To trace the progress of literature in these remote times from century to century is impossible. Five hundred years, however, bring us to the Augustan era of romance and satire, epic and devotional poetry, in Egypt: they introduce us to Zoroas’ter, the founder or reformer of the ancient Persian religion, whose teachings are set forth in the Aves’ta; to the Ve’da, or Brahman Bible; to Moses and the Pentateuch; and to Phœnician theology, science, and poetry. Meanwhile Chaldean literature declines, and Assyrian letters come into view. During the next five centuries, poetry and science continue to flourish in Egypt, though not perhaps with their pristine vigor; Phœnicia maintains her literary reputation; the Veda grows; and Persian priests are occupied in enlarging and modifying their sacred texts. 1000 B.C. was the era of great epics. The epic, or narrative poem, based on some important event (in Greek, επος) or chain of events, though first appearing in Egypt, was brought to perfection, about this time, by the Greeks, and some say by the Hindoos also, Aryan nations holding no intercourse with each other. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were paralleled by two stupendous Indian poems, the Râmâyana (_rah-mah’-yă-nă_) and the Mahâbhârata (_mă-hah’bah’ră-tă_).[3] To these, all dazzling with Oriental splendor, the epics of the Greek bard may yield in luxuriance of fancy and gorgeous imagery; but in power of description, sublimity of thought, and attractive simplicity of expression, Homer was without an equal. While, then, the Semitic nations as a rule employed prose as the vehicle of their earliest records of events, Greece and India, types of the Aryan stock, transmitted their legends to posterity in epic verse. Later times have not failed to perpetuate the taste, and measurably the ability; epic poetry has been cultivated by all the Indo-European nations, and to them it has been confined.—Contemporaneously with Homer, native poets were inditing ballads and pastorals in China, and the Hebrews enjoyed their golden age of secular and religious poetry; Egypt had entered on her literary, as well as her political, decline.