654 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



Alexandria, 600,000 to Seleucia, and 100,000 to Antioch and Per- 

 gamis. 



In Greece the origin of cities was due to the same- religious motive, 

 but ''the topography of the countr}^, the characteristics of the race, 

 the social and political status, all united in turning that country 

 toward trades and manufactures, commerce, navigation, colonization, 

 and everywhere gave birth to cities which, like Miletis, Chalcis, 

 Corinth, iEgina, and later, Athens, found in the new ways, riches and 

 fame. It produced there, in brief, from the seventh to the fourth 

 centuries before Chi'ist, a phenomenon comparable to what we see 

 to-day among modern peoples." ^ In Greece it was chiefly through 

 slavery that the cities increased in their way the number of inhab- 

 itants. It was Chios, a maritime city, that first introduced foreign 

 slaves among them. Its example was imitated by cities which had 

 like needs, and there was thus organized ''a steady stream of immi- 

 gration, which brought from all the Orient into Greece an abundance 

 of workmen." ^ The population of ancient cities also included a great 

 number of foreigners (meteques) who, having abandoned theu* native 

 land with no hope of return, consecrated themselves to the trades 

 and to commerce. At Athens, toward the end of the fifth century 

 before Christ, the meteques and the freedmen reached the number of 

 100,000, as opposed to 120,000 citizens. Prosperity was then directly 

 proportionate to the abundance of handwork, for the arm was the only 

 force employed ; but from the day when work and money failed them 

 the cities decreased in population. Such was Greece during the 

 second and first centuries before Christ. ''Thebes," writes Strabo, 

 "was only a market town and the other cities of Boeotia showed 

 the same decline." 



Before the Mediterranean epoch, where the principal seats of civil- 

 ization were represented simultaneously or in turn by the great oli- 

 garchies, Phenician, Carthaginian, Greek, and Italian — and we 

 might repeat for Tyre and Carthage what we have said of Grecian 

 cities — were placed the four great civilizations of high antiquity 

 which all flom-ished in navigable regions, "Hoangho and Yangtze- 

 Kiang," writes L. Metchnikoff, "flowed through the primitive do- 

 main of Chinese civilization; Vedique, India, was likewise cut by the 

 basins of the Indus and the Ganges; the Assyro-Bab3'lonian mon- 

 archies spread over a vast country of which the Tigris and the 

 Euphrates formed the two vital arteries; Egypt, finally, as Herod- 

 otus has said, was a gift, a present, a creation, of the Nile." ^ From 

 Nineveh, on the Tigris, Assyrian civilization was carried to Babylon 



' Paul Guiraud: Etudes 4conomiques sur I'antiquitd. Paris, Hachette, 1905, p. 127. 



» Paul Guiraud, op. eit. 



3 L6on Metchnikoff, La civilisation et les grands fleuves historique.s. Paris, Hachette, 1889. 



