Part 2 (1/2)

Nevertheless, though Shalmaneser and his dynastic successors down to Adadnirari III were unable to enter Palestine, the shadow of a.s.syrian Empire was beginning to creep over Israel. The internal dissensions of the latter, and its fear and jealousy of Damascus had already done much to make ultimate disaster certain. In the second generation after David the radical incompatibility between the northern and southern Hebrew tribes, which under his strong hand and that of his son had seemed one nation, rea.s.serted its disintegrating influence. While it is not certain if the twelve tribes were ever all of one race, it is quite certain that the northern ones had come to be contaminated very largely with Aramaean blood and infected by mid-Syrian influences, which the relations established and maintained by David and Solomon with Hamath and Phoenicia no doubt had accentuated, especially in the territories of Asher and Dan. These tribes and some other northerners had never seen eye to eye with the southern tribes in a matter most vital to Semitic societies, religious ideal and practice. The anthropomorphic monotheism, which the southern tribes brought up from Arabia, had to contend in Galilee with theriomorphic polytheism, that is, the tendency to embody the qualities of divinity in animal forms. For such beliefs as these there is ample evidence in the Judaean tradition, even during the pre-Palestinian wanderings. Both reptile and bovine incarnations manifest themselves in the story of the Exodus, and despite the fervent missionary efforts of a series of Prophets, and the adhesion of many, even among the northern tribesmen, to the more spiritual creed, these cults gathered force in the congenial neighbourhood of Aramaeans and Phoenicians, till they led to political separation of the north from the south as soon as the long reign of Solomon was ended. Thereafter, until the catastrophe of the northern tribes, there would never more be a united Hebrew nation. The northern kingdom, harried by Damascus and forced to take unwilling part in her quarrels, looked about for foreign help. The dynasty of Omri, who, in order to secure control of the great North Road, had built himself a capital and a palace (lately discovered) on the hill of Samaria, relied chiefly on Tyre. The succeeding dynasty, that of Jehu, who had rebelled against Omri's son and his Phoenician queen, courted a.s.syria, and encouraged her to press ever harder on Damascus. It was a suicidal policy; for in the continued existence of a strong Aramaean state on her north lay Israel's one hope of long life.

Jeroboam II and his Prophet Jonah ought to have seen that the day of reckoning would come quickly for Samaria when once a.s.syria had settled accounts with Damascus.

To some extent, but unfortunately not in all detail, we can trace in the royal records the advance of a.s.syrian territorial dominion in the west.

The first clear indication of its expansion is afforded by a notice of the permanent occupation of a position on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, as a base for the pa.s.sage of the river. This position was Til Barsip, situated opposite the mouth of the lowest Syrian affluent, the Sajur, and formerly capital of an Aramaean princ.i.p.ate. That its occupation by Shalmaneser II in the third year of his reign was intended to be lasting is proved by its receiving a new name and becoming a royal a.s.syrian residence. Two basaltic lions, which the Great King then set up on each side of its Mesopotamian gate and inscribed with commemorative texts, have recently been found near Tell Ahmar, the modern hamlet which has succeeded the royal city. This measure marked a.s.syria's definite annexation of the lands in Mesopotamia, which had been under Aramaean government for at least a century and a half. When this government had been established there we do not certainly know; but the collapse of Tiglath Pileser's power about 1100 B.C. so nearly follows the main Aramaean invasion from the south that it seems probable this invasion had been in great measure the cause of that collapse, and that an immediate consequence was the formation of Aramaean states east of Euphrates. The strongest of them and the last to succ.u.mb to a.s.syria was Bit-Adini, the district west of Harran, of which Til Barsip had been the leading town.

