Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead

“ The Assyrian peace was indeed a very welcome change from the petty wars which were destroying the life of the east, and the Aramaean and Phoenician merchants were not slow to seize the opportunities which the Assyrian noble scorned. Thought followed trade along roads formerly taken by armies, and the deportations increased the cultural unification of the empire. For those who believe in cultural unification, the value of the system is obvious. There are those, however, who believe that smaller nations have their rights and their value to history. ”

“ To those who have thought of the empire as a despotism, there comes a shock of surprise when they find the Persians, after the Ionic revolt, actually introducing democracies into the cities of Asia Minor; still more strange does it seem that the democracies of Athens and of the other Greek city-states were pro-Persian up to the very outbreak of the Great War. ”

“ None the less, nationalism of a sort persisted. Three quarters of a century after the death of Alexander, the eastern half of the empire had relapsed into Orientalism, and in another century the old culture-lands of Babylonia, Assyria, Media, and Persia had followed. Astonishingly little of Greek culture was left behind. As a single illustration, we have cuneiform business documents from Uruk, one of the Babylonian city-states of former days, which date from the very end of the Seleucid period. Aside from the dating by Macedonian kings, the presence of a half-dozen Greek names. ”

“ These lands pay, not taxes but rent, and the king is not so much monarch as landlord. Divine right to the land, whether in the Hellenistic period or in the twentieth century after Christ, meant loss of individualism, dynastic wars, a total denial of nationalism. ”

“ Such a position, of danger and of opportunity alike, could not but develop in the Assyrians the spirit which found its only worthy activity in war and in government, which looked down with contempt on the merchant princes of the south. While the earlier Assyrian monarchs were, as they called themselves, "kings of kings", the formal change was made by Ashur-nasir-apal and the conquered states began to be placed directly under provincial governors. ”

“ In the case of Egypt, it needs no proof that the long thin line of civilization along the Nile, where city-state bounded city-state on but two sides, up stream and down, was not conducive to unity, and that such a condition bred a localism which broke up Egypt into its constituent parts every time that the central power weakened. ”

“ Large as is the degree of truth in his claim, in the almost universal backsliding to a regime of tooth and claw, which has proved that after all the so-called retarded races are not such distant brothers, far more can be learned from the history of the ancient Near East. ”