Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/772

762 the use of the signet seal, we might be a thousand years earlier. What was left to Macedonian or Roman sway was more thoroughly Hellenized, but how superficial this was is shown by the constant tendency to fall away to the Oriental power across the Euphrates, by the ease with which the Arabs brought about its conquest, by the fewness of the survivals in the land to-day of the once dominant foreign influence.

But while such foreign influence as we find in the Near East to-day is almost without exception modern, or at the very best medieval, the very reverse is true of the western lands. The great stream of political thinking from its source in Babylonia and Egypt passed, with many a notable change but still the same stream, through the organization of Assyria and Persia, to the writings of the Hebrews and of the later Greeks, to the practice of the Romans, through feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire alike, to the classicism of the Renaissance and the modernity of the present day. As the eagle which is the state symbol of Lagash, earliest of Babylonian states, is the direct ancestor of the birds of varied plumage and number of heads which to-day adorn the national seals, so there is a direct line of apostolic succession from the priest-god of the early Orient to the divine right of the twentieth-century rulers, from the first feeble attempt to enforce tribute from the conquered rival to our own enlightened government of dependencies.