honoured, out there in the Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have originated some "Early-German" ornament. But meantime the Babylonian realm itself passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians — all of these small[1] warrior-hosts under energetic leaders — successively replaced one another in the capital city without any serious resistance on the part of its people.
It is a first example — soon paralleled in Egypt — of the "Roman Empire" style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by prætorians; the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome (after Commodus), maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian Cyrus and the Ostrogoth Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of the Empire, and the warrior bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples in alien surroundings. But these are constitutional rather than factual distinctions; in intent and purpose the legions of Septimius Severus, the African, did not differ from the Visigoths of Alaric, and by the battle of Adrianople[2] "Romans" and "barbarians" have become almost indistinguishable.
After 1500 three new Cultures begin — first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about 1100, the Classical, on the Ægean Sea. The Chinese historians speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia, Shang, and Chou in much the same way as Napoleon regarded himself as a fourth dynasty following the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Capetians — in reality, the third coexisted with the Culture right through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the titular Emperor of the Chóu dynasty became a state pensioner of the "Eastern Duke" and when in A.D. 1793 "Louis Capet" was executed, the Culture in each case passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the later art in exactly the same relation as Mycenaean to Early Classical pottery and Carolingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and Chinese springtimes, with their "Pfalzen" and "Burgen," their knighthood and feudal rulership, can be seen the whole image of our Gothic, and the "period of the Great Protectors" (Ming-Chu, 685-691) corresponds precisely to the time of Cromwell, Wallenstein, and Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.
The period 480-230 is called by the Chinese historians the "Period of the Contending States"; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between
- ↑ Eduard Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, III, 97) estimates the Persians, probably too highly, at half a million as against the fifty millions of the Babylonian Empire. The numerical relation between the Germanic peoples and legions of the third-century Roman emperors and the Roman population as a whole, and that of the Ptolemaic and Roman armies to that of the Egyptian people, was of much the same order.
[H. Delbrück, in his well-known Gesch. der Kriegskunst (1908), Vol. I, Part I, chapter i, and elsewhere, deals in considerable detail with the strengths of ancient armies. — Tr.]
- ↑ A.D. 378. See C. W. C. Oman, History of the Art of War: Middle Ages (1898), ch. i; H. Delbrück, Gesch. der Kriegskunst, Vol. II, book I, ch. x, and book II. — Tr.
