MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
vivors became so disorganized that a final charge could 
easily break and scatter them. Here again the Indo- 
Europeans, for such were the Medes and Persians, showed 
themselves preeminently horsemen. Herodotus tells us 
that they were taught, from their youth up, three things: 
to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth. 
The Aryans still walled their cities mainly with sun- 
dried mud; but they learned to use glazed and colored 
burnt brick, with which they formed facades depicting 
processions, warriors, and the like (Plate 83). From 
Egypt, which they also conquered, they seem to have 
borrowed the use of the column. From Asia Minor they 
learned the use of regular coined money, which the Baby- 
lonians and Assyrians had not known. Last, but very 
far from least, it appears to have been the Persians who 
popularized through the western world the humble but 
exceedingly valuable hen, originally a native of the East 
Indies. 
The Persians not only enormously extended the limits 
of the older empires which they had won; but they devised 
greatly improved systems of organization, communica- 
tion, and administration. Much of the older civilization 
they necessarily adopted; but there was little that they did 
not improve upon, and the debt which the modern world 
owes to the Persian Empire is incalculable, although often 
unrecognized. 
ANCIENT CRETE 
The civilization that thrived so in the fertile valley of 
the Nile and the no less fertile river plains of Mesopotamia 
found an equally propitious soil on an island in the Medi- 
terranean, and it is to Crete that we must turn next. Here 
sprang up from simple Neolithic beginnings a civilization 
in many ways of a very high order, the first of those that 
can be called distinctively European, the forerunner of 
Grecian culture. 
Crete possessed an especially fortunate situation for such 
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