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The National Geographic Magazine 



eastward march, the Aryan at last on 

 the bridge, carried for the first and only 

 time in history the supremacy of Euro- 

 pean ideas and organization over the 

 entire space which constitutes the inev- 

 itable link between the three groups of 

 population which, from the nature of 

 things, constitute the three great hives 

 of the human race in the Eastern World. 

 The far-flung line of Greek cities which 

 he left starred the whole region with 

 spots and dots of enlightenment, free 

 colonies extending to the Indus and the 

 Oxus. So completelj'- has this perished 

 and left no trace that it is not easy for 

 us to realize that for over a century and 

 a half Greek coins were being struck in 

 Bactria, that Buddhist sculpture re- 

 ceived a form and comeliness which has 

 never left it and which places it alone 

 among the bizarre modeling of the East. 

 It is as difficult for us to understand 

 that for three centuries a great Greek 

 city like Seleucia, with its own assem- 

 bly and council, its agora, and its Boule, 

 maintained itself on the Tigris. There 

 is something invincibly pathetic in the 

 disappearance of these cities one by one 

 like guttering candles. Their glory. 



Like the shooting star. 

 Fell to base earth from the firmament. 



These Greek cities had no land or 

 rural cultivators about them. In the 

 ancient city the death rate was steadily 

 higher than the birth rate. As fresh 

 supplies of Greeks ceased, it was a mere 

 question of brief generations when the 

 Greek lines were extinct and the effort 

 to hold this tract for civilization faded 

 and was lost first in the Arabian and 

 then the Tatar migration. 



ROME AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 



The successor of Greece, Rome, was 

 a sea power. Its first treaty was a com- 

 riiercial compact with Carthage. Its 

 conflict with that maritime power was 

 really a struggle for the basin of the 



Mediterranean. In its zenith the Ro- 

 man Empire was a rim of land about the 

 Mediterranean, with an outlying region 

 like South Britain, but limited always in 

 the full exercise of its power by its com- 

 mand of the great sea. When Augustus 

 fixed the policy of the Roman State he 

 adopted a new practice in regard to these 

 great trade routes, which were the ar- 

 teries or connecting ligaments between , 

 the East and the West. They were no 

 longer left wholly in Asiatic hands ; 

 neither was the effort made to hold them 

 from end to end. An expedition of 

 Augustus seized Aden, but left it. The 

 police of the Red Sea was maintained, 

 but the effort was not carried farther, so 

 as to hold its entrance, and trade from 

 south Arabia to Zanzibar was allowed 

 to grow. The Persian frontier was ex- 

 panded so as to grip Palmyra because it 

 was the end of one caravan route. Its 

 great colonnades in the desert marked 

 the wealth of this outpost. The carved 

 Roman fronts of Arabia Petrsea, a tract 

 always held by a strong imperial garri- 

 son, was the head of another route. Eater 

 Dara was the fortified fort and outpost 

 which protected the heads of the di- 

 vergent caravan roads which came up 

 the Mesopotamian plain and then sepa- 

 rated. Here, as along the line of the 

 Rhine and Danube or the southern edge 

 of north Africa, strategic points were 

 held, but no effort was made to expand 

 beyond them until the period between 

 Trajan and Heraclius.- 



When this advance came the Arab 

 expansion was near. It had been pre- 

 ceded by causes which prepared the way. 

 Augustus' policy of holding the heads 

 of the trade routes, instead, as uiider 

 Alexander's far-sighted plan, of garri- 

 soning the routes themselves with a long 

 line of Greek cities and settlements, 

 divided the springs and sources of con- 

 trol over a region whose free transit was 

 indispensable to the health of each mem- 

 ber of the human race whose trade it 

 carried. The Roman fringe from Tra- 



