Persia proper, roughly corresponding to the modern province of Farsistan, was comparatively a small district, about 450 miles in length by 250 in breadth. Eastward it touched on Kermân or Karamania, westward it was bounded by Susiana, southward by the Persian Gulf. Its inhabitants were Aryans, whose immigration into the country called after their name was hardly earlier than the period of the fall of the Assyrian empire. The Assyrian inscriptions know nothing of them. Under leaders termed Akhæmenians (from Hakhámanish, “the friendly”) the tribe of the Persians pushed its way into the old kingdom of Anzan, or Southern Elam, which had been destroyed and desolated by the armies of Assur-bani-pal, and subsequently left a prey to the first invader by the decay of the Assyrian power. The tribe was but one out of many which had long been steadily advancing westward from the regions of the Hindu Kush. The first great wave of Aryan emigration, which had resulted in the establishment of the European nations, had been followed by another wave which first carried the Hindus into the Punjab, and then the Iranian populations into the vast districts of Baktria and Ariana. Mountains and deserts checked for a time their further progress, but at length a number of tribes, each under its own chiefs, crept along the southern shores of the Caspian or the northern coast of the Persian Gulf. These tribes were known in later history as the Aryan Medes and Persians.

Egypt, historically the oldest of countries, is geologically the youngest. It consists entirely of the soil deposited in comparatively recent times by the Nile. The triangle of the Delta marks the site of the ancient mouth of the river; and though the land has encroached upon the sea but slightly since the age of the Pharaohs, its height has year by year been slowly increasing. Some of the mouths of the river which were navigable streams in classical times have now ceased to be so; the Serbonian lake has in part become dry land, while desolate marshes are now cultivated fields. To the south of the Delta,—with the exception of the Fayûm, which owes its fertility to the canal called Bahr Yusûf, the former feeder of Lake Mœris,—Egypt is confined to the narrow strip of mud which lines both sides of the river, and is bounded by low hills of limestone, or the shifting sands of the desert. The Nile now flows for 1600 miles without receiving a single tributary ; the heated deserts on either bank absorb all the moisture of the air, and almost wholly prevent a rainfall, and it is consequently only where the waters of the river extend during the annual inundation, or where they can be dispersed by artificial irrigation, that cultivation and settled life are possible.

Whether it was that the work of Hêrodotos fell upon an age which had imbibed the sceptical teaching of the philosophers and sophists, and, like the wits at the court of the Restoration, was ready to laugh down a writer who made demands upon its credulity,—or whether his residence in the West lost him the literary friends and advocates he would otherwise have had in Greece,—or whether, again, his partiality for Athens aroused the prejudices of the younger generation which gathered like vultures round the carcase of Athenian greatness, and neither cared nor desired to remember the history of the Persian wars,—certain it is that from the first Herodotos met with hostile criticism and accusations of historical dishonesty. Hardly had the generation for whom he wrote passed away before Thukydidês tacitly accused him of errors which the Attic historian corrected without even naming the author to whom they were due. While his statements on matters of Greek history were thus called in question by a writer of that very nationality whose deeds he had done so much to exalt, his history of the East was categorically declared to be false by Ktêsias, the physician of the Persian king Artaxerxes Mnêmon. Born at Knidos, almost within sight of Halikarnassos, the birthplace of Herodotos, the position of Ktêsias gave him exceptional opportunities for ascertaining the true facts of Persian history, and his contemporaries naturally concluded that a critic who had lived long at the Persian Court, and had there consulted the parchment archives of Persia, was better informed than a mere tourist whose travels had never extended so far as the Persian capital, and who was obliged to depend upon ignorant dragomen for the information he retailed.

Geographically, as well as ethnologically and historically, Babylonia and Assyria form but one country. It is therefore with justice that classical writers sometimes speak of the whole district between the Euphrates and Tigris as Assyria, though Babylonia would no doubt have been a more accurate name. The district naturally falls into two divisions, the northern being more or less mountainous, while the southern is flat and marshy, and a sharp line of separation is drawn between them at a spot where the two rivers approach closely to one another, and the undulating table-land of the north sinks suddenly into the alluvial flats of Babylonia. It was in these rich and loamy flats, however, that the civilisation of Western Asia first developed. The northern plateau was inhabited by a mixture of uncultivated tribes at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge, and was known under the general name of Gutium or Guti (Kutu in Assyrian), first identified by Sir H. Rawlinson with the Goyim of Gen. xiv. 1. Gutium comprised the whole country which stretched from the Euphrates on the west to Media on the east; the land of Nizir, with the mountain of Rowandiz, on which the ark of the Chaldean Noah was believed to have rested, being included within it. The later kingdom of Assyria formed a portion of it, as well as the great plain of Mesopotamia, which was bounded on the west by Palestine or Martu, the land of “the path of the setting sun,” and on the north by Subarti, “the highlands” of Aram or Syria.

