the districts beyond Tigris; but since the term _Mesopotamia_, though obviously incorrect, is generally understood nowadays to designate it, this name may be used for want of a better. (6) A high plateau, walled off from Mesopotamia and Armenia by high mountain chains, and extending back to the desert limits of the Ancient East. To this region, although it comprises only the western part of what should be understood by _Iran_, this name may be appropriated "without prejudice." [Plate 1: THE REGION OF THE ANCIENT EAST AND ITS MAIN DIVISIONS] CHAPTER I THE EAST IN 1000 B.C. 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. SECTION 1. BABYLONIAN EMPIRE The earliest of these centres of power to develop foreign empire was also that destined, after many vicissitudes, to hold it latest, because it was the best endowed by nature to repair the waste which empire entails. This was the region which would be known later as Babylonia from the name of the city which in historic times dominated it, but, as we now know, was neither an early seat of power nor the parent of its distinctive local civilization. This honour, if due to any one city, should be credited to Ur, whose also was the first and the only truly "Babylonian" empire. The primacy of Babylonia had not been the work of its aboriginal Sumerian population, the authors of what was highest in the local culture, but of Semitic intruders from a comparatively barbarous region; nor again, had it been the work of the earliest of these intruders (if we follow those who now deny that the dominion of Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-sin ever extended beyond the lower basins of the Twin Rivers), but of peoples who entered with a second series of Semitic waves. These surged out of Arabia, eternal motherland of vigorous migrants, in the middle centuries of the third millennium B.C. While this migration swamped South Syria with "Canaanites," it ultimately gave to Egypt the Hyksos or "Shepherd Kings," to Assyria its permanent Semitic population, and to Sumer and Akkad what later chroniclers called the First Babylonian Dynasty. Since, however, those Semitic interlopers had no civilization of their own comparable with either the contemporary Egyptian or the Sumerian (long ago adopted by earlier Semitic immigrants), they inevitably and quickly assimilated both these civilizations as they settled down.