The Story of Mankind [17]
leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great
teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow
the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea.
Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western
Asia and there they had founded the half-independent communities
of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose
names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In
the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had
established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this
perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan,
made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon
a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the
undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.
Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians
push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon
found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo-
European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe
and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands
of the AEgean Sea.
These difficulties led to the three famous wars between
Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King
Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula.
They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to
get a foothold upon the European continent.
But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens
proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies
of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the
Asiatic rulers to return to their base.
It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient
teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great
many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the
struggle between east and west has continued until this very
day.
THE AEGEAN SEA
THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED
THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO
THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his
father told him the story of Troy. He liked that story
better than anything else he had ever heard and he made
up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave home,
he would travel to Greece and ``find Troy.'' That he was the
son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did
not bother him. He knew that he would need money but
he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging afterwards.
As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune
within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to
equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia
Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high
mound covered with grainfields. According to tradition it had
been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann,
whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge,
wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began
to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his
trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he
was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried
town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy
of which Homer had written. Then something very interesting
occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone
hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects,
which people had generally associated with the prehistoric
men who had lived in these regions before the coming of
the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very
costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was
unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of
the AEgean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men
who in many ways had been the