loth to venture here !
Mithridates did not believe all he heard about these
things, but he foresaw that there would be real practical
difficulties for the army in a land where there were no
roads or bridges. He hoped, however, to have now
a better chance than ever of displaying his great
skill as an engineer, and was quite disappointed when
he heard that the first big bridge which was needed,
to take the army across the narrow strait into Europe,
had already been built by a Greek architect, Mandrocles
of Samos, and that the king was delighted with it and
had richly rewarded the builder. However, he was
partly consoled by being sent with the fleet which was
ordered to sail to the mouth of the Ister, to build another
great bridge there.
All the adventures of the army in Scythia, and the
strange sights they saw there, would take too long to
tell ; but at last they returned safely to Susa, and Mithri-
dates was very glad to see his wife and family again.
He had been away nearly four years altogether, and the
boys had grown so big that he hardly knew them. You
may well imagine what tales he had to tell them of all
that he had seen and done, and how they longed to
be grown up and travel too !
The last wonder he had seen was not far from home ;
it was the great carving which had been made while
he was in Egypt, to tell the tale of King Darius' victories
over the rebels and pretenders who had opposed him
when he first came to the throne. Mithridates as an
engineer saw how difficult the work must have been to
do, and he admired it accordingly. High above the
road, on a steep smooth face of rock in the hillside, the
figure of the Great King had been carved, with the sign
144 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
of Ahuramazda beside his head, his generals behind him,
his foot on one of his beaten enemies, and the rest
facing him in a long line, all bound together by a rope
round their necks. The story of the king's triumph
had also been cut in the rock in three languages, so that
Darius and his conquered enemies.
(The " Rock of Behistun.")
(By permission of ike Trustees of the British Museum )
all his subjects might read it. Later it happened that
Mithridates met the man whose task it had been to make
the monument, and his admiration for it increased as
he heard of the clever ways in which all obstacles had
been overcome, both in scaling the cliff from below,
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE
'45
and lowering men by means of ropes and baskets from
above, to do the actual smoothing and carving.
(From Pillet,
A room in the palace at Susa.
I* Palais de Danus ler a Suse," by hind permission.)
After his return from Scythia he and his family were
able to live together quietly for a time in Susa, where he
146 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
was employed at the great new palace which King Darius
was having built for himself. It was a wonderful
building, with a splendid entrance and many stately
rooms ; the finest perhaps was the great pillared hall,
known as the " Hall of a Hundred Columns." Some
of the rooms were decorated with coloured friezes of
enamelled brick, in the style which Mithridates had
admired so much when he first saw it in the palace in
Babylon, years before.
Besides his own share in the work, he had the over-
sight of several Greek architects who were also helping
with the palace. They of course were very pleased to
meet someone who knew Greek, and Mithridates for
his part was glad to have the chance of speaking his
mother-tongue again, and to find it all coming back to
him, though he had scarcely spoken it at all for many
years. His friendship with these men, coming so soon
after the glimpse he had had of his native country on
the way to and from Scythia, reminded him of his
childhood, and sometimes he almost felt that he was
tired of Persia and its ways, and would like to be back
among his own people again. However, he did not
get his wish for several years. Besides the palace at
Susa, Darius wished to have one in the heart of Persia
itself; so instead of going back to Ionia, Mithridates
had to go still further eastwards, taking his family with
him, and lived and worked for some years at Persepolis.
Then he had to leave his wife and sons once more, and
go with the army on an expedition into India. He did
not get home from this journey for quite a long time,
for he was left behind with several others by the king's
orders in the country which we call Afghanistan, to
make a reservoir in a dry region there, which Darius
thought would be very useful.
When at last he returned, Mithridates found that
his wife had just died, and now he cared less than ever
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE
'47
about staying in Persia. He was no longer young, and
he was growing weary with these years of travel, in
which he had visited nearly every corner of Darius'
Persian decoration in coloured tiles.
(From Ptllet, " Le Palais de Darius ler d Suse," by kind permission.)
dominions. When he went to give his report about the
reservoir, the king noticed how old and tired and sorrow-
ful he looked, and asked him what reward he would
like for his long and faithful service. So he confessed
that he longed to be back in the country where he had
148 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
been born, 'and was given an easier task than he had
ever had, and one which took him to his home to go
down into Ionia and make some enquiries relating to the
money affairs of the empire.
King Darius was very careful about money matters ;
indeed, men called him (behind his back, of course) a
mere tradesman, a counter of pence which was hardly
fair. He had arranged for a regular amount of tribute
to be paid each year by every " satrapy," as the divisions
of his realm were called, except the district of Persia
itself. In the more backward countries of the south and
east, the tribute was paid in the old way, each man giving
so much corn or wine, a horse or cow or a few sheep,
Gold coin issued by Croesus.
(From Oman's " History of Greece.")
to the nearest royal official. But in the west Darius
made use of a new invention, which was said to have
come from Croesus* old kingdom, Lydia. Instead of
using metal in rough lumps or rings, someone had sug-
gested that the lumps should be made all of the same size,
and a mark put upon them to guarantee their worth,
so that they need not be weighed each time they were
used. So now the gold and silver which came to the
royal treasury was melted down and then made into
coins, stamped with the king's mark of a running archer.
Darius allowed some of his great officers to coin silver
in the provinces they governed, but he issued all the
gold coins himself, and was anxious that they should
be very pure and well made. It was to study the best
ways of doing this kind of work that Mithridates was sent
to Ionia, the place where the idea had first come from.
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 149
He and his sons, therefore, now grown-up young men,
set out on what was to be his last journey, back towards
his old home. They travelled all the way by a single
great road, the Royal Road from Susa to' Sardis. As
they went they met many other travellers and merchants,
and royal messengers hurrying to and fro with letters,
some on horseback, some on swift camels. Letters
travelled across the Persian Empire faster than anywhere
else in those days, for there were places along the roads
where men waited with fresh horses, ready to take the
message, jump on a horse's back, and gallop along to
the next relay station. There were also resting-places
provided at convenient distances, where people could
Persian gold coin. (Dane.)
(From Witt's " Retreat of the Ten Thousand: 1 }
sleep, but Mithridates and his little party were usually
able to stay the night with other officials in the towns
they passed through. One night, near their journey's
end, they stayed at a place called Pteria, where the Persian
governor knew them. He and Mithridates had a very
interesting chat in the evening, but I don't suppose
that either of them mentioned that the town had once
been the capital of a great empire, and called PJattusa,
eight hundred years ago and more ; for the Hittites were
already forgotten.
