It is from peoples of this culture that the great religions of the old world have come, near or remote, but it is not easy to find any substantial contribution to human culture drawn indubitably from this source apart from religious creed, cult and poetry. The domestication of animals, for instance, is not due to them; with the possible exception of the horse and the dog, that work had to be done in peaceable, sedentary communities, from whom the pastoral nomads will have taken over the stock and the industry and carried it out on a scale and with cultural consequences which do not follow from cattle-breeding under sedentary conditions. Their religion, on the other hand, seems in no case to have been carried up to the consummate stage of despotic monotheism during the nomadic-pastoral phase of their experience, but to have been worked out to a finished product presently after they had engaged on a career of conquest and had some protracted experience of warfare and despotism on a relatively large scale. The history of these great civilisations with pastoral antecedents appears to run somewhat uniformly to the effect that they collapsed as soon as they had eaten their host into a collapse. The incidents along the way between their beginning in conquest and their collapse in exhaustion are commonly no more edifying and of no more lasting significance to human culture than those which have similarly marked the course of the Turk. These great monarchies were organised by and for an intrusive dynasty and ruling class, of pastoral antecedents, and they drew their subsistence and their means of oppression from a subjugated agricultural population. In the course of this further elaboration of a predatory civilisation, the institutions proper to a large scale and to a powerful despotism and nobility resting on a servile people, were developed into a finished system; in which the final arbiter is always irresponsible force and in which the all-pervading social relation is personal subservience and personal authority. The mechanic arts make little if any progress under such a discipline of personalities, even the arts of war, and there is little if any evidence of sensible gain in any branch of husbandry. There were great palaces and cities built by slave labour and corvée, embodying untold misery in conspicuously wasteful and tasteless show, and great monarchs whose boast it was that they were each and several the best friend or nearest relative of some irresponsible and supreme god, and whose dearest claim to pre-eminence was that they “walked on the faces of the black-head race.” Seen in perspective and rated in any terms that have a workmanlike significance, these stupendous dynastic fabrics are as insignificant as they are large, and none of them is worth the least of the fussy little communities that came in time to make up the Hellenic world and its petty squabbles.