Both institutions were constructed out of old and well-seasoned materials. Many of the ideas in each can be followed back until their origin is lost in prehistoric obscurity; hardly a feature in either but had a clear derivation from, relationship to, or suggestion in, some prototype of pre-Ottoman days. Only the final structure of each, the proportion and composition of its parts, and the effect of the completed whole was worked out in the Ottoman Empire. If an attempt be made, in a very general way, to distinguish the main lines of influence which led up to the two institutions, it may be said that the Ruling Institution had its nucleus of ideas from the Turks of the steppe lands. Influenced by old Persian neighbors and Chinese rulers, the original group of ideas was brought into the Moslem Empire and Asia Minor by the predecessors of the Seljuk Turks and by the Seljuk Turks themselves. Coming into contact in Asia Minor with the ideas of the Byzantine Empire, and to some extent with those of the crusaders from the West, the system took on a large number of new features; and the Ottomans continued the process in Asia Minor and Southeastern Europe until the time of Suleiman. The Moslem Institution began with the ideas of the Arabs as combined by Mohammed with Jewish, Middle Persian, and Christian influences. Political notions were rapidly incorporated from those prevailing in Byzantine Syria and Egypt, and perhaps to a greater extent from those in the Sassanian Persian Empire. A compact system of ideas began early to be developed, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it reached final scholastic shape. Together with its institutional embodiments, it began to pass to the Ottomans in their earliest days; and, as the nation grew, it grew into the Moslem Institution of the Ottoman Empire, fresh power being given to it by Selim’s conquest of the old Moslem lands, and especially by his acquisition of the over-lordship of the Holy Cities. The two lines of tendency which led to the two great Ottoman institutions were first brought into contact when, in the seventh century, the Arab conquest of Persia advanced the Moslem frontier into Central Asia. From that time to the reign of Suleiman reciprocal influence was exerted, although the Moslem ideas affected the Turkish much more than the Turkish did the Moslem.