Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/118

98 A Short History of The World civilizations on the northern borders. They all spoke variants of what once must have been the same language, Aryan. Round the north-east of the Black and Caspian Seas were coming the Medes and Persians. Confused with these in the records of the time Averc Scythians and Sarniatians. From north-east or north- west came the Armenians, from the north-west of the sea-barrier through the Balkan peninsula came Cimmerians, Phrygians and the Hellenic tribes whom now Ave call the Greeks. They were raiders and robbers and plunderers of cities, these Aryans, east and west aUke. They were all kindred and similar peoples, hardy herdsmen who had taken to plunder. In the east they were still only borderers and raiders, but in the west they were taking cities and driving out the civilized ^gean populations. The ^gean peoples were so pressed that they were seeking new homes in lands beyond the Aryan range. Some were seeking a settlement in the delta of the Nile and being repulsed by the Egyptians ; some, the Etruscans, seem to have sailed from Asia Minor to found a state in the forest wildernesses of middle Italy ; some built themselves cities upon the south-east coasts of the Mediterranean and became later that people known in history as the Philistines. Of these Aryans who came thus rudely upon the scene of the ancient civilizations we will tell more fully in a later section. Here we note simply all this stir and emigration amidst the area of the ancient civilizations, that was set up by the swirl of the gradual and continuous advance of these Aryan barbarians out of the northern forests and wildernesses between 1600 and 600 b.c. And in a section to follow we must tell also of a little Semitic people, the Hebrews, in the hills behind the Phoenician and Philistine coasts, who began to be of significance in the world towards the end of this period. They produced a literature of very great importance in subsequent history, a collection of books, histories, poems, books of wisdom and prophetic works, the Hebrew Bible. In Mesopotamia and Egypt the coming of the Aryans did not cause fundamental changes until after 600 b.c. The flight of the iEgeans before the Greeks and even the destruction of Cnossos must have seemed a very remote disturbance to both the citizens of Egypt and of Babylon. Dynasties came and went in these cradle states of civilization, but the main tenor of human Ufe went on, with a slow increase in refinement and complexity age by age. In Egypt the accumulated monuments of more ancient times — the pyramids