preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we still have some archaeological documents to fall back upon. If the cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of the later Assyrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform us of local society and life. SECTION 1. EASTWARD MOVEMENT OF THE GREEKS The Greek had been pushing eastward for a long time. More than three hundred years ago, as has been shown in the last chapter, he had become a terror in the farthest Levant. Before another century had passed he found his way into Egypt also. Originally hired as mercenaries to support a native revolt against Assyria, the Greeks remained in the Nile valley not only to fight but to trade. The first introduction of them to the Saite Pharaoh, Psammetichus, was promoted by Gyges the Lydian to further his own ends, but the first development of their social influence in Egypt was due to the enterprise of Miletus in establishing a factory on the lowest course of the Canopic Nile. This post and two standing camps of Greek mercenaries, one at Tahpanhes watching the approach from Asia, the other at Memphis overawing the capital and keeping the road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce Ionian civilization to the Delta in the seventh century. Indeed, to this day our knowledge of the earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia and Caria depends largely on the fragments of their vases imported into Egypt which have been found at Tahpanhes, Memphis and another Greek colony, Naukratis, founded a little later (as will be told presently) to supersede the original Milesian factory. Though those foreign vases themselves, with their decoration of nude figure subjects which revolted vulgar Egyptian sentiment, did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion of Hellenic culture.