The next stage of a.s.syrian expansion is marked by a similar occupation of a position on the Syrian side of the Euphrates, to cover the landing and be a gathering-place of tribute. Here stood Pitru, formerly a Hatti town and, perhaps, the Biblical Pethor, situated beside the Sajur on some site not yet identified, but probably near the outfall of the stream. It received an a.s.syrian name in Shalmaneser's sixth year, and was used afterwards as a base for all his operations in Syria. It served also to mask and overawe the larger and more wealthy city of Carchemish, a few miles north, which would remain for a long time to come free of permanent a.s.syrian occupation, though subjected to blackmail on the occasion of every western raid by the Great King.

With this last westward advance of his permanent territorial holding, Shalmaneser appears to have rested content. He was sure of the Euphrates pa.s.sage and had made his footing good on the Syrian bank. But we cannot be certain; for, though his known records mention the renaming of no other Syrian cities, many may have been renamed without happening to be mentioned in the records, and others may have been occupied by standing a.s.syrian garrisons without receiving new names. Be that as it may, we can trace, year by year, the steady pus.h.i.+ng forward of a.s.syrian raiding columns into inner Syria. In 854 Shalmaneser's most distant base of operations was fixed at Khalman (Aleppo), whence he marched to the Orontes to fight, near the site of later Apamea, the battle of Karkar.

Five years later, swooping down from a Cilician raid, he entered Hamath.

Six more years pa.s.sed before he made more ground to the south, though he invaded Syria again in force at least once during the interval. In 842, however, having taken a new road along the coast, he turned inland from Beirut, crossed Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and succeeded in reaching the oasis of Damascus and even in raiding some distance towards the Hauran; but he did not take (perhaps, like the Bedawi Emir he was, he did not try to take) the fenced city itself. He seems to have repeated his visit three years later, but never to have gone farther. Certainly he never secured to himself Phoenicia, Coele-Syria or Damascus, and still less Palestine, by any permanent organization. Indeed, as has been said, we have no warrant for a.s.serting that in his day a.s.syria definitely incorporated in her territorial empire any part of Syria except that one outpost of observation established at Pitru on the Sajur. Nor can more be credited to Shalmaneser's immediate successors; but it must be understood that by the end of the century Adadnirari had extended a.s.syria's sphere of influence (as distinct from her territorial holding) somewhat farther south to include not only Phoenicia but also northern Philistia and Palestine with the arable districts east of Jordan.

SECTION 6. CILICIA

When an a.s.syrian emperor crossed Euphrates and took up quarters in Pitru to receive the submission of the western chiefs and collect his forces for raiding the lands of any who might be slow to comply, he was much nearer the frontiers of Asia Minor than those of Phoenicia or the Kingdom of Damascus. Yet on three occasions out of four, the lords of the Middle a.s.syrian Kingdom were content to harry once again the oft-plundered lands of mid-Syria, and on the fourth, if they turned northward at all, they advanced no farther than eastern Cilicia, that is, little beyond the horizon which they might actually see on a clear day from any high ground near Pitru. Yet on the other side of the snow-streaked wall which bounded the northward view lay desirable kingdoms, Khanigalbat with its capital, Milid, comprising the fertile district which later would be part of Cataonia; Tabal to west of it, extending over the rest of Cataonia and southern Cappadocia; and Kas, possessing the Tyanitis and the deep Lycaonian plain. Why, then, did those imperial robbers in the ninth century so long hold their hands from such tempting prey? No doubt, because they and their armies, which were not yet recruited from other populations than the Semites of a.s.syria proper, so far as we know, were by origin Arabs, men of the south, to whom the high-lying plateau country beyond Taurus was just as deterrent as it has been to all Semites since. Tides of Arab invasion, surging again and again to the foot of the Taurus, have broken sometimes through the pa.s.ses and flowed in single streams far on into Asia Minor, but they have always ebbed again as quickly. The repugnance felt by the a.s.syrians for Asia Minor may be contrasted with the prompt.i.tude which their Iranian successors showed in invading the peninsula, and may be ill.u.s.trated by all subsequent history. No permanent footing was ever established in Asia Minor by the Saracens, its definite conquest being left to the north-country Turks. The short-lived Arab power of Mehemet Ali, which rebelled against the Turks some eighty years ago, advanced on to the plateau only to recede at once and remain behind the Taurus. The present dividing line of peoples which speak respectively Arabic and Turkish marks the Semite's immemorial limit. So soon as the land-level of northern Syria attains a mean alt.i.tude of 2500 feet, the Arab tongue is chilled to silence.

