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148 A Short History of The World which also had a great library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks that had once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians and Mace- donians. They raided, shattered and destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They were an able but unimaginative people preferring law and profit to either science or art. New in- THE DEATH OF BUDDHA Grceco-Buddhisticarving from Sivat Valley. N.W. Province, probably A d. 350 vadfers were also coming down out of central Asia to shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the western world again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of mounted bowmen, who treated the Graeco-Persian Empire of Persepolis and Susa in the third century b.c. in much the same fashion that the Medes and Persians had treated it in the seventli and sixth. And there were now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the north-east, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and Aryan-speaking but yellow-skirmed and black-haired and with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we shall tell more in a subsequent chapter.