masterpiece-the Anabasis. The fact that it was possible to march in this way right through the Great King's dominions convinced the Greeks that the Persian Empire was not such a powerful thing as they had at one time imagined, and it is not surprising to see it falling an easy prey to the arms of Alexander the Great seventy years later (330 B.C.).

C

V

EARLY CIVILIZATIONS-CHINA

HINESE legends speak of a Golden Age three thousand years before the birth of Christ and of emperors who were almost impossibly virtuous. Setting aside these accounts as purely imaginary, it is nevertheless certain that by 1000 B. C. the civilization of China had reached a high stage of development. This civilization appears to have been indigenous; it grew up spontaneously and unassisted; it is quite safe to reject the theory that it was an offshoot of the Sumerian civilization, but it is not unlike other civilizations in some respