Rise Of The Persians In The East
( Originally Published Early 1900's )
Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had developed along the lines we have described in Greece, Magna Graecia, and around the shores of the Black Sea, another series of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose originally Nordic blood was perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian elementwere settling and spreading to the north and east of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. We have already spoken of the arc-like dispersion of the Nordic Aryan peoples to the north of the Black and Caspian Seas; it was probably by this route that the Aryan-speaking races gradually came down into what is now the Persian country, and spread, on the one hand, eastward to India (? 2,000 to 1,000 B. o.and on the other, increased and multiplied in the Persian up-lands until they were strong enough to assail first Assyria (650 B. o.) (and then Babylon 538 B. c).
There is much that is not yet clear about the changes of climate that have been going on in Europe and Asia during the last 10,000 years. The ice of the last glacial age receded gradually, and gave way to a long period of steppe or prairie-like conditions over the great plain of Europe. About 12,000 or 10,000 years ago, as it is reckoned now, this state of affairs was giving place to forest conditions. We have already noted how, as a consequence of these changes, the Solutrian horse hunters gave place to Magdalenian fishers and forest deer hunters; and these, again, to the Neolithic herdsmen and agriculturists. For some thousands of years the European climate seems to have been warmer than it is today. A great sea spread from the coast of the Balkan peninsula far into Central Asia and extended northward into Central Russia, and the shrinkage of that sea and the consequent hardening of the climate of south Russia and Central Asia was going on contemporaneously with the development of the first civilizations in the river valleys. Many facts seem to point to a more genial climate in Europe and western Asia, and still more strongly to a greater luxuriance of plant and vegetable life, 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, than we find today. There were forests then in south Russi and in the country which is now Western Turkestan where now steppes and deserts prevail. On the other hand, between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago, the Aral-Caspian region was probably drier and those seas smaller than they are at the present time.
We may note in this connection that Thotmes III (say, the fifteenth century B. C.), in his ex edition beyond the Euphrates, hunted a herd of 120 elephants in that region. Again, an Ægean dagger from Mycenae dating about 2,000 B. C., shows a lion hunt in progress. The hunters carry big shields and spears, and stand in rows one behind the other. The first man spears the lion, an when the wounded beast leaps at him, drops flat under the protection of his big shield, leaving the next man to repeat his stroke, and so on, until the lion is speared to death. This method of hunting is practised by the Masai today, and could only have been worked out by a people in a land where lions were abundant. But abundant lions imply abundant game, and that again means abundant vegetation. About 2,000 B. c. the hardening of the climate in the central parts of the Old World, to which we have already referred, which put an end to elephants and lions in Asia Minor and Greece, was turning the faces of the nomadic Aryan peoples south-ward towards the fields and forests of the more settled and civilized nations.
These Aryan peoples come down from the East Caspian regions into history about the time that Mycenae and Troy and Cnossos are falling to the Greeks. It is difficult to disentangle the different tribes and races that appear under a multitude of names in the records and inscriptions that record their first appearance, but, unfortunately, these distinctions are not needed in an elementary outline such as this present history. A people Called the Cimmerians appear in the districts of Lake Urumiya and Van, and shortly after Aryans have spread from Armenia to Elam. In the ninth century B. C., a people called the Medes, very closely related to the Persians to the east of them, appear in the Assyrian inscriptions. Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II, names already familiar in this story, profess to have made them pay tribute. They are spoken of in the inscriptions as the "dangerous Medes." They are as yet a tribal people, not united under one king.
About the ninth century B. C. Elam and the Elamites, whose capital was Susa, a people which Assessed a tradition and civilization at least as old as the Sumerian, suddenly vanish from history. We do not know what happened. They seem to have been overrun and the population absorbed by the conquerors. Susa is in the hands of the Persians.
A fourth people, related to these Aryan tribes, who appear at this time in the narrative of Herodotus, are the "Scythians." For a while the monarchs of Assyria play off these various kindred peoples, the Cimmerians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Scythians, against each other. Assyrian princesses (a daughter of Esarhaddon, e. g.) are married to Scythian chiefs. Nebuchadnezzar the Great, on the other hand, marries a daughter of Cyaxares, who has become king of all the Medes. The Aryan Scythians are for the Semitic Assyrians; the Aryan Medes for the Semitic Babylonians. It was this Cyaxares who Assyrian capital, in 606 B. C., and so released the Assyrian yoke to establish, under Second Babylonian Empire. The Scythian allies of Assyria drop out of the story after this. They own life away to the north without mue the peoples to the south. A glance at theither lion or elephant from south east Europe and Asia Minor; the cause of their gradual disappearance was I to think nothing but Man, increasingly well armed for the chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan peninsula till about the fourth century B. C., if not later. Elephants had perhaps disappeared from western Asia by the eighth century B. C. The lion (much bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany till the Neolithic period. The pater inhabited Greece, southern Italy and southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period (say 1,000 B. c.).—H. H. J.took Nineveh, the released Babylon from Chaldean rule, the an allies of Assyria go on living their h interference with map of this period shows how, for two-thirds of a century, the Second Babylonian Empire lay like a lamb within the embrace of the Median lion.
Into the internal struggles of the Medes and Persians, that ended at last in the accession of Cyrus "the Persian" to the throne of Cyaxares in 550 B. C, we will not enter. In that year Cyrus was ruling over an empire that reached from the boundaries of Lydia to Persia and perhaps to India. Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian rulers, was, as we have already told, digging up old records and building temples in Babylonia.