We shall never find a.s.syrian armies, therefore, going far or staying long beyond Taurus. But we shall find them going constantly, and as a matter of course, into Cilicia, notwithstanding the high mountain wall of Ama.n.u.s which divides it from Syria. Cilicia--all that part of it at least which the a.s.syrians used to raid--lies low, faces south and is s.h.i.+elded by high mountains from northerly and easterly chills. It enjoys, indeed, a warmer and more equable climate than any part of Syria, except the coastal belt, and socially it has always been related more nearly to the south lands than to its own geographical whole, Asia Minor. A Semitic element was predominant in the population of the plain, and especially in its chief town, Tarsus, throughout antiquity. So closely was Cilicia linked with Syria that the Prince of Kue (its eastern part) joined the Princes of Hamath and of Damascus and their south Syrian allies in that combination for common defence against a.s.syrian aggression, which Shalmaneser broke at Karkar in 854: and it was in order to neutralize an important factor in the defensive power of Syria that the latter proceeded across Patin in 849 and fell on Kue. But some uprising at Hamath recalled him then, and it was not till the latter part of his reign that eastern Cilicia was systematically subdued.

Shalmaneser devoted a surprising amount of attention to this small and rather obscure corner of Asia Minor. He records in his twenty-fifth year that already he had crossed Ama.n.u.s seven times; and in the year succeeding we find him again entering Cilicia and marching to Tarsus to unseat its prince and put another more pliable in his room. Since, apparently, he never used Cilicia as a base for further operations in force beyond Taurus, being content with a formal acknowledgment of his majesty by the Prince of Tabal, one is forced to conclude that he invaded the land for its own sake. Nearly three centuries hence, out of the mist in which Cilicia is veiled more persistently than almost any other part of the ancient East, this small country will loom up suddenly as one of the four chief powers of Asia, ruled by a king who, hand in hand with Nebuchadnezzar II, negotiates a peace between the Lydians and the Medes, each at the height of their power. Then the mist will close over it once more, and we shall hear next to nothing of a long line of kings who, bearing a royal t.i.tle which was graecized under the form Syennesis, reigned at Tarsus, having little in common with other Anatolian princes. But we may reasonably infer from the circ.u.mstances of the pacific intervention just mentioned that Cilician power had been growing for a long time previous; and also from the frequency with which Shalmaneser raided the land, that already in the ninth century it was rich and civilized. We know it to have been a great centre of Sandan wors.h.i.+p, and may guess that its kings were kin of the Mushki race and, if not the chief survivors of the original stock which invaded a.s.syria in Tiglath Pileser's time, ranked at least among the chief inheritors of the old Hatti civilization. Some even date its civilization earlier still, believing the Keftiu, who brought rich gifts to the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and succeeding dynasties, to have been Cilicians.

Unfortunately, no scientific excavation of early sites in Cilicia has yet been undertaken; but for many years past buyers of antiquities have been receiving, from Tarsus and its port, engraved stones and seals of singularly fine workmans.h.i.+p, which belong to Hitt.i.te art but seem of later date than most of its products. They display in their decoration certain peculiar designs, which have been remarked also in Cyprus, and present some peculiarities of form, which occur also in the earliest Ionian art. Till other evidence comes to hand these little objects must be our witnesses to the existence of a highly developed sub-Hitt.i.te culture in Cilicia which, as early as the ninth century, had already been refined by the influence of the Greek settlements on the Anatolian coasts and perhaps, even earlier, by the Cretan art of the Aegean area.

Cilician civilization offers a link between east and west which is worth more consideration and study than have been given to it by historians.

