THE STUDENTS ANCIENT HISTORY. THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE EAST. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE CONQUEST BY INCLUDING EGYPT, ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA, MEDIA, PERSIA, JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET; JAMES WALTON, GOWER STREET. PREFACE. A KNOWLEDGE of the History of the East is indispensable to the student of Classical Literature. In the earliest records, he meets with doubtful traditions-and further study reveals undoubted signs-of older forms of civilisation, which helped to determine those of Greece and Rome. Egypt and Phoenicia loom up, however vaguely, in what he learns of the origin of Greek society, arts, and letters. The earliest and noblest poetry of Greece and of the world, as well as the legend of Rome's original, bring him at once in contact with an Asiatic kingdom, of whose real existence, however, he is left in doubt. As his first reading of Greek poetry excites his curiosity about Troy, so his earliest lessons in Greek prose plunge him into the midst of the history of Persia, and into the heart of the region of the great eastern empires. His first guide to the history of Greece is an author who-with a wise prescience of that method of study which we have only learnt of late-carries him at once to Assyria and Babylon, Egypt and Libya, Lydia and Persia, that, in the light of the knowledge of the East, he may see the true meaning of the victories which form the glory of the history of Greece. And, at every succeeding step, he finds himself in contact with Oriental forms of government and civilisation, and he learns that the victories of Alexander, Scipio, and Augustus b |