In the further hope of enabling readers to retain a clear idea of the evolution of the history, I have adopted the plan of looking out over the area which is here called the East, at certain intervals, rather than the alternative and more usual plan of considering events consecutively in each several part of that area. Thus, without repetition and overlapping, one may expect to convey a sense of the history of the whole East as the sum of the histories of particular parts. The occasions on which the surveys will be taken are purely arbitrary chronological points two centuries apart. The years 1000, 800, 600, 400 B.C. are not, any of them, distinguished by known events of the kind that is called epoch-making; nor have round numbers been chosen for any peculiar historic significance. They might just as well have been 1001, 801 and so forth, or any other dates divided by equal intervals. Least of all is any mysterious virtue to be attached to the millenary date with which I begin. But it is a convenient starting-point, not only for the reason already stated, that Greek literary memory--the only literary memory of antiquity worth anything for early history--goes back to about that date; but also because the year 1000 B.C. falls within a period of disturbance during which certain racial elements and groups, destined to exert predominant influence on subsequent history, were settling down into their historic homes. A westward and southward movement of peoples, caused by some obscure pressure from the north-west and north-east, which had been disturbing eastern and central Asia Minor for more than a century and apparently had brought to an end the supremacy of the Cappadocian Hatti, was quieting down, leaving the western peninsula broken up into small principalities. Indirectly the same movement had brought about a like result in northern Syria. A still more important movement of Iranian peoples from the farther East had ended in the coalescence of two considerable social groups, each containing the germs of higher development, on the north-eastern and eastern fringes of the old Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian. A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic East much behind 1000 B.C.--that nothing like a sure chronological basis of it exists before that date. Precision in the dating of events in West Asia begins near the end of the tenth century with the Assyrian Eponym lists, that is, lists of annual chief officials; while for Babylonia there is no certain chronology till nearly two hundred years later. In