Apparently, therefore, it was not through the Phoenicians that the Greeks had learned most of what they knew about the East in 400 B.C. Other agents had played a greater part and almost all the intercommunication had been effected by way, not of the Levant Sea, but of the land bridge through Asia Minor. In the earlier part of our story, during the latter rule of Assyria in the farther East and the subsequent rule of the Medes and the Babylonians in her room, intercourse had been carried on almost entirely by intermediaries, among whom (if something must be allowed to the Cilicians) the Lydians were undoubtedly the most active. In the later part of the story it will be seen that the intermediaries have vanished; the barriers are down; the East has itself come to the West and intercourse is immediate and direct. How this happened--what agency brought Greeks and Orientals into an intimate contact which was to have the most momentous consequences to both--remains to be told. SECTION 3. THE COMING OF THE PERSIANS We have seen already how a power, which had grown behind the frontier mountains of the Tigris basin, forced its way at last through the defiles and issued in the riverine plains with fatal results to the north Semitic kings. By the opening of the sixth century Assyria had passed into Median hands, and these were reaching out through Armenia to central Asia Minor. Even the south Semites of Babylonia had had to acknowledge the superior power of the newcomers and, probably, to accept a kind of vassalage. Thus, since all lower Mesopotamia with most part of Syria obeyed the Babylonian, a power, partly Iranian, was already overshadowing two-thirds of the East before Cyrus and his Persians issued upon the scene. It is important to bear this fact in mind when one comes to note the ease with which a hitherto obscure king of Anshan in Elam would prove able to possess himself of the whole Semitic Empire, and the rapidity with which his arms would appear in the farthest west of Asia Minor on the confines of the Greeks themselves. Nebuchadnezzar allied with and obedient to the Median king, helping him on the Halys in 585 B.C. to arrange with Lydia a division of the peninsula of Asia Minor on the terms _uti possidetis_--that is the significant situation which will prepare us to find Cyrus not quite half a century later lord of Babylon, Jerusalem and Sardes.