Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/41

 THE ARYAN MIGRATIONS 29 Chaldean Empire. It remained for his son Cambyses to over- throw Egypt and add that to the new Persian Empire. Now we can see that the real boundaries of the ancient empires, whose stories we have told in the last chapter, were set by the great mountain chain which is shown on „„, J ° Asia Minor, the map, the western part of which is called Mount Taurus, which bends northward to the head-waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and then south-eastwards beyond the Tigris to the Persian Gulf. The western part of this territory beyond the mountains, the land lying between the Black Sea and the north-east coast of the Mediterranean, is Asia Minor. The Hittite Empire arose in Asia Minor and spread into Syria, but the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires never main- tained any prolonged hold of the regions beyond the mountains. The early history of these regions is obscure. Their popula- tions were pretty certainly akin to the pre-Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia. How far the Semites penetrated among them and combined with them, as they did with the peoples of Syria and Mesopotamia, is uncertain. It is uncertain even whether the Hittites should be classed as Semites ; and finally, it is uncertain when and how far an Aryan element entered and predominated. It is not impossible that there were Aryan predecessors of that wave of migration which is called Hellenic, which entered Asia from Europe. It is agreed, however, that 2. Tiie the Hellenic migration was entering Greece and Hellenes spreading over the islands of the Aegean Sea by or Greeks ' the middle of the second millennium ; and that before the close of that millennium it was occupying the districts along the coast. Our earliest recorded information about the Hellenes is derived from the Homeric Poems, which were probably not written till about 800 B.C., but were based on poems and ballads which had grown up during earlier centuries, and represented much earlier traditions. They tell of the war of the Greeks, generally spoken of as Achaeans or Danaans, against Troy, under the leadership of Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae. Excavations at Mycenae, a town in the Peloponnesus, and at Troy, have proved that there