II NOTES 105 



embraced questions which, at the present day, are 

 still hotly controverted. 



The old Ionian philosophy, then, seems to be only 

 one of many results of a stirring of the moral and 

 intellectual life of the Aryan and the Semitic popu- 

 lations of Western Asia. The conditions of this 

 general awakening were doubtless manifold ; but 

 there is one which modern research has brouofht into 

 great prominence. This is the existence of extremely 

 ancient and highly advanced societies in the valleys 

 of the Euphrates and of the Nile. 



It is now known that, more than a thousand — 

 perhaps more than two thousand — years before the 

 sixth century B.C., civilization had attained a re- 

 latively high pitch among the Babylonians and the 

 Egyptians. Not only had painting, sculpture, 

 architecture, and the industrial arts reached a re- 

 markable development ; but in Chald^ea, at any rate, 

 a vast amount of knowledge had been accumulated 

 and methodized, in the departments of grammar, 

 mathematics, astronomy, and natural history. Where 

 such traces of the scientific spirit are visible, 

 naturalistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so 

 far as I know, no remains of an Accadian, or 

 Egyptian, philosophy, properly so called, have yet 

 been recovered. 



Geographically, Chaldsea occupied a central posi- 

 tion among the oldest seats of civilization. Com- 

 merce, largely aided by the intervention of those 

 colossal pedlars, the Phoenicians, had brought Chaldsea 

 into connection with all of them, for a thousand 

 years before the epoch at present under consideration. 



