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THE SELEUCID EMPIRE. 358-251 BC. HOUSE OF SELEUCUS

CHAPTER 2

THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

Western Asia—all that group of countries which by the last turn of destiny in 323 B.C. had fallen to the Macedonian chiefs to be dealt with at their pleasure—had been the soil of many histories, wonderful and momentous enough for the human race, before the Macedonians had ever known it, and was to be the soil of histories more wonderful and more momentous still. It is marked out by certain general features as a different world from Europe, by features which shape and qualify to a considerable extent the histories enacted in it, and of these the most fundamental, uninteresting as it may sound, is a generally low rainfall. The atmosphere is peculiarly dry.

The consequences of this one peculiarity reach far. In the first place large tracts are either absolutely barren, mere sun-baked stone and sand, or able only to support men who roam with their herds over a large area. But it happens to be traversed by mountain ranges whose summits reach up and, catching the fugitive vapour from the sea, roll it down their sides in the form of rivers. It is only in the neighbourhood of the mountains and along the sea-board that a settled population can sow and reap, or where the rivers generated in the mountains are strong enough to carry their waters far out into the desert, so that men living on their banks can make up for the defect of rain by irrigation. In this contest with the desert many of the rivers of Western Asia are ultimately worsted, and perish before they find the sea.

Take a map of Europe, and the different departments, we see marked out represent tracts available throughout, but in a map of Alexander’s Empire only part of each province counts. The rest is waste land—the desolation of the level desert, the desolation of the mountains. The mountains, although they catch and store the rain, are necessarily barren themselves in their higher parts, and only on their lower slopes and foot­hills can furnish the means of life to a civilized population— a population with more requirements than rude and ill-housed mountain tribes. The belts between mountain and desert, the banks of the great rivers, the lower hills near the sea, these are the lines of civilization (actual or potential) in Western Asia. The consequence of these conditions is that through all the history of Western Asia there runs the eternal distinction between the civilized cultivators of the plains and lower hills and the wild peoples of mountain and desert. The great monarchies which have arisen here have rarely been effective beyond the limits of cultivation; mountain and desert are another world in which they can get, at best, only precarious footing. And to the monarchical settled peoples the near neighbourhood of this unsubjugated world has been a continual menace. It is a chaotic region out of which may pour upon them at any weakening of the dam hordes of devastators. At the best of times it hampers the government by offering a refuge and recruiting-ground to all the enemies of order. Between the royal governments and the free tribes the feud is secular. The ordinary policy of the Asiatic monarchies has been simply to safeguard the great highways of communication. It obviously follows from the restriction of civilized habitation to the narrow belts of territory just described that the main roads are fixed by nature to certain definite lines. The task set before itself by these governments has been, not that of holding an immense continuous area, but the comparatively simpler one of holding these lines. It is important to remember this in connection with rapid conquests like that of Alexander. To conquer the Achaemenian Empire did not mean the effective occupation of all the area within its extreme frontiers—that would have been a task exceeding one man’s lifetime—but the conquest of its cultivated districts and the holding of the roads which connected them.

In this eternal contest between civilized government and the free children of mountain and desert the frontiers which divide the two are necessarily shifting. Sometimes a region able, if proper pains be spent on it, to support civilization has been so overrun by the nomads as to fall altogether to their domain. This has been the case with most of the country along the lower Euphrates, once populous and lined with flourishing cities, and now, under the wretched Turkish administration, only the pasture ground of the Bedawin. On the other hand, sometimes civilized government has been able to push its way farther into the desert, higher up the mountain, either by conquest, or, more often, by the strong men of the tribes founding monarchies in imitation of the monarchies of the plain. This was the case with the Persians, highland clans at the dawn of history, but inhabiting valleys which were not unfruitful.

A thorough subjugation, however, of mountain and desert has been beyond the power of any Asiatic monarchy. If the great roads can be protected from marauders, enough seems accomplished. And even this was very imperfectly achieved by the Achaemenian government which preceded Alexander. With the entrance of Alexander upon the scene a new spirit, more vigorous, more alert, and, above all, more consequent than that of Asiatic monarchy, comes into action. It is not Alexander’s intention to acquiesce in the defiance to his government offered by the free tribes. The Macedonians knew, by their old experience of Illyrian and Thracian, the habits of such folk. For the hill-tribes of Asia were not very different from the hill-tribes of Europe; they were both peoples who had remained at the same stage of barbarism when the lowlanders had gone on to civilization. It is significant that Alexander, at his first entry into Asia, goes out of his way to chastise the Pisidians and the tribes of Antibanus. When the Hûzha (Uxii) a little later on ask for the immemorial blackmail they have to learn by a sharp stroke that the ways of Alexander are not the ways of a Persian king. The tribes of the wilderness also feel his hand.

On the Scythians of the Central-Asiatic steppe he did actually inflict some salutary blows; he was preparing in 323 to deal with the Bedawin. His policy perhaps envisaged the ultimate subjection of mountain and desert; but little more than a beginning of such a work had been made at his death, and its accomplishment would have taken centuries.

When the day comes for European government to be re-established in Western Asia it will be seen whether its operation, immensely more powerful than that of any Asiatic monarchy, does not bring the old license of mountain and desert to an end. Already weapons of scientific precision are working a transformation in the Nearer East. We hear so much of the decay of the Ottoman and Persian monarchies, and their power in relation to other states is in truth so fallen, that we hardly realize that there has never been a time when they have been so consolidated internally, when the central government has made its authority so effective throughout the realm. Already some of the extreme provinces of Alexander’s Empire are once more under European rule; British and Russian administrators are grappling with the problem of the mountain and desert tribes, with the Afridi of the frontier hills and the Kirghiz of the steppe. But instead of the sarissa and bow with which Alexander had to work, his modern successors have the rifle and the mountain battery, and who knows but progressive science may put into their hands before long means of mastery more certain still?