At last, after a journey of a good many days, they
came to Sardis, and were given quarters in the citadel,
where the Persian officials lived. The three newcomers
were soon at home, and quickly made friends, both
among the Persians and the native Greeks. By a
i 5 o GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
strange chance, Mithridates came across an old man from
Ephesus who had known his parents, and remembered
their death and the disappearance of their little son
when the city was captured by Cyrus' troops. This
old man, whose name was Neokles, was rather disap-
pointed to find that the Greek boy had grown up to
be such a devoted servant of the Persian king, and he
never would call Mithridates by that name, but always
by the name his Greek father and mother had given him,
Myrtilos.
This rather puzzled Mithridates, and he was still
more surprised when he found that the men of Ionia were
very discontented under Persian rule. He had been so
long among people who were willing subjects of King
Darius, and were thankful for the peace and good govern-
ment he had given them, that he could not understand
this. He began to have arguments about it with Neokles
and the other Greeks he met, telling them what a just
and wise ruler the king was, and how much good he had
done for the countries he governed. The Greeks did
not deny this ; what they said was, that no man ought
to hold such power as he did over his fellow-creatures,
and that people had a right to govern themselves instead
of being ordered about by a king, even a good one. There
was one man, a grandson of Neokles, who spoke very
hotly about it ; he was a ship-captain named Scylax,
and often went on voyages to the port of Athens, where
he heard all the newest ideas on this subject.
" The rule of one man," said Scylax one evening
to a group of men who were discussing it, " is neither
good nor pleasant. Darius is a good ruler, I grant
you ; but have you never heard of the tyranny of
Cambyses ? and how do we know that the next king will
not be as bad or worse ? It seems that as soon as a
man becomes king, and can do as he likes without having
to answer for his actions, the worst side of his nature
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 151
comes uppermost. Think of the tales we hear of kings
who envy the rich men among their subjects and put
them to death without trial, and break every law, and do
all sorts of cruel deeds. It is far better to have rulers
chosen by the people, who can be dismissed if they do
wrong, as they have now in Athens. I should like to
see all cities do away with kings in the same way, and
raise the people to power. For the people are all in
all."
Everybody who heard this speech did not agree
with all of it ; a few seemed to think that government
by several of the worthiest citizens acting together was
a better way than the rule of the people in a body, and
one man said that the rule even of a tyrant, who at
least knew what he was about, was better than having the
ignorant mob rushing into state affairs and confusing
everything. But on the whole Scylax seemed to have
put into words just what many men were feeling in
Greek lands at that time.
At first Mithridates was horrified, and refused to
listen to such speeches, and was very angry when he heard
his sons talking in the same way. Then after a time
he began to wonder if there was not some truth in these
ideas. He tried to think again of the king as the great
servant of Ahuramazda, doing good on every side, as
he had done when he was young, but now he could not
feel so sure about it. Even Darius was not always wise
or just, and it was true that his successor might be foolish
and cruel. It did not seem right that a man should be
able to order others to be put to death, without even
hearing them give a reason for their conduct It was
true too that there might be plenty of men in a country
who were as capable of governing it as the king or his
son, but they would never have the chance of doing
so, but must obey all their lives. It was a big question,
and Mithridates found it hard to make up his mind.
i S 2 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
But his sons did not. Scylax and their other young
friends soon persuaded them that neither Darius nor
any other king had the right to rule as he did and hold
such absolute power. More than that, they were secretly
told that a revolt was being planned, and that one day
the cities of Ionia, with help from Greece, would rise
up and defy the Great King and begin to govern them-
selves. Their friends told them that their father was
really a Greek, that they were partly Greeks, and that
they ought to help their fellow-countrymen to win
their freedom from the Persians. So they joined in
the plot. *
When the time drew near for the revolt to begin,
they told their father what they were going to do, for
they had noticed that he seemed to be changing his
mind on the subject of kingly rule, and before he could
stop them they fled away to Ephesus, where many of
the plotters were gathering. Mithridates did not know
what to do. On the one hand he wanted to be faithful
to King Darius. On the other hand, if he told what he
knew to the commander of the troops in Sardis, he would
be betraying his fellow-countrymen and his sons all
together. So he shut himself up in his room in the
citadel, and waited to see what would happen.
He had not to wait long. On the very day when his
sons reached Ephesus, the promised help came from
Greece twenty ships from Athens, and five from another
town. The men landed from them, and joining with
the Ionian troops they marched up the river and over
a hill right to Sardis. When the Persian governor saw
them approaching he prepared to defend the citadel,
and called out all his men ; but the rest of the town
surrendered to the Greeks in a few moments. Although
there was no fighting, one of the soldiers set fire to a
house with his torch, and the flames spread very quickly
among the many thatched roofs of the place. Soon a
THE GREAT PERSIAN EMPIRE 153
cry was raised that the citadel too was burning, and some
of the defenders left it and made for the banks of the
river that ran right through the market-place, where the
people of the town were now gathering for safety from
the fire. The lonians, seeing these armed men appear,
thought that fresh Persian soldiers had come to the rescue,
and began to draw back to the hills.
From his quarters Mithridates had heard something
of the preparations for fighting, and the tumult in the
citadel, and he guessed what was happening. He could
not wish for either side to win, and only prayed that his
sons might be safe whatever happened. At last, when it
seemed strangely quiet, he left his own room and went
to a window that looked out over the streets. The citadel
seemed empty, the town was ablaze, the lonians were
falling back ; it looked as if the revolt had failed. A
dreadful fear for the fate of his sons came upon Mithri-
dates, and feeling that he did not want to live any longer
in these difficult days, he sprang from the window, and
died in the flames below.
# * * * *
What became of the sons of Mithridates I cannot say.
Very likely they fought in the battle with the Persians
that followed the burning of Sardis. Perhaps they fell
there, for many of the lonians were slain, and the Persians
won ; but let us hope that they escaped, and lived to
fight another day in the same cause. For of course King
Darius was very angry when news of this rebellion was
brought to him, and resolved to be avenged not only
on the men of Ionia (who were his subjects) but on the
Athenians who had helped them, and to make the latter
his subjects too. The story goes that he told a slave
to repeat to him three times daily, " Master, remember
the Athenians." So a great war began between
the Greeks and the Persians, which is one of the most
famous and important in history. Darius did not live
i S 4 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
to finish it, but his son Xerxes carried it on, and soon
had even better cause than his father to remember the
Athenians, for under their leadership the Greeks
defeated the huge Persian forces both by land and sea,
Greek and Persian fighting.
(From Maspcro's " Passing of the Empires." S.P.C.K.)
at Thermopylae and Salamis and Plataea. But the story
of that splendid struggle for freedom is too long to be
told here, and besides it has been written in many other
books which you can read for yourselves some day.
So here our tales of ancient times come to an end.