SECTION 7. ASIA MINOR

Into Asia Minor beyond Taurus we have no reason to suppose that an a.s.syrian monarch of the ninth century ever marched in person, though several raiding columns visited Khanigalbat and Tabal, and tributary acknowledgment of a.s.syrian dominance was made intermittently by the princes of both those countries in the latter half of Shalmaneser's reign. The farther and larger part of the western peninsula lay outside the Great King's reach, and we know as little of it in the year 800 as, perhaps, the a.s.syrians themselves knew. We do know, however, that it contained a strong princ.i.p.ality centrally situated in the southern part of the basin of the Sangarius, which the Asiatic Greeks had begun to know as Phrygian. This inland power loomed very large in their world--so large, indeed, that it masked a.s.syria at this time, and pa.s.sed in their eyes for the richest on earth. On the sole ground of its importance in early Greek legend, we are quite safe in dating not only its rise but its attainment of a dominant position to a period well before 800 B.C.

But, in fact, there are other good grounds for believing that before the ninth century closed this princ.i.p.ality dominated a much wider area than the later Phrygia, and that its western borders had been pushed outwards very nearly to the Ionian coast. In the Iliad, for example, the Phrygians are spoken of as immediate neighbours of the Trojans; and a considerable body of primitive h.e.l.lenic legend is based on the early presence of Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but on the central west coast about the Bay of Smyrna and in the Caystrian plain, from which points of vantage they held direct relations with the immigrant Greeks themselves. It seems, therefore, certain that at some time before 800 B.C. nearly all the western half of the peninsula owed allegiance more or less complete to the power on the Sangarius, and that even the Heraclid kings of Lydia were not independent of it.

If Phrygia was powerful enough in the ninth century to hold the west Anatolian lands in fee, did it also dominate enough of the eastern peninsula to be ranked the imperial heir of the Cappadocian Hatti? The answer to this question (if any at all can be returned on very slight evidence) will depend on the view taken about the possible ident.i.ty of the Phrygian power with that obscure but real power of the Mushki, of which we have already heard. The ident.i.ty in question is so generally accepted nowadays that it has become a commonplace of historians to speak of the ”Mushki-Phrygians.” Very possibly they are right. But, by way of caution, it must be remarked that the identification depends ultimately on another, namely, that of Mita, King of the Mushki, against whom Ashurbanipal would fight more than a century later, with Midas, last King of Phrygia, who is mentioned by Herodotus and celebrated in Greek myth. To a.s.sume this ident.i.ty is very attractive. Mita of Mushki and Midas of Phrygia coincide well enough in date; both ruled in Asia Minor; both were apparently leading powers there; both fought with the Gimirrai or Cimmerians. But there are also certain difficulties of which too little account has perhaps been taken. While Mita seems to have been a common name in Asia as far inland as Mesopotamia at a much earlier period than this, the name Midas, on the other hand, came much later into Phrygia from the west, if there is anything in the Greek tradition that the Phryges or Briges had immigrated from south-east Europe. And supported as this tradition is not only by the occurrence of similar names and similar folk-tales in Macedonia and in Phrygia, but also by the western appearance of the later Phrygian art and script, we can hardly refuse it credit. Accordingly, if we find the origin of the Phrygians in the Macedonian Briges, we must allow that Midas, as a Phrygian name, came from Europe very much later than the first appearance of kings called Mita in Asia, and we are compelled to doubt whether the latter name is necessarily the same as Midas. When allusions to the Mushki in a.s.syrian records give any indication of their local habitat, it lies in the east, not the west, of the central Anatolian plain--nearly, in fact, where the Moschi lived in later historical times. The following points, therefore, must be left open at present: (1) whether the Mushki ever settled in Phrygia at all; (2) whether, if they did, the Phrygian kings who bore the names Gordius and Midas can ever have been Mushkite or have commanded Mushkite allegiance; (3) whether the kings called Mita in records of Sargon and Ashurbanipal were not lords rather of the eastern Mushki than of Phrygia. It cannot be a.s.sumed, on present evidence at any rate (though it is not improbable), that Phrygian kings ruled the Mushki of Cappadocia, and in virtue of that rule had an empire almost commensurate with the lost sway of the Hatti.