From considering the general characteristics of Western Asia we must pass to some review of its arrangement. The enormous plateau of Central Asia is adjoined on the west by a separate smaller plateau, that of Iran, and this again on the west by a third, still smaller plateau, the Anatolian (Asia Minor). The two last of these fall within the political system of Western Asia. All the three plateaus have some features in common. The centre of each is desert, or at best steppe, and they are each surrounded by mountain ramparts. Between the Central-Asiatic plateau and the Iranian intervenes the mountain mass whose nucleus is the Pamir, and whose off­shoots, from the Hindu-Kush to the Sulaiman range, spread like a fan over Eastern Iran, the country which corresponds roughly to the modern principality of Afghanistan. The Iranian plateau again is separated from Asia Minor by the mountain mass of Armenia. There is yet a fourth plateau in Western Asia, the Arabian Peninsula; but this, although it did not lie outside the bounds of Alexander’s Empire, as he projected it in idea, did lie outside the actual possession of Alexander and his successors, and therefore outside our field of vision in this book. All the sides of the Anatolian plateau slope down to the sea except that towards Armenia. The Iranian plateau, contrariwise, is only bordered by water on its southern side, and along part of its northern, where its rim overlooks the Caspian. Its north-west corner mingles with the “Alpine” country of Armenia, which links it to Anatolia; along most of its eastern side it is bordered by the Alpine country of East Iran (Afghanistan), which links it to Central Asia. At all other points it slopes down to the level desert; at its north-eastern extremity to the deserts of the Caspian and Azov basins (Russian Turkestan); along its south-western face to the desert, which is variously called in its different parts Syrian, Mesopotamian, and North Arabian, but which, since it is altogether the domain of the Bedawin Arabs, we will call simply the Arabian desert; and lastly, at its south-eastern extremity to the sand-drifts of Beluchistan. Between the deserts which take up so much of the interior of the plateaus and the deserts or seas which stretch outside of them intervene the belts of mountain country which constitute the plateaus’ rim. The Anatolian plateau, being comparatively small, has no part beyond the reach of rains—it is not want of water in this case which makes the central region sterile—but farther east the border ranges and the two intermediate mountain groups (Armenia and the Pamir), together with that long line of mountain shot out from Armenia between the Arabian desert and the eastern end of the Mediterranean (making Syria)—these various mountains and hills catch all the moisture which avails to redeem from the desert on either side some productive tracts. Some of this moisture drains down into the interior of the plateaus, making a sort of verdure along the inward faces and the crevices of the border ranges, but since the faces turned towards the sea naturally get most of it, the great rivers of Nearer Asia flow, not into the interior, but outwards to the sea.

Of the rivers west of Iran the mightiest are those two which take their rise in the Armenian uplands and flow through the Arabian desert to the Persian Gulf. Were it not for the Euphrates and Tigris all the space between Syria and Iran would be an area of immense dearth. But these rivers are to the Arabian desert what the Nile is to the Libyan, carrying with them a green line of fertility, and capable of nursing a succession of cities. The Tigris takes the straighter course south-east, parallel with, and not very far from, the ranges which border Iran, swelled as it goes by the waters which these send down their sides. Both the head streams of the Euphrates flow west; then, as a single river, it sweeps round, enters the Arabian desert, and crosses it diagonally. At one point, about 350 miles from its mouth, it seems about to mingle with its brother river on the east. From Baghdad on the Tigris the Euphrates is only 25 miles distant. But thence it again diverges to enter the sea—in ancient times — by a separate mouth; now the two rivers do really join at Kurna. This narrow waist of land between the rivers in the region of Baghdad marks a change in the character of the country. North of it the land between the two rivers is desert—part of the great Arabian desert which sweeps from Syria to the confines of Iran—only the immediate neighborhood of the rivers being habitable. South of it the rivers were connected in ancient times by a network of canals, quickening the soil, dark alluvium, into exuberant fertility. This was Babylonia, a level fat land, like the Egyptian delta, a land of corn-fields and gardens, of osiers and palms. It was the richest country of Nearer Asia, the seat of its oldest civilization, the natural focus of its life.

The Asiatic part, therefore, of Alexander’s Empire, with which the Empire of Seleucus at its greatest extent nearly coincided, falls into certain clearly marked divisions:

(1) The “country beyond the Taurus,” i.e. the Anatolian peninsula (Asia Minor) without Cilicia.

(2)  Syria, and, closely connected with it, Cilicia on the west and Mesopotamia on the east, i.e. the Aramean country.

(3) The lowlands about the Euphrates and Tigris, the seats of the old Assyrio-Babylonian civilization, together with Susiana (Elam).

(4) Iran.

(5) The Indian provinces, covering a great part of the Punjab.

After narrating the series of events which led up to the virtual conquest of the whole heritage of Alexander by Seleucus, I propose in the first instance to follow the history of his successors up to the death of Seleucus III only in so far as it is concerned with the first of the divisions above mentioned—Asia Minor; then to take each of the other divisions in turn and see what can be gleaned of its life under these Hellenistic kings.

An important contribution has lately been made to the literature bearing on the geography of the Nearer East by Mr. D. G. Hogarth’s telling book (The Nearer East)—a book which no one interested in the past or present history of these countries can afford to leave unread. My own chapter naturally purports to do no more than call attention to a single characteristic of this part of the world, which has been of great moment for its history.