PART TWO
I. HISTORICAL SUMMARY
EMPLOYING the well-worn metaphor of " the drama of
history," we may say that the play begins on a darkened
stage v In a sort of twilight we see men slowly learning
the first arts of civilization, beginning to build shelters,
to use fire, to make clothing and simple tools, to tame and
utilize animals, to domesticate certain useful wild plants,
and to provide for the future by tilling the ground.
Gradually the light increases, and life in three places the
Nile valley, Lower Mesopotamia, Crete stands out more
clearly. Here cities rise, and art begins to flourish.
For Crete we have no records of definite events as
yet, but it is clear that a brilliant civilization was developed
there very early, by a people who, judging from their
costume and habits, must have entered the island by sea
from the south. This culture stretches back without a
break into the Neolithic period, though the name which
its investigators have given it " Minoan " is associated
with its last rather than its first days. As we should
expect, the inspiration of the sea tinges it from the
beginning, and it gradually spreads to the neighbouring
islands and the western shores of the -#Jgean. Three
great periods of its development have been distinguished
by modern archaeologists " Early Minoan," (roughly)
3000-2200 B.C. ; " Middle Minoan," 2200-1700 ; " Late
Minoan," 1700-1300. Each is characterized by special
156 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
styles in art and dress, and is further divided into three
sub-periods (see time chart). There is evidence of the
contact of this civilization with the outer world by trade,
but otherwise it seems to have lain apart from the main
stream of events, and as far as we yet know, Crete played
no great part in general history.
In the lower Euphrates and Tigris valleys, research is
slowly revealing a highly-developed civilization still more
ancient than that of Crete. Here, at an almost incredibly
early date, we find the Sumerians, whose origins are still
obscure, living in a number of rival city-states, practising
irrigation, building fine temples and ornamenting them
with elaborate sculptures and other decorations (see
pp. 3-4). Beside the Sumerians, and repeatedly attacking
and mingling with them, are the Semites of the desert,
whose nomadic, pastoral way of life also goes back to
time immemorial.
Egypt is the third region where civilization began to
develop at a very remote date, and it is the first to supply
us with a great and roughly dateable event. This is the
political union between Upper and Lower Egypt the
Valley and the Delta somewhere about 3500 B.C., after
centuries of merely tribal organization. Tradition attri-
buted this union to a single conqueror Mena, but it may
have been the work of a series of chieftains. The import-
ance of the union lay largely in the adequate control of the
Nile flood which it made possible through superior power
and organization, and its material results are soon seen in
the rapid advance of the arts under the early dynasties
though pre-dynastic Egypt was not backward. Later
Egyptian remains, too, show us a pale reflection of a
civilization in Syria, of which little is as yet known.
This region then Mesopotamia, the north end of
Arabia, Syria, the Nile valley, and the islands and shores
of the eastern Mediterranean is the heart and citadel of
ancient civilization, where life and art develop early and
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
157
richly. To the south lie sea and desert, except where the
Nile valley leads to the Sudan and Central Africa. But
northwards and eastwards, beyond a not impassable
barrier of highland and narrow sea-ways, lies another
source of men and manners, the forest-fringed grasslands
that form the home of the Indo-European or Aryan race.
The desirable countries, the heart of the ancient world,
DESER
HOME OF THE.
SEMITES)
are thus exposed to a double attack. They enclose
the Arabian waste, from which climatic variations drive
out periodical floods of emigrants, and they are in turn
half encircled though at a much greater distance
by the plains to the north and north-east, where roam
other possible invaders. The latter have a much longer
journey than any Semitic people to their " Promised
Land," but on the other hand they possess horses,
Further, the Barrier Region itself is not uninhabited, and
its peoples also find the southern river-valleys very
attractive.
The earliest " international " events, then, as dis-
tinguished from the growth of national cultures or chance
158 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
details of individual kings, are the movements of peoples
and the consequences of these movements. The Semites
were early on the move. Early in the third millen-
nium B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, established his
people in a district on the Euphrates north of Sumer,
known as Akkad, and from there ruled a considerable
area of the North Syrian desert fringe. Soon after
began the migrations in the course of which the Canaan-
ites, Amorites, early Assyrians and Babylonians found
their respective homes. About the same time the Hit-
tites, arriving apparently from the north, began to take
up their position in the Barrier Region, the mountain
belt of Asia Minor. While they defended the inner
lands from more northerly invaders, they also took toll
of them for their own profit. There were Hittites in
Syria as far south as Hebron (see p. 4) in Abraham's
day, i.e. before 2000. At the same time " Tidal Lord of
the North," a Hittite king, called in his own language
Tudhalia, was fighting, in alliance with Hammurabi of
Babylon Amraphel King of Shinar and others some-
where east of the Dead Sea ; and not long after the great
days of Hammurabi the Lawgiver, Babylon itself was
destroyed and its temples plundered in a Hittite raid
(c. 1900).
From such invasions Crete and Egypt were usually
free. But somewhere between 1800 and 1700 B.C. the
turn of Egypt came, when the Hyksos poured in from
Syria and seized the Nile valley, which they held for
about two hundred years. The arrival and rule of the
" Shepherd Kings " forms a very obscure episode in the
history of Egypt, for the origin of the Hyksos is uncertain.
But their expulsion by Aahmes, the founder of the
Eighteenth Dynasty, was followed by an Egyptian
conquest of Syria. Year after year the warrior kings,
Thothmes L, Thothmes III., Amenhotep II., led their
troops into Canaan, ravaging, burning, carrying off
F 2
HISTORICAL SUMMARY 159
prisoners and live-stock, to found the first great ancient
empire at the expense of a flourishing civilization. Then
internal weakness stopped an advance which in any case
would probably soon have been checked by the rising
Hittite power. But the example of Egypt was quickly
followed, and the next thousand years (1500-500) saw
the empires of the Hittites, Assyria, Neo-Babylon, Media,
and Persia, rise in turn. It is therefore a period of
constant wars waged by the great powers of the
central regions against each other and the lesser
kingdoms. It is also the period of the gradual en-
croachment of the Northerners and their triumph over
the older nations.
Even while Egypt was at the height of her early imperial
prosperity under Amenhotep III., the younger peoples
were knocking at the gate. On the one hand, Median
and Persian names begin to be known to Assyria and
Babylon ; the eastern wing was already in touch with its
future opponents. In the west, Crete begins to have a
history, in the half-legendary form of the story of Minos,
his control of the seas, and his tragic end. Though
details are very imperfectly known as yet, it seems clear
that Minoan civilization was overthrown in its home by an
attack from the north, either by the early Achaeans or the
peoples of the peninsula whom they drove before them.
Refugees from Crete, however, carried its influence with
them in their dispersion. About the same time or shortly
after, kinsmen of the Achaeans, instead of pushing down
into continental Greece, were crossing the Hellespont
into Asia Minor and making settlements on its western
shores (including the Sixth the Homeric city at Troy).
These first comers included the Mysians, Lycians, Dar-
danoi, Leleges and others, and their further advance,
like that of Egypt from the south, was checked by the
Hittites.
The Hittite territory in Asia Minor thus appears as a
160 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
well-guarded bridge between the older lands and the
homes of new and still half-barbaric peoples. It with-
stood armed attack from either side during many centuries,
but it doubtless served also as a channel by which ideas
and products filtered through from one civilization to
the other. The state to the east of it, centring round
Lake Van, and known to the Hittites as Harri and to
Assyria as Urartu, was a similar barrier against invasion
from the north, protecting in particular a very ungrateful
Assyria. On the other hand, the Phoenician cities,
whose ships and merchants succeeded those of the
Minoans in the eastern Mediterranean, formed no barrier
but a purely peaceful link.
The weakness of Egypt, following the reign of Akhen-
aten and his disastrous attempt at religious reform, gave
other peoples a short opportunity of expansion in Syria,
already weakened by Egyptian attacks. Babylon had at
the moment no imperial ambitions : she had, like Egypt,
passed some time under foreign domination, that of the
Kassites, and was now sufficiently occupied with the
rising power of Assyria, once her vassal, but now inde-
pendent. But the Hittites and their allies the Amorites
made good use of their chances in North Syria, and in
the more southerly parts the Aramean peoples, pressing
in from the desert as the Canaanites and Amorites had
done before them, founded kingdoms on both sides of
the Jordan. To the east we soon find Ammon and Moab,
with Edom just south of the Dead Sea, and to the west
Joshua and his followers, driven ahead of the others by
their greater religious zeal, are raiding up and down the
land, and gradually carving themselves out an inheritance
in the hill country. Damascus, already an ancient city,
was also now occupied by an Aramean people.
When Egypt revived under the Nineteenth Dynasty
(Seti I., Rameses II.) and set out to re-assert her power
in Syria, she found the Hittites more firmly established
HISTORICAL SUMMARY 161
there than before. Two great kings, ubbiluliuma
(pp. 73-6) and his son Mursil (pp. 84-5), both famous
alike in war and in diplomacy, had built up a solid power
in Asia Minor, and a chain of Hittite subjects and allies
now stretched southwards through Carchemish, Aleppo
(Haleb), Hamath and Horns (ancient names uncertain),
and Kadesh. Soon there was war between Egypt and
#atti, the central point of which was the great but inde-
cisive battle at Kadesh in 1288 (p. 86). At this time the
newcomers from Europe, Mysians, Dardanoi and others,
were in alliance with the kings of Hattusas, and they sent
contingents to Kadesh, but before long they turned against
the Hittites, driven perhaps by the pressure of fresh
arrivals, the Phrygians. The strain of this double con-
test now became dangerous, and Hattusil III. found it
prudent to propose peace with Egypt, probably in order
to be able to concentrate upon his western frontier. The
growth of Assyria was a further cause of anxiety. But the
treaty of 1271, and the subsequent marriage-alliance with
Rameses II. , did not ward off danger for long. Before
the end of that century the pressure of the Phrygians and
their allies had become irresistible, and the Hittite barrier
broke at last. The result was that, somewhere about
1190, i.e. about the same time as the siege of Troy,
Western Asia Minor was completely overrun, and
wandering European folk, coming both by land and sea,
made their way through Syria as far as the borders of
Egypt. This raid left its best-known mark in history in
the settlement of one or more of the defeated clans in the
south of the country which is henceforward called after
them Palestine (pp. 101-2).
Another period of weakness now overtook Egypt, and
with the Hittite empire also gone, there was room for
new actors on the stage. West of the Halys, the Phrygians
by degrees organized themselves into a kingdom whose
rulers bore alternately the names, famous in Greek
162 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
legend, of Gordios and Midas. Eastwards, the last
relics of the northern Hittite power were broken by
Assyria, though the traditions and culture of the race
long survived in Carchemish and other North Syrian
towns. Hitherto Assyria had been chiefly engaged in
wars with Babylon and her eastern neighbours, but now
(c. noo) under her first great warrior-king Tiglath-
Pileser I., she made her first bid for empire, and his
armies certainly reached the Mediterranean and possibly
the Black Sea (p. 120). This time of power, however, was
but short, and two centuries passed before the effort was
renewed. In the meantime the lesser peoples had their
chance. Tyre reached a pitch of great prosperity and
influence under Hiram I. (pp. 104-9), and he, as every one
knows, was the contemporary of David and Solomon,
under whose rule the tribes of Israel, long harassed by
the Philistines and the " Sons of the East " (pp. 100-102),
had their brief spell of peace, unity, and glory. The
division of the kingdom soon followed, and with it the
renewed independence of Damascus, whose energetic
lungs were to prove such a thorn in the side of Israel
and not of Israel alone.
Soon the shadow of Assyria fell across the path of all
these small states. The central figure of the Second
Empire is Ashur-nasir-pal (884-860), whose record of
cruelty has perhaps done more than anything else to
make his country infamous. He fought campaigns on
almost all his frontiers, and penetrated into North
Syria. His successor, Shalmaneser III. (860-825), carried
on the military tradition, and we find him in southern
Syria extracting tribute from Jehu of Israel (p. 120).
But Ben-hadad of Damascus was a more warlike king, and
his city for long made a valiant resistance to Assyrian
attacks. The later kings of this second empire exhausted
their strength in wars with Urartu, which had replaced
in Armenia the ancient enemy of the Hittites, and a short
HISTORICAL SUMMARY 163
period of decline and great weakness takes place between
the second empire and the third.
It is noticeable that now (c. 750) the force of the
Aryan invasion on the west has long been spent, and the
new settlements have taken root and assumed their histori-
cal shapes. Phrygia indeed is already near the end of its
short career, and the kingdom of Lydia is ready to take
its place. On the -ffigean coast the Greet settlers of
Ionia have reached a high degree of civilization and pros-
perity, while across on the European mainland classical
Greece is beginning to develop. The last phase pf the
northern attack is the struggle for trade control, in which
Phoenician fleets are driven from the /Egean by the
" young light-hearted masters of the waves," and the
energy of Tyre and Sidon is diverted in consequence to
colonization in the western Mediterranean (pp. 106-8 ;
Carthage founded c. 800). But in the east the Aryan
forces are gathering to the attack behind the mountains
that overlook the Tigris valley ; and in the centre it would
seem that hard-pressed Urartu had other enemies beside
the armies of Nineveh.