Nevertheless theirs was a strong power, the strongest in Anatolia, and the fame of its wealth and its walled towns dazzled and awed the Greek communities, which were thickly planted by now on the western and south-western coasts. Some of these had pa.s.sed through the trials of infancy and were grown to civic estate, having established wide trade relations both by land and sea. In the coming century Cyme of Aeolis would give a wife to a Phrygian king. Ephesus seems to have become already an important social as well as religious centre. The objects of art found in 1905 on the floor of the earliest temple of Artemis in the plain (there was an earlier one in the hills) must be dated--some of them--not later than 700, and their design and workmans.h.i.+p bear witness to flouris.h.i.+ng arts and crafts long established in the locality.

Miletus, too, was certainly an adult centre of h.e.l.lenism and about to become a mother of new cities, if she had not already become so. But, so early as this year 800, we know little about the Asiatic Greek cities beyond the fact of their existence; and it will be wiser to let them grow for another two centuries and to speak of them more at length when they have become a potent factor in West Asian society. When we ring up the curtain again after two hundred years, it will be found that the light shed on the eastern scene has brightened; for not only will contemporary records have increased in volume and clarity, but we shall be able to use the lamp of literary history fed by traditions, which had not had to survive the lapse of more than a few generations.

CHAPTER III

THE EAST IN 600 B.C.

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 ma.s.sacre 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 succ.u.mbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone s.n.a.t.c.hed by one foreign dog from another. The a.s.syrian colossus which bestrid the west Asiatic world has failed and collapsed, and the Medes and the Chaldaeans--these two clouds no bigger than a man's hand which had lain on a.s.syria's horizon--fill her seat and her room. As we look back on it now, the political revolution is complete; but had we lived in the year 600 at a.s.shur or Damascus or Tyre or Tarsus, it might have impressed us less. A new master in the East did not and does not always mean either a new earth or a new heaven.

Let us see to how much the change really amounted. The a.s.syrian Empire was no more. This is a momentous fact, not to be esteemed lightly. The final catastrophe has happened only six years before our date; but the power of a.s.syria had been going downhill for nearly half a century, and it is clear, from the freedom with which other powers were able to move about the area of her empire some time before the end, that the East had been free of her interference for years. Indeed, so near and vital a centre of a.s.syrian nationality as Calah, the old capital of the Middle Empire, had been taken and sacked, ere he who was to be the last ”Great King” of the northern Semites ascended his throne.

SECTION 1. THE NEW a.s.sYRIAN KINGDOM

For the last hundred and fifty years a.s.syrian history--a record of black oppression abroad and blacker intrigue at home--has recalled the rapid gathering and slower pa.s.sing away of some great storm. A lull marks the first half of the ninth century. Then almost without warning the full fury of the cloud bursts and rages for nearly a hundred years. Then the gloom brightens till all is over. The dynasty of Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser II slowly declined to its inevitable end. The capital itself rose in revolt in the year 747, and having done with the lawful heirs, chose a successful soldier, who may have been, for aught we know, of royal blood, but certainly was not in the direct line. Tiglath Pileser--for he took a name from earlier monarchs, possibly in vindication of legitimacy--saw (or some wise counsellor told him) that the militant empire which he had usurped must rely no longer on annual levies of peasants from the a.s.syrian villages, which were fast becoming exhausted; nor could it continue to live on uncertain blackmail collected at uncertain intervals now beyond Euphrates, now in Armenia, now again from eastern and southern neighbours. Such Bedawi ideas and methods were outworn. The new Great King tried new methods to express new ideas. A soldier by profession, indebted to the sword for his throne, he would have a standing and paid force always at his hand, not one which had to be called from the plough spring by spring. The lands, which used to render blackmail to forces sent expressly all the way from the Tigris, must henceforward be incorporated in the territorial empire and pay their contributions to resident governors and garrisons.