The title of this book needs a word of explanation, since each of its terms can legitimately be used to denote more than one conception both of time and place. "The East" is understood widely and vaguely nowadays to include all the continent and islands of Asia, some part of Africa--the northern part where society and conditions of life are most like the Asiatic--and some regions also of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. Therefore it may appear arbitrary to restrict it in the present book to Wes

In 1000 B.C. West Asia was a mosaic of small states and contained, so far as we know, no imperial power holding wide dominion over aliens. Seldom in its history could it so be described. Since it became predominantly Semitic, over a thousand years before our survey, it had fallen under simultaneous or successive dominations, exercised from at least three regions within itself and from one without. The earliest of these centres of power to develop foreign empire was also that destined, after many

Two centuries have passed over the East, and at first sight it looks as if no radical change has taken place in its political or social condition. No new power has entered it from without; only one new state of importance, the Phrygian, has arisen within. The peoples, which were of most account in 1000, are still of the most account in 800--the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Mushki of Cappadocia, the tribesmen of Urartu, the Aramaeans of Damascus, the trading Phoenicians on the Syrian coast and

When we look at the East again in 600 B.C. after two centuries of war and tumultuous movements we perceive that almost all its lands have found fresh masters. The political changes are tremendous. Cataclysm has followed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygian dynasty has gone down in massacre and rapine, and from another seat of power its former client rules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholds of the lesser Semitic peoples have almost all succumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone snatched by one f

As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men, military and civil, their men of sci

The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had tried to subdue in Europe itself. To this race (and to the historian also) "the East," as a geographical term, standing equally for a spatial area and for a social idea, has ceased to mean what it once meant: and the change w

Less than ten years later, Alexander lay dead in Babylon. He had gone forward to the east to acquire more territories than we have surveyed in any chapter of this book or his fathers had so much as known to exist. The broad lands which are now Afghanistan, Russian Turkestan, the Punjab, Scinde, and Beluchistan had been subdued by him in person and were being held by his governors and garrisons. This Macedonian Greek who had become an emperor of the East greater than the greatest theretofore, had