Just after 750, Assyria sprang up again suddenly from
her apparent decadence, revived by a general named Pul,
who usurped the throne, and took the name of Tiglath-
Pileser IV. He renewed the attack on Urartu, and made
war upon the Medes. He began the enslavement of the
Jews by annexing much of the land of Israel and carrying
away captive some of its people, and he at last subdued
Damascus. Just at the end of his reign he drove out a
Chaldean usurper from Babylon, and was there received
as king. Other conquerors succeeded him, and the
empire became more of an organization and less a series
of raids after plunder. Shalmaneser V. spent most oi
his short reign in quelling rebellions in Syria, which had
been stirred up by a King of Egypt, new to the throne and
anxious to bring his country once more into the front
164 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
rank. Thus we read that Hoshea King of Israel sent
messengers to the King of Egypt, and brought no present
to the King of Assyria, as he had done year by year. The
result was the capture of Samaria after a siege lasting two
years, and the transplanting of the people of Israel far
away (a regular feature of the Assyrian system). But
before this a new king had succeeded to the throne
Sargon (722-705), the founder of the last Assyrian
dynasty, under which the Third Empire culminated
and then collapsed, worn down by the strain of its own
conquests. Sargon continued the ceaseless struggles
with Babylon and with Urartu, who had now found an
ally in one of the last kings of Phrygia. Egypt continued
to stir up trouble in Syria.
Sargon 's son Sennacherib is perhaps the best known
of the Assyrian kings. He carried on the usual wars
against a circle of enemies. Two outstanding events of
his reign are the unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem by his
generals, as the king was on his way to Egypt, where he
shortly afterwards lost an army by plague (p. 121), and
the destruction of Babylon (689) in revenge for a rebellion.
This step laid the foundation of later troubles, even though
the next king Esarhaddon rebuilt the city before ten
years had passed. This ruler had good reasons for
desiring friendship wherever he could obtain it. For one
thing, his predecessors had so weakened Urartu that it
was no longer able to defend the barrier of the Caucasus,
and new invaders, Cimmerians and Scythians, the fiercest
of all the northern tribes, were already pouring into Asia
Minor. They overthrew the kingdom of Phrygia (c. 675) ,
and in alliance with the Medes caused Esarhaddon much
anxiety before their defeat. Then, he had determined
to put an end to revolts in Syria by conquering Egypt,
and in 670 he carried out this plan. On his death in the
next year he was succeeded by Ashur-bani-pal in Nineveh,
and by a younger son Shamash-shumulun in Babylon.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY 165
This consideration for the feelings of Babylon only
strengthened its desire for independence and revenge,
and Shamash-shumukin himself organized revolt. But
it failed (p. 117), the kingdom was united once more,
and under Ashur-bani-pal Assyrian power and glory
reached their highest point. Yet his reign ended in
gloom. Egypt slipped quietly from his control, under
the rule of a viceroy who became Psammetichos I., and
a great Scythian raid swept across the western provinces
unchecked. Soon after his death Babylon finally asserted
her independence, and set up a native king Nabopolassar.
He made alliance with the Medes, whose king Kyaxares
soon swooped down upon Nineveh and destroyed it
(612), perhaps to the surprise but certainly to the delight
of all the nations.
The Assyrian empire was now divided between the
allies, the Medes taking the northern and Babylon the
southern, Semitic, lands. Thus there came about the
battle of Carchemish (604) between Nebuchadnezzar,
then crown prince, and Pharaoh Necho, who would also
have liked a share in the spoils of Assyria. Carchemish
now disappears ; the last important lung of Judah had
already perished at Megiddo (608) in a vain attempt to
prevent the passage of the Egyptian army. Jerusalem was
now subject to Babylon, and thither her people were
carried captive when the city was destroyed after a further
attempt at rebellion, again in alliance with Egypt. In the
intervals of his wars, Nebuchadnezzar found time to make
Babylon what Nineveh had once been the most splendid
city of its day (pp. 136-9). In the meantime Kyaxares
finally destroyed Urartu, of which we hear no more,
and by wars with the Lydian kings pushed his frontier in
Asia Minor as far west as the Halys. He was succeeded
by Astyages.
This state of affairs was suddenly upset by the rise to
power of Cyrus, King of Anshan in Elam. As the Medes
i66 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
and Persians were closely akin, his overthrow of the
Median king was in one sense little more than a change
of dynasty. But two factors combined to render his
accession a landmark in history. One was his personal
genius both for war and for organization. The other was
the influence on and through him and his successors of
the Zoroastrian conception of the king as the greatest
servant of Ahuramazda and the cause of good, which for
the first time made it a moral duty, on the one hand for
the king to rule humanely and justly, and on the other
for the subject to obey and serve loyally.
After the fall of Astyages, the first feat of Cyrus was
the conquest of Croesus of Lydia (p. 132), who had made
alliance with the kings of Egypt and Babylon against
the newcomer, but began the war, and had to finish it,
without the help of his allies. This victory led to the
subjugation of the Ionian cities (p. 133). Next came the
overthrow of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon. He
was by choice a scholar rather than a soldier, relying both
in military and other matters upon his son Belshazzar ;
which probably accounts for the Jews' impression that
the latter was king. The victory of Cyrus ended the
Babylonian Captivity of the Jews (p. 138), and we may
measure the appreciation of all the subject races of the
new methods of government from the outburst of joy
with which the prophets hailed the deliverer, whose
right hand the Lord had holden, to subdue nations before
him. Cyrus met his death while campaigning on his
eastern frontiers, and Cambyses his son was left to deal
with Egypt, the last survivor of the anti-Persian alliance.
After an easy victory there he was crowned as Pharaoh.
But while still in Egypt his mind apparently became
unhinged, and he died from an unknown cause while
returning to Persia to crush a revolt. On the arrival of
the army from Egypt the " false Smerdis," a pretender
who had seized the throne in Cambyses' absence, declaring
HISTORICAL SUMMARY 167
himself a son of Cyrus, was disposed of by Darius, a
member of the royal house. He thus succeeded to the
throne, and after suppressing several attempts at rebel-
lion (p. 140), reigned for the most part in peace.
Under Darius, the organization of the Persian Empire
was completed, and it seemed as though the ancient world
had at last found stability under one centralized and
efficient government. His reign thus formed the climax
of a period. With the Ionic Revolt a new force appeared
the ideals of self-government and democracy, in
preference to despotism, however wise and benevolent
(pp. 150-5 1 ) ; and from that time a new chapter of history
began.
II. NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS,
WITH BIBLIOGRAPHY
As an " Introductory Chapter," originally planned, has
had to be omitted, and its geographical and other contents
have not been entirely absorbed into the narrative, I venture
to add, for the use of teachers who are not specialists in the
subject, or who are working out of reach of an adequate
library, a few notes on special points, and some suggestions
for supplementary work. I am quite aware that some of
this material is not suitable for direct transmission to a class,
as being too technical or difficult, but its presence in the
teacher's mind will help to colour the oral work. For
instance, in connection with Chapter I., I feel sure, from my
own experience in teaching both history and geography, that
too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of natural
routes such as the Euphrates valley, in the absence of
engineering technique and mechanical means of transport.
That point, in addition to others, such as the wonderful
craftsmanship involved in hollowing out by hand and with
very imperfect tools, translucent bowls. and vases in hard
stone, and the whole question of the freedom of individual
taste and creative self-expression which hand-manufacture,
as distinct from mass-production in factories, permits, can
be used to build up an idea of the possibility of real civilization
without machinery, which is peculiarly valuable nowadays.
Another feature of the mental background is the frank
acceptance of the Old Testament as a human historical
document, of unique value certainly, but with the limitations
that that description implies. Two useful discussions of
the point are in Driver's Commentary on the Book of Genesis
(introduction), and the published Schweich Lecture for 1917,
168
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 169
Israefs Settlement in Canaan , by Professor Burney. A study
of the scriptures in that light seems to the writer additional
proof of the truth of Lord Acton's saying, that the modern
scientific study of history is the most important intellectual
movement since the Renascence. In this connection I
might add a reference to the distinction between spiritual
religion and its non-ethical or magical aspect, common in
ancient times and among undeveloped races ; it is indicated
briefly on pp. 15-16, Chapter II,, and p. 98, Chapter VI.,
and an intelligent class might wish to pursue the subject.
Frazer's Golden Bough (now issued in an abridged form) and
his other writings, are classics on the question, and there is
a useful article on " Magic " in the Encyclopaedia of Religion
and Ethics.
The Bibliography, except for a few general works, is
distributed among the notes on individual chapters. It
does not of course pretend to be exhaustive, and few if any
references to foreign books, or the publications of learned
societies, are given.
GENERAL AUTHORITIES
Baikie, Life of the Ancient East.
Breasted, Ancient Times. (Written for schools.)
Cambridge Ancient History, Vols. I. and II.
Hall, Ancient History of the Near East.
Helmolt, The Worlds History.
Hogarth, The Ancient East. (Home University Library.)
The Nearer East. (Geographical.)
Huntingdon, The Pulse of Asia.
Maspero, Dawn of Civilization.
Struggle of the Nations.
Passing of the Empires.
Myres, Dawn of History. (Home University Library.)
Perrot & Chipiez, Histoire de I 9 Art dans VAntiquite.
Reinach, Orpheus.
Articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Encyclopaedia Biblica.
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible.
170 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Chapter I.
Special references : Driver's Genesis ; Cambridge Ancient
History, Chapter V. ; Myres, Dawn of History, Chapter V. ;
Demolins, Comment la Route cree le Type Sociale ; Minns,
Scythians and Greeks ; Report on Excavations at Ur of the
Chaldees, reprinted from the Antiquaries Journal of Oct.,
1923, and obtainable from the British Museum ; additional
articles appear from time to time in the Press ; any good
account of the nomads of Turkestan, such as is given in
many " human " geographies.
The chapter is mainly introductory, making use of a
familiar figure as a link with others to be described.
p. 4 : The identification of " Amraphel, King of Shinar,"
with Hammurabi is usually accepted, though the political
situation indicated in Genesis xiv. does not quite harmonize
with our knowledge from other sources. The " Goyyim "
are the foreigners par excellence hordes of outsiders, Bar-
barians, Gentiles, as it is translated in Judges iv. 2, " Harosheth
of the Gentiles."
p. 9 : With regard to natural routes, it should be noted
that the Hellespont has never formed a barrier between
Europe and Asia Minor, but rather a link.
Chapter II.
Special references : Goodspeed, History of Babylonians
and Assyrians ; King, History of Sumer and Akkad, and
History of Babylon ; King and Hall, Egypt and Western Asia
in the Light of Recent Research ; Jastrow, Civilizations of the
Babylonians and Assyrians ; Handcock, Mesopotamian
Archaeology ; Cook, The Laws of Moses and the Code of
Hammurabi ; King, Letters of Hammurabi, Vol. III. (English
translation).
p. 14 : The temple-votaresses referred to were orders of
women who took vows of celibacy, but were otherwise free
to live very much as they liked, under certain regulations,
e.g. to enter a beer-shop was forbidden them under pain of
death. On entering such an order a woman received from
her father such a dowry as he would have given her on her
marriage, and with this capital she might engage in business*
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 171
" Irrigation-works as Training in Citizenship " is an idea
that might be suggested in reading this chapter*
Chapter HI.
Special references : Annual of the British School at Athens,
chiefly Vols. VII. to XL; Hall, JEgaan Archeology;
Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete ; Hawes, Crete, the Fore-
runner of Greece ; Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos
(deals so far only with earlier periods) ; Baikie, S$a-Kings
of Crete.
This is the only chapter in which the names of the fictitious
characters are not taken from original sources ; owing to
the absence of any deciphered remains of the Minoan
language, I have simply borrowed the names of inconspicuous
people with Cretan connections from Homer and Herodotus.
p. 32 : A carpenter's kit was found hidden as described
in a house at Gournia, the sack of which, according to some
authorities, should not be placed within the same lifetime
as that of Knossos. But the whole question of Cretan
chronology is very vague as yet.
p. 36 : Children who have read, for example, Kingsley's
Heroes, may have questions to ask concerning the Minotaur
and the Labyrinth. But it should not be difficult to show
how these legends grew up in the minds of the early Greek
invaders as they wandered through the ruined palaces, par-
ticularly if they had already heard vague traditions of a king
who offered captive victims in sacrifice to a god in the form of a
bull (which is thought by some to be the origin of the bull-
sports). Kingsley's description of the Labyrinth as a great
cavern was of course written before the excavations in Crete
were begun. It is now usually thought that the Labyrinth
was the rambling palace itself.
p. 38 : " Keftiu " was at first usually identified with
Crete itself, but the present trend of opinion seems to be that
it was in south-west Asia Minor.
Chapter IV.
The amount of material is vast, and fortunately fairly
accessible. Specially useful are Professor Breasted's one-
i 7 2 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
volume History of Egypt ; Flinders Petrie's History, which
gives extracts from original sources, useful lists of monuments,
etc. ; Erman's Life in Ancient Egypt, of which a new German
edition has just appeared. The text of Wilkinson's Ancient
Egyptians is out of date, but it contains a great number of
good illustrations. The first part of Maspero's Life in Ancient
Egypt and Assyria, gives a vivid picture of XlXth Dynasty
days.
