It was implied in the opening of this chapter that in 600 B.C. social changes in the East would be found disproportionate to political changes; and on the whole they seem so to have been. The Assyrian Empire was too lately fallen for any great modification of life to have taken place in its area, and, in fact, the larger part of that area was being administered still by a Chaldaean monarchy on the established lines of Semitic imperialism. Whether the centre of such a government lay at Nineveh or at Babylon can have affected the subject populations very little. No new religious force had come into the ancient East, unless the Mede is to be reckoned one in virtue of his Zoroastrianism. Probably he did not affect religion much in his early phase of raiding and conquest. The great experience, which was to convert the Jews from insignificant and barbarous highlanders into a cultured, commercial and cosmopolitan people of tremendous possibilities had indeed begun, but only for a part of the race, and so far without obvious result. The first incursion of Iranians in force, and that slow soakage of Indo-European tribes from Russia, which was to develop the Armenian people of history, are the most momentous signs of coming change to be noted between 800 and 600 B.C. with one exception, the full import of which will be plain at our next survey. This was the eastward movement of the Greeks.
As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men, military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these, Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians, Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus of Halicarnassus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, and with him had marched more than ten thousand Greeks. Not only have works by these three men of letters survived, wholly or in part, to our time, but also many notes on the East as it was before 400 B.C. have been preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we still have some archaeological documents to fall back upon. If the cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of the later Assyrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform us of local society and life.