While the struggle for supremacy between Accadian and Semite was going on in the east, another branch of the Semitic race was establishing itself on the western coast of Asia. A narrow but fertile strip of land, from 10 to 15 miles in breadth and 150 in length, shut in between the snow-clad peaks of Lebanon and the sea, and stretching from the Bay of Antioch to the promontory of Carmel, was the home of the Phœnicians. They called it Canaan, “the lowlands,” a name which was afterwards extended to denote the whole district of Palestine inhabited by kindred tribes. The Egyptians named it the land of Keft, or the “palm,” of which the Greek Phœnikê is but a translation. The early date at which it was occupied is shown by the emigrations from it to the Delta in the time of the Middle Egyptian Empire; by the time the Hyksos were ruling at Memphis the mouths of the Nile had become so thickly populated by Phœnicians as to cause the whole coastland to be termed Keft-ur (Caphtor), or “Greater Phœnicia.”

According to Genesis, Sidon, “the fishing city,” was the firstborn of Canaan. Native legends, however, claimed an older foundation for the sacred city of Gebal or Byblos, northward of Beyrût. Beyrût itself, the Bêrytos of classical writers, was dependent on Gebal, and along with it formed a distinct territory in the midst of the Phœnician states.

Lydia is the link that binds together the geography and history of Asia and Europe. It occupied the western extremity of that great peninsula of Asia Minor, 750 miles in length and 400 in breadth, which runs out from the mountains of Armenia and divides the nations of the north from the happier inhabitants of a southern clime. The broad plains of the Hermos and Kayster, in which the Lydian monarchy grew up, are the richest in Asia Minor, and the mountain chains by which they are girdled, while sufficiently high to protect them, form cool and bracing sites for cities, and are rich in minerals of various kinds. The bays of Smyrna and Ephesos formed incomparable harbours; here the products of the inland could be safely shipped and carried past the bridge of islands which spans the Ægean to the nations of the West. Asia Minor, naturally the richest of countries and blessed with an almost infinite diversity of climates, finds, as it were, in the ancient territory of Lydia the summing-up of its manifold perfections and characteristics. Rightly, therefore, did the loamy plain of the Kayster give its name of Asian to the rest of the peninsula of which it formed the apex. This peninsula is cut in two by the Halys, which flows from that part of the Taurus range—the western spur of the Armenian mountains—which overlooks the eastern basin of the Mediterranean and forms the background of Kilikia.

The main object of the present work is to show what light has been thrown upon the earlier books of “the Father of History” by recent discoveries in Greece and the Levant, and, at the same time, to emphasize the fact, which Herodotos perceived, that Greek history and civilisation are but a continuation of the history and civilisation of the ancient East. The rapid progress that has been made of late years in the decipherment of the Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, the active exploration and unexpected discoveries that have been made in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Syria, and Asia Minor, the excavations on the site of Carchemish, and the recognition of the important part once played by the Hittites, have revolutionised our conception of early history, and given us a knowledge of the religion and culture, the languages and inner life, of the old nations of the Orient which Herodotos and his contemporaries did not and could not possess. In studies which are growing day by day, and continually revealing some new fact or correcting some previous misconception, it is well to take stock of our existing knowledge every now and then, and see exactly what is the point to which our researches have brought us. The present volume, accordingly, deals with the history rather than with the language of Herodotos, and with that history only in so far as it bears upon the East.

My dear friend Schliemann, — In complying most readily with your wish to do justice to the above title from the point of view of Egyptian antiquity, I am troubled with certain scruples, which I cannot withhold from you in the very beginning of my letter. As I have the accidental merit, by favour only of good fortune, of having moved for a long number of years amidst the world of Egyptian monuments as among old acquaintances, you will perhaps demand from me, as from an initiated priest, disclosures on the relations between Troy and Egypt. You may expect from me the solution of obscure historical enigmas, and rejoice by anticipation at having found at the right hour the right man, who has in this respect succeeded in evoking, as if by enchantment, old life from the ruins of dead monuments. Nothing have I to bring of all that you expect and that I should like to lay at your feet, as the most eloquent testimony of my friendship and high esteem. Is it my fault, is it the fault of the monuments, if I appear before you with a poor gift? I fear the fault lies with both, and, with this frank confession, I transport myself into the midst of the monuments and their inscriptions.