lator. It was an act of self-defence on the part of the momentary potentate against possible heirs, and closely analogous, therefore, to the proscriptions of Sulla and the Triumvirs. Half Asia Minor belonged to the Dukas, Phocas, and Skleros connexions; the Chancellor Basileios, who could keep an army on pay out of his own fabulous resources, has long ago been compared with Crassus.[1] But the imperial age proper begins only with the Seljuk Turks.[2] Their leader Togrulbek won Irak in 1043 and Armenia in 1049, and in 1055 forced the Caliph to grant him the hereditary Sultanate. His son Alp Arslan conquered Syria and, by the victory of Manzikert, gained eastern Asia Minor. The remnant of the Byzantine Empire thenceforward possessed no importance to, or influence on, the further destinies of the Turkish Islamic Imperium.
This is the phase, too, which in Egypt is concealed under the name of the "Hyksos." Between the XIIth and the XVIIIth Dynasties lay two centuries,[3] which began with the collapse of the ancien régime which had culminated with Sesostris III,[4] and ended with the beginning of the New Empire. The numbering of the dynasties itself suffices to disclose something catastrophic. In the lists of kings the names appear successive or parallel, usurpers of obscurest origin, generals, people with strange titles, often reigning only a few days. With the very first king of the XIIIth Dynasty the high-Nile records at Semne break off, and with his successor the archives at Kahun come to an end. It is the time out of which the Leiden Papyrus portrays the great social revolution.[5]
- ↑ Krumbacher, op. cit., 993.
- ↑ And perhaps not in Baghdad alone, for the gifted Maniakes, who was hailed by the army in Sicily as Emperor and fell in 1043 in his march on Byzantium, must have been a Turk.
- ↑ 1785-1580. See, for the following, Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt. §§ 298, et seq.; Weill, La Fin du moyen empire égyptien (1918). That Ed. Meyer's assignment is correct as compared with the 1670 years of Petrie has long been proved by the thickness of the strata in which objects have been found and the tempo of the style-evolution (Minoan included). Here it is demonstrated afresh by comparison with corresponding sections in the other Cultures.
- ↑ P. 387.
- ↑ Erman, "Mahnworte eines ägyp. Propheten" (Sitz. Preuss. Akad., 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): "The higher officials are displaced, the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counsellors of the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased, documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their rightful owners. Former slave-girls become insolent and aliens lord it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness, births are few — and oh, that mankind might cease!" Here is the very picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted in the Hellenistic (p. 405) and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ali; whether the division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for banner like Marxism — all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Cæsarism the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.
