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 brought into 

 great prominence. This is the existence of extreme- 

 ly ancient and highly advanced societies in the val- 

 leys 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 rel- 

 atively high pitch among the Babylonians and the 

 Egyptians. Not only had painting, sculpture, ar- 

 chitecture, and the industrial arts reached a re- 

 markable development ; but in Chaldaea, 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, natu- 

 ralistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so far as 

 I know, no remains of an Accacian,or Eg5T)tian, phi- 

 losophy, properly so called, have yet been recovered. 



Geographically, Chalda^a 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 Chal- 

 daea into connection with all of them, for a thousand 

 years before the epoch at present under considera- 

 tion. And in the ninth, eighth and seventh centu- 



