About 3000[42] after a long “Merovingian” period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinctions between early and late periods have long ago been labelled as Old and Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline (from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I-Wang (934-909) and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the Babylonian “Baroque” we see the figure of the great Sargon (2500), who pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself, like Justinian I and Charles V, “lord of the four parts of the earth.” And in due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we perceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the Asiatic displayed immense expansive power. The “achievements of the Babylonian Civilization” (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring, numbering, and accounting, travelled probably as far as the North and the Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be honoured, out there in the Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some “Early-German” ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians--all of these small[43] warrior-hosts under energetic leaders--successively replaced one another in the capital city without any serious resistance on the part of its people. It is a first example--soon paralleled in Egypt--of the Roman Empire style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by prætorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome (after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus, the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the battle of Adrianople[44] “Romans” and “barbarians” have become almost indistinguishable.