Any child who is interested and would like to read further
should be warned of the bewildering variety of the spellings of
Egyptian names. Thothmes figures in various books as
Thutmosis, Thutmose, Tethmose, Tethmosia, Tehutimes,
Tahutmes ; Amenhotep may be Amenhetep, Amenophis,
Amenothis ; Akhenaten is Ikhnaton, Khuenaten, Chuenaten,
Khuniatonu ; while a famous Pharaoh of the Xllth Dynasty
varies from Usertesen through Senusert, Senusret, Sesostris,
to Senwosri. There are plenty of other examples, and it is
confusing at first. The variants are due to (a) the changes
in speech-habits during the long career of Egypt ; (b) the
unscientific attempts of Greek tourists to reproduce the names
they heard on their visits to Egypt, which form the basis of
the literary tradition in the matter ; (c) the practice, common
to Egyptian and several other ancient languages, of writing
down only the consonants, thus leaving the vowels to be
inserted in the names discovered on monuments by modern
Egyptologists " according to the taste and fancy of the
speller," and his philological theories.
The dates of the Pharaohs mentioned may be useful :
Thothmes III., c. 1500-1447 ; Amenhotep III., 1412-1376 ;
Amenhotep IV. (Akhenaten), 1380-1362 (as frequently
happened he reigned for a time jointly with his father) ;
Tutankhamen 1360-1350. Rameses II., who appears in
the following chapter, reigned from c. 1300 to 1234. The
title " Pharaoh," it may be added, was quite unofficial, a
respectful expression which avoided the use of the king's
almost sacred name : derived from two words meaning " the
great house." The royal names and titles, which were many,,
are always distinguishable on monuments by being enclosed
in a flattened oval or " cartouche."
p. 47, lines 6-10: The ordinary hens were introduced
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 173
into Egypt about the time of Thothmes III., who mentions
having brought from Syria birds " which lay an egg every
day " ; a picture of a cock at Luxor confirms this. They
are often stated to have been unknown in Egypt till a much
later date.
Chapter V.
The list of books in this case is short because those in
English are still few, and much of the new material is still
buried in learned periodicals and in the private notes of
investigators. Sayce, The Hittites ; Garstang, Land of the
Hittites ; Woolley, Carchemish (British Museum Report on
the excavations there) ; the articles in Wonders of the Past
(a publication which, quite apart from the text, is a mine of
excellent illustrations), are almost all that can be named,
though the list will no doubt soon grow longer.
Pronunciation of names : the dotted H=roughly Scotch
or German " ch " (ich, loch) ; dotted S=roughly Z. These
letters are usually printed H and S ; the simple dot has been
adopted at Professor Garstang's suggestion, as being less
distracting to children's eyes. Some print the aspirated
H as Kh. In this connection it may be as well to draw
attention to a distinction of name only recently established
by research : Hatti, the country of the Hittites, Hattusas,
their capital. The latter was known in classical times as
Pteria, and the modern Turkish village on the site is
Boghaz-Keui.
As the subject-matter of this chapter iff the least familiar,
the following sketch may be of service : The adventures of
Akia (the name is that of a royal messenger from Babylon to
Egypt, whose passport is all that has survived of him) begin
in the reign of the diplomat Subbiluliuma, who during
temporary Egyptian weakness had revived, largely by intrigue,
a North-Syrian empire such as his predecessors had held
some centuries earlier (before 1800). He was succeeded by
his elder son, whose reign was but short, and then by a
younger son, Mursil III. (1330-1290), who has been called
" the Hittite Napoleon." His early years were devoted to
crushing, in a series of brilliant campaigns, his rivals and
174 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
rebellious vassals on the south and east, i.e. towards Armenia
and on the south shores of Asia Minor. It was part of the
Hittite state-system throughout to conclude elaborate treaties
with their vassals and allies, of which that between Subbili-
liuma and Mattiuaza of Mitanni, from which the account
of their meeting (pp. 76-7) is taken, is a good example, as
well as the more famous one with Egypt later. Mursil's
successor was Mutallu, into whose short reign (1290-1287)
fell the battle of Kadesh, at which he was assisted by allies
of European origin who appear later as allies of Troy during
the great siege. Hattusil III., who came next, was the last
important king of the northern Hittites, and during his
reign danger was clearly at hand (p. 161). After the fall
of Hatti, the traditions of the nation had a new lease of
life in Carchemish, which had for some time previously been
ruled by princes of the royal house ; but there was a con-
siderable non-Hittite element in the city.
p. 85 : The pet lion of Rameses II., which fought beside
his chariot in battle, and slept outside his tent at night, is
well authenticated.
Chapter VI.
Special books : G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of
the Holy Land; Ball, Light from the East ; Macalister, Bible
Sidelights from the Mound of Gezer ; Hugues Vincent, Canaan ;
Jean, Le Milieu BibUque ; Peet, Egypt and the Old Testament ;
three of the Schweich Lectures : Driver, Modern Research
as Illustrating the Bible ; Burney, Israel's Settlement in Canaan;
Macalister, The Philistines; Authority and Archaeology^
ed. Hogarth.
There are several theories as to the date of the Exodus >
the whole episode of the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt
being unknown from any Egyptian source as yet discovered.
The question is fully discussed in Egypt and the Old Testament.
It may be worth while, in connection with the small map,
to draw attention to the important strategic position of
Megiddo, controlling the passes between the plains of Sharon
and Esdraelon, on the main line of an army's march northward
from Egypt. Here Thothmes III. fell upon the Prince of
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 175
Kadesh (c. 1480) (p. 50), by a path later followed by Lord
Allenby, and Josiah tried to oppose Pharaoh Necho (608)
(p. 165). The fight against Sisera at Taanach took place
close at hand. The neighbourhood has a monument to
its reputation as a place of decisive battles in our word
Armageddon.
Chapter VII.
Special books : Olmstead, History of Assyria ; Maspero,
Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria ; and see under Chapter II.
p. 113 : The embassy from Ardys of Lydia brought con-
gratulations on Ashur-bani-paTs defeat of the Cimmerians,
and found him at the very height of his power Egypt still
nominally subject to him, Elam crushed, the revolt of his
brother Shamash-shumukin of Babylon and his allies
successfully put down, a state of peace with Urartu.
p. 121 : The Egyptian version of the " Destruction of
Sennacherib " is given in Herodotus, Book II. cap. 141.
