Arisia

“ Even Mentor, the ancient Arisian sage, never did understand.
All that any of them knew was that an infinitely loving and intensely suffering woman, stretched rigidly upon a bed, hurled out through space and time a passionately questing thought—a thought behind which she put everything she had.
Clarrissa Kinnison, Red Lensman, had much—and every iota of that impressive sum total ached for, yearned for, and insistently demanded her Kim—her one and only Kim. Kim her husband; Kim the father of her children; Kim her lover; Kim her other half; Kim her all in all for so many perfect years. ”

“ The Phœnician proverb says: ‘Better barley in the granary than gold in the desert.’ Should Egypt feel very weak she might prefer Sinai and Palestine to a war with Assyria. But this is what sets me to thinking: Not Egypt, but Assyria, is easy to conquer. Assyria has a quarrel on the northwest; Assyria has few troops, and those of poor quality. Were Egypt to attack she would destroy Assyria, seize immense treasures in Babylon and Nineveh, and establish her authority in Asia at once and securely—”
“Such a treaty cannot exist, as thou seest,” interrupted Rameses. ”

“ At the beginning of our knowledge of this region Assyria was only a province, a northern province, of Babylonia, and was ruled from Babylon. But the Assyrians became very strong and revolted, and conquered those who had been their masters, and it was during this victorious period that they made those incursions into Palestine of which the Bible tells us. But at length the Babylonians, their old masters, rose up against them and got the mastery over them again, and after this blaze of glory Assyria sinks back into its old place as a province of Babylon, in the northern part of the empire. ”

“ Whenever in history one nation has been dominant there has been another nation, next in strength, as its rival to check its supremacy. Thus Greece stood in the way of Persia, Carthage in the way of republican Rome, and Parthia in the way of imperial Rome. In the earlier days Assyria (and after Assyria Babylon) was the controlling power in the East; but it was always opposed by Egypt, which, though less powerful, was yet strong enough to be dangerous to Assyrian or Chaldean supremacy. Palestine [80] stood on the border of the Assyrian Empire toward Egypt ”

“ No kingdom ever shone with brighter splendour, or gave a greater impression of prosperity, than the kingdom of Assyria in the days succeeding its triumphs over Blam and Arabia: precisely at this point the monuments and other witnesses of its activity fail us, just as if one of the acts of the piece in which it had played a chief part having come to an end, the drop-curtain must be lowered, amid a flourish of trumpets and the illuminations of an apotheosis, to allow the actors a little breathing-space. ”

“ From Carchemish to Arpad, from Hamath to Damascus and Samaria, their irresistible advance had led the Assyrians on towards Egypt, the only other power which still rivalled their prestige in the eyes of the world; and now, at Gaza, on the frontier between Africa and Asia, as in days gone by on the banks of the Euphrates or the Balîkh, these two powers waited face to face, hand on hilt, each ready to stake the empire of the Asiatic world on a single throw of the dice. ”

“ No dismemberment of the empire followed this conquest, however, if conquest there was. The kings of the new dynasty seem to have succeeded each other peacefully enough in Babylon. But the conquering days of Chaldea were over. We read no more of expeditions into the plains of Syria and to the "Sea of the Setting Sun." For a power was rising in the North-West, which quickly grew into a formidable rival: through many centuries Assyria kept the rulers of the Southern kingdom too busy guarding their frontiers and repelling inroads to allow them to think of foreign conquests. ”

“ The older nations—Egypt, Syria, Chaldæa, and Elam—had all had their day of supremacy; they had declined in the course of centuries, and Assyria had for a short time united them under her rule. On the downfall of Assyria, the Iranians had succeeded to her heritage, and they had built up a single empire comprising all the states which had preceded them in Western Asia; but decadence had fallen upon them also, and when they had been masters for scarcely two short centuries, they were in their turn threatened with destruction. ”

“ The Assyrian names which either history or the monuments have handed down to us are Semitic, and not Arian. It is only among the fabulous accounts of the Assyrian Empire put forth by Ctesias that Arian names, such as Xerxes, Arius, Armamithres, Mithraus, etc., are to be found.
Together with the true names of the Assyrian kings, the mounds of Mesopotamia have yielded up a mass of documents in the Assyrian language, from which it is possible that we may one day acquire as full a knowledge of its structure and vocabulary as we possess at present of Greek or Latin. ”

“ In these places they had the same advantage of wide plains of exceptional fertility, a high and remote civilisation, an army of tremendous strength, and a centralisation under an absolute rule, with all the resources which a great and vast dominion could command. As Persia succeeded Babylon, and as Babylon succeeded Assyria, so Persia—far more mighty and terrible—overruns and conquers all Western Asia. Egypt itself falls. Palestine is a mere speck, surrounded by the huge dominions of the Persian monarch. What chance has Israel against such terrible neighbours? ”

“ In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. ”

“ When Assyria fell, the New Babylonian empire kept guard over the west. With the end of Babylonian rule, and the ascendency of Persia, Semitic dominance came to an end. Under Persia, and later under Greece, new states came into existence and Aryan rule began.
In the ages with which we are at present concerned, however, Syria remained to the portion of Semitic tribes. We have found Arabia the original home of this race. Providing at best but a scanty living for her children, when tribes multiplied rapidly Arabia seems to have cast out a portion of her inhabitants to make room for the rest. ”

“ Eusebius glowed with pleasure as he listened to the language in which the emperor depicted the character of Arius, and replied: "Only the truly great are able to do justice to those whom they have strong reason to dislike, but thou hast painted the grand and lonely soul of the Libyan even as it is. He hath been purified by sorrow. He is all for Christ, and earthly hopes, fears and ambitions no more can move his chaste and lofty spirit." ”

