At the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium the struggle for the possession of this highway was as keen and sanguinary as it is at present. The empires of the Nile and Mesopotamian basins, of the Syrian strip and of the Hittite mountain lands mustered the flower of their manhood in yearly arrays for the purpose of seizing or guarding the great arteries of west Asiatic traffic. The short-lived prosperity of the Jewish empire, at the time of Solomon, was attained immediately after the country’s boundaries extended from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Judea grew to splendor by becoming sole mistress of the international routes which traversed Syria and Mesopotamia. Her greatness was transmitted to Assyria with the loss of the land routes to that same empire in the eighth century B.C. A hundred years later the Chaldeans obtained possession of the highways. It is now their turn to impose their will on neighboring nations. Another century slips by and with it the greatness of Semitic states. In the east, men of Aryan speech, mostly Persians, have begun to value the present Turkish land routes. In 560 B.C. Cyrus is at the head of cohorts which soon after give him mastery of Turkish Asia from the Ægean to the Persian Gulf. To this conquest Darius adds Egypt and India. All these events center around one of the greatest struggles ever fought between men. It is the conflict between Europeans and Asiatics immortalized in Hellenic literature,--the clash between two continents, each battling for the exclusive control of the highway connecting them. The contestants met on this Turkish highway, they fought over its plains and defiles, and battled for its possession in the realization that the economic prosperity upon which national wealth and greatness rest could be secured only by its conquest. A significant fact of the celebrated struggle is revealed by the inability of the Greeks to conquer the Persians. They defeated them and checked their westerly advance. The Ægean and Eurasian waterways of Turkey proved an impassable moat to the Persian invaders. As long as the Persians retained control of the highways the menace of their brutal despotism faced the liberal spirit of the Greeks. The danger was dispelled by Alexander’s conquest of the highway. No better instance of the power vested in the effective hold of these lines of communication between the east and west can be found.