The presence of the mice is interesting, in view of their
connection, as germ-carriers, with pestilence. Cf. the plague
among the Philistines, I Sam. vi.
p. 122, lines 23-7 : Ashur-bani-pal carried out this in-
tention on the occasion of his triumph in 642.
p. 128 : Inflated skins are used by the natives to cross
the Indus, in exactly the same way, at the present time.
Chapter VIII.
Material is rather scanty. Dhallas, Zoroastrian Civiliza-
tion and the article on Persia in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
may be mentioned. Herodotus has been freely drawn on.
p. 134 : The date of Zoroaster is variously given : c. 1000
is the one adopted here.
pp. 150-5 1 : In connection with the political ideas discussed
by the imaginary characters (based on Herod., III. 80, 81),
the complete absence of representative institutions in the
ancient world should be pointed out. The idea of a king's
governing for the good of the governed was almost as new
as that of self-government by the people.
176 GREAT PEOPLES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
The following are suggested as possible subjects for
extra classes ; some, of course, involve visits to museums, etc.,
which are not within reach of every school : Pottery-making
in its various aspects ; the development of writing (Breasted 's
Ancient Times will be very useful here) ; national styles and
conventions in art ; lives and work of some of the great
archaeologists. Only lack of space has excluded a chapter
on the latter subject, which should have dealt with
Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by
means of the Rosetta Stone ; the work of Layard at Nineveh ;
Rawlinson and the Behistun Inscription ; Schliemann's
romantic fulfilment of his early dreams of discovering Homer's
Troy ; the methods by which the fascinating work of restoring
lost civilizations to the light of day is now carried on. The
following references may be of service : Cambridge Ancient
History, Vol. I. Chapter IV. (general sketch of progress); Budge,
The Mummy, early chapter (decipherment of Rosetta Stone) ;
Flinders Petrie, Methods and Aims in Archeology ; Masters,
The Romance of Excavation ("popular"); Baikie, A Century
of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs ; Articles in Wonders
of the Past, e.g. " The Rock of Behistun," etc.
INDEX
(Only the more important kings are given, in view of the
numerous cross-references in the Historical Summary and the
notes. Names of fictitious characters excluded.)
Aahmes (king), 56, 158 E-sagila, 15, 24, 137
Amenhotep III., 62-7, 159, 172. Euphrates, 3, 93, 128, 158, 168
Amenhotep IV. (Akhenaten), 67
-8, 71, 73, 99, 160, 162 Feasts, 60-61, 129
Armour and weapons, 23, 37, 51, Funeral customs, 7, 18, 24, 57-9
71, 81, 93, 95, 102-3, 121, Furniture, 3, 14, 28-9, 45, 93,
126-7, 138 96, 119
Art (styles, methods, etc.), 30,
58, 83, 90, 92 (and ill.), 93, Gods and goddesses :
109, 119, 168 of Assyria, 126
Ashur-bam-pal, 113, 117, 121-3, Babylon, 16-18
125, 128, 130, 165, 175 Crete, 32
Egypt, 54-5, 67, 90
Battles, 4, 50, 86, 132, 153, 158, Hittites, 82-3
161, 165, 166, 174, 175 Persia, 134
Bronze, 30, 96, 103 Philistines, 103
Syria, 96-7, no
Camels, 2, 100, in, 116, 132 Gold, 12, 29, 51, 62, 66, 81, 93,
Canals, 22-3, 24, 136, 141 96, 100, 129, 142, 148
Carchemish, 70, 90-93, 109, 142, Government, administration, 3,
162, 165 24, 37, 66, 80, 105, 150-1,
Caves, sacred, 34, 98, 102 167, 175-6
Chariots, 41, 50, 51, 76, 85 (ill.), Greeks, 9, 102, 104, 109, 113,
86, 95, 122 131, 150, 154, 163
Climate, 2, 28, 78, 94, 157
Cyrus, 132, 136, 139-140, 166 Hammurabi, 4, n, 24-5, 158,
170
Damascus, 99, no-ii, 120, 160, Hattusas, 77, 80, 81, 100, 149,
162, 163 173
Dancing, 39, 60, 89, 129 Herodotus, vm., 10, 175
Darius, 140, 148, 153, 167 Hiram I., 104-9, 162
Dress, 12, 29, 60, 64, 75, 93, 96, Horses, 8 (and ill.), 15, 41, 42,
115, 132 65,78, 132, 157
177
178 INDEX
Houses, 8, 14, 23, 28, 44, 96, 106 Scythians, 8, 112, 130, 142-3
Hunting, 32, 48, 51, 65, 84, 120, 164-5
122 (and i//.), 124 (ill.) Seals, 13, 41, 42 (*//.), 96, 124
Hyksos, 56, 158 (and ills, on pp. 16, 17 and 19)
Sennacherib, 120-1, 164
Iron, introduction of, 102-3 Ships and boats, 15, 22, 37, 42
Irrigation, 22, no, 171 (#/), 47 (and ill.), 107 (and
ill.)
Jerusalem, 68, 95, 104, 121, 141, Siege-engines, 126-7 (and ill.).
I64 ' I6S Silver?5i,88
v c - oo Sports, games, 39-40, 46
Keftiu, 38, 48, 102, 171 Subbiluliuma (Saplel), 73-4,
libraries, 80, ,, ,25 SumSsfa', % '.& ' ?3
Magic, 21, 45, 169 Taxes, 23 52 157
Menes, 56, 156 Temples, '18 '(aw/ 01.), 21, 62,
Minos, 35, 42, 159 109,126,137,142
Music, 60, 84 Thothmes III., 50-56, 158, 173
KT , , , /TO* Timber, 8, 15, 22, 104, 108-9
Nebuchadnezzar, 136, 138, 165 Trade> ^ ^ x * 14 ; xs % If ^^
D . , . 41,65,81,93,103,108,111,
Palaces, 35-6, 63, 109, 117-9, 141,163
136-9, 145-6 Tribute, 35, 37, 5^ 105, 119, H^
Pottery, 14, 30-31 Troy> IOI> I59> l6l
Purple-dyeing, 31, 106
Pyramids, 4, 56 Ur of the Chaldees, 3-4, 12, 16,
170
Rameses II., 85, 88, 160, 172
Religion, 15-16, 98, 112, 169 Waggons, 8, 100, 101 (ill.)
Roads and streets, 14, 27-8, 95, Water-supply in towns, 96, 105
115, 149 Women, position of, 12, 36, 123,
Routes, natural, 9, 168, 170, 174 170
Writing (see Scripts)
Sacrifices, 19, 78, 98, 99, 134
Scripts, 20 (and ill.), 37, 52, 73, Ziggurats, 18 (andill.) t 136
75 (#/.)i 84, 108 Zoroaster, 134, 175
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