Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/126

 io6 A Short History of The World seem to have spread over the mountain masses of Central Asia far to the east of the present range of such peoples. In Eastern Turkestan there are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but now they speak Mongolian tongues. Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites had been submerged and " Aryanized " by the Armenians before 1000 B.C., and the Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and formidable fighting barbarism on the north-eastern frontiers, a group of tribes amidst which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain as outstanding names. . But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made their first heavy thrust into the heart of the old world civihzation. They were already coming southward and crossing into Asia Minormany centuries before 1000 B.C. First came a group of tribes of whom the Phrygians were the most conspicuous, and then in succession the ^olic, the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks. By 1000 B.C. they had wiped out the ancient ^gean civilization both in the mainland of Greece and in most of the Greek islands ; the cities of Mycenae and Tiryns were obliterated and Cnossos was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea before 1000 B.C., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes, and they were founding colonies in Sicily and the South of Italy after the fashion of the Phoenician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean coasts. So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and Sardan- apalus were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt, the Aryan peoples were learning the methods of civiliza- tion and making it over for their own purposes in Italy and Greece and north Persia. The theme of history from the ninth century B.C. onward for six centuries is the story of how these Aryan peoples grew to power and enterprise and how at last they subjugated the whole Ancient World, Semitic, JEgean and Egyptian aUke. In form the Aryan peoples were altogether victorious ; but the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian ideas and methods was continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan hands. It -is indeed a struggle that goes on through all the rest of history and still in a manner continues to this day.