“ Then spake Jehovah: As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and Ethiopia (Cush) , so shall the king of Assyria lead the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, with their nakedness uncovered, to the shame of Egypt. Then shall they be ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation, and of Egypt their glory. And the inhabitants of these coasts said on the same [Pg 91] day: Behold, such is our expectation, whither we fled for help, to be delivered from the king of Assyria: how shall we escape? ”

“ The provinces included within the Empire may be conveniently divided into the Central, the Western, and the Eastern. The Central are Persia Proper, Susiana, Babylonia, Assyria, Media, the coast tract of the Caspian, and Sagartia, or the Great Desert. The Western are Paeonia, Thrace, Asia Minor, Armenia, Iberia, Syria and Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt, and the Cyrenaica. The Eastern are Hyrcania, Parthia, Aria, Chorasmia, Sogdiana, Bactria, Scythia, Gandaria, Sattagydia, India, Paricania, the Eastern AEthiopia, and Mycia. ”

“ We now know who built Van and by whom these tablets were engraved upon the face of the citadel. As the horizon opens with each advance in our acquisition of the vocabulary and with each addition to the catalogues of texts, we are introduced to no obscure dynasty which slept secure behind the mountains, but to a splendid monarchy which for at least two centuries rivalled the claims of Assyria to the dominion of the ancient world. The native designation of the imperial people was that of Khaldians or children of Khaldis, just as the Assyrians reflect the name of their god, Assur. ”

“ The contrast forces itself upon us at every point.
When, about fifteen centuries B. C., the Aryas The Aryas and Israelites—their probable future, about 1500 B. C.were victoriously occupying the Panjab, and the Israelites were escaping from the "iron furnace" of Egypt, if one had been asked which of the two races would probably rise to the highest conception of the divine, and contribute most largely to the well-being of mankind, the answer, quite possibly, might have been, the Aryas. ”

“ This 'sacred theory of the Aryas,' it seems, passed into Palestine from Persia and India, and got possession of the founder of Christianity and of his greatest apostles St. Paul and St. John; becoming more perfect, and returning more and more to its true character of a 'transcendent metaphysic,' as the doctors of the Christian Church developed it. ”

“ Here, again, Tiglath-pileser had merely to show himself in order to re-establish the supremacy of Assyria: the races of the plain, for many years familiar with defeat, made no pretence of serious resistance, but bowed their necks beneath a fresh yoke almost without protest. ”

“ But at this epoch Assyria woke once more from her lethargy, and became the scourge of God to the guilty people and their guiltier kings. For a whole century the Assyrians had either been governed by kings who had abjured the lust of blood and conquest, or had been too seriously occupied on their own eastern and northern frontiers to intermeddle with the southern kingdoms, or break down the barriers erected by the confederacy of Hamath and Damascus between Nineveh and the weaker principalities of Palestine. ”

“ Assyria was the foremost kingdom of the East, and indeed of the whole world, and the hegemony which she exercised over all the countries within her reach cannot be accounted for solely by her military superiority. Not only did she excel in the art of conquest, as many before her had done—Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites, and Egyptians—but she did what none of them had been able to accomplish ”

“ The principal districts of Persia, under command of the Vitaxae, that is to say of the generals of the cavalry, and of the king's Satraps, for the many inferior provinces it would be difficult and superfluous to enumerate, are Assyria, Susiana, Media, Persia, Parthia, the greater Carmania, Hyrcania, Margiana, the Bactrians, the Sogdians, the Sacae, Scythia beyond Mount Emodes, Serica, Aria, the Paropanisadae, Drangiana, Arachosia, and Gedrosia. 15. Superior to all the rest is that which is the nearest to us, Assyria, both in renown, and extent, and its varied riches and fertility. ”

“ The first of these cities on the road from Syria was El Arish, situated near the Wadi el Arish, the river or “stream of Egypt” of the Bible (Isa. xxvii. 12) . El Arish was accounted a very ancient city by the Arabs. Its land was cultivated soon after the Deluge and was called the Gate to Paradise. Abraham passed here. Makrizi († 1441) relates a tradition regarding the building of reed huts there, which recalls an incident preserved by Diodorus Siculus (c. b.c. 20) , the origin of which may be sought in the wish to explain the later name of the city which was Rhinocorura or Rhinocolura. ”

“ The monuments do not tell us what he accomplished on the borders of Asia Minor; he certainly won some considerable advantages there, and the influence which Assyria had exercised over states scattered to the north of the Taurus, such as Melitene, and possibly Tabal and Kummukh, which had formed the original nucleus of the Hittite empire, must have now passed into his hands. The form of Argistis looms before us as that of a great conqueror, worthy to bear comparison with the most indefatigable and triumphant of the Pharaohs of Egypt or the lords of Chaldæa. ”

“ Lo thou trustest upon this broken staff of a reed, upon Egypt: upon which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is Pharao king of Egypt to all that trust in him.
36:7. But if thou wilt answer me: We trust in the Lord our God: is it not he whose high places and altars Ezechias hath taken away, and hath said to Juda and Jerusalem: You shall worship before this altar?
36:8. And now deliver thyself up to my lord the king of the Assyrians, and I will give thee two thousand horses, and thou wilt not be able on thy part to find riders for them. ”

“ Since the Medes belonged to the same Aryan family as the Persians, and had the same language, religion, and institutions, with slight differences, and lived among the mountains exposed to an uncongenial climate with extremes of heat and cold, and were doomed to hard and incessant labors for a subsistence, and were therefore--that is, the ordinary people--frugal, industrious, and temperate, it will be seen that what we have said of Persia equally applies to Media, except the possession by the latter of political power as wielded by the sovereign of a larger State. ”