The branches which occupied the table-land of Iran and the valley of the Indus were the first to rise from the basis acquired in common to a higher civilisation; and even they did not attain to this till long after the time when Egypt, under the ancient kingdom of Memphis, found herself in the possession of a many-sided culture, after Babylon had become the centre of a different conception of life and development. The western branches of the Indo-Europeans remained at various stages behind their eastern fellow-tribesmen in regard to the epochs of their higher culture. If the Greeks, who were brought into frequent contact with the civilisation of the Semites, came next in point of time after the eastern tribes, and the Italians next to the Greeks, it was only through conflict and contact with the culture of Greece and Rome that the western branches reached a higher stage, while the dwellers on the plains of the Baltic owe their cultivation to the influences of Germanic life. Finally, when the West European branches, the Indo-Germans, had developed independently their capacities and their nature, when in different phases they had received and assimilated what had been left behind by their Greek and Roman kinsmen, and formed it into the civilisation of the modern world, their distant navigation came into contact with the ancient civilisation, to which their fellow-tribesmen in the distant East had finally attained some 2000 years previously. With wonder and astonishment the long-separated, long-estranged relatives looked each other in the face. But even now the ancient, deeply-rooted, and variously-developed civilisation of the eastern branch maintains its place with tough endurance beside the mobile, comprehensive, and restlessly-advancing civilisation of the west.