Throughout most of this region there began to work certain
influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did
nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the
forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great
activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great
administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental
questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety
of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been
known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual
leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all
that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day
as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more
daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like
Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what
none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their
surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to
the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization
was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of
Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the
whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a
period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of
Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian
defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged
it.
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