We have briefly sketched in the foregoing chapters the concepts of race and religion that Greek and Roman applied to the world about them. These concepts were not starkly rigid. They changed considerably and often rapidly in the six centuries our subject covers. They are further to be qualified by the social environment within which they operated. But it was not only the Greeks or Romans who in blood and thought passed through many and profound changes. The Jews, too, developed in many directions, and this development can no more be lost sight of than the corresponding one among their neighbors. In 586 B.C.E. the kingdom of Judah, which had for some years been a Babylonian dependency, was ended as a political institution, and the majority of its people, at any rate of the nobles and wealthy men of them, were forcibly deported to Babylon. The deportation though extensive was not complete. Some, principally peasants and artisans, were left, but in districts so long wasted by war their condition can only have been extremely wretched. Since the whole region was part of the same huge empire, the old boundary lines were probably obliterated, and those who lived there subjected to the control of imperial governors residing in one or another of the walled cities of Syria or Philistia. Within the next two generations momentous political changes occurred. The Babylonian empire gave way to a Persian, which, however, can at first have changed nothing except the personnel of the actual administrators. According to a very probable tradition, one of the first acts of Cyrus was to permit, at any rate not to oppose, the remigration of some of the Judean families or clans to their former homes. Within the next hundred years a larger and larger number of the families deported by Nebuchadnezzar likewise returned, though never all of them and perhaps not even a majority of them. Much of the old territory must have been found unoccupied, since otherwise conflicts must have arisen with interests vested within the fifty years and more that had elapsed, and of these we do not hear. But we do hear of immediate conflicts between the returned exiles and those who professed to be the descendants of the Israelites (and Judaites) left by Assyrians (and Babylonians) on the soil. These latter were beginning to gather about Shechem, where they must already have been a dominant element, and where they had created a cult center on Mount Gerizim. The conflict tended to become compromised in time, until the activities of the reformer Ezra, backed by the civil governor Nehemiah, again and permanently separated them.