Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/42

 3 o EARLY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES really were great cities at both those places with an advanced civilisation long before the year iooo B.C. Excavations in the island of Crete have shown that there also, as well as at Mycenae, the civilisation at this early stage was of a Greek type. And we have from Egypt records of mail-clad warriors coming by sea from the north with names which quite certainly represent Achaeans and Danaans. It appears, then, that about the middle of the second millennium this Hellenic group was establishing or had estab- Aeolians lished itself in the Grecian Peninsula and in the ionians, and islands of the Aegean Sea, including Crete. This Dorians. group subsequently split into two divisions called Aeolian and Ionian. Then a little later came another Hellenic group from the north-west called the Dorians, who made them- selves masters of the western half of the Peninsula, the whole of the Peloponnesus, and many of the islands, by a date which we may put down at about iooo B.C. By this time Ionians and Aeolians had already established themselves also on the coast of Asia Minor. The Dorians did likewise ; and also established dynasties among the states already existing in Asia Minor, or the western part of it, notably in the state called Lydia, which had its capital at Sardis. A little later this Lydian state extended its supremacy over nearly the whole of Asia Minor, until, as we saw, it shared Western Asia with the Median and Chaldean Empires. When we speak of a state or people being civilised, we mean first of all that it lives under an ordered government which protects the lives and property of its citizens ; it has learnt discipline and obedience to authority. Secondly, we mean that it has acquired a degree of proficiency in sciences and arts which enables it to provide itself with comforts and luxuries, and generally with the means of adding to the enjoyments of life. No test of civilisation is more im- portant than that of Government. Now, in all the states that we have dealt with so far, we have found them concerned with lordship over large territories. We have not found in any of them a very highly organised government, or one in which any large proportion of the people have a share. There is not, in