hewers of wood and drawers of water, and the leaders of the nomads become kings and princes, masters and aristocrats. They too settle down, they learn many of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their old nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they drive and race chariots, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class.
This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first history that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the civilized regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class and the working mass of the population. And we find too that after some generations, the aristocrat, having settled down, begins to respect the arts and refinements and law-abidingness of settlement, and to lose something of his original hardihood. He intermarries, he patches up a sort of toleration between conqueror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas and learns the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a part of the civilization he has captured. And as he does so, events gather towards a fresh invasion by the free adventurers of the outer world.[1]
§ 2a
This alternation of settlement, conquest, refinement, fresh conquest, refinement, is particularly to be noted in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris, which lay open in every direction to great areas which are not arid enough to be complete deserts, but which were not fertile enough to support civilized populations. Perhaps the earliest people to form real cities in this part of the world, or indeed in any part of the world, were a people of mysterious origin
- ↑ My friend Colonel Lawrence tells me that the movement among the Arabs is somewhat as follows: (1) the sessile village cultivators are pushed out by overpopulation into the desert—very reluctantly; (2) they wander in the desert for a thousand years or so—as a stick pushed into the water gets carried about for a long way; (3) they are pushed again out of the desert, back again into sessile life by starvation—very reluctantly (they have learned to love the desert); and when they come back into sessile life they are on the other side—i.e. having started in west Arabia, they land in Mesopotamia. Thus they wander a thousand years or so, and end up thousands of miles from where they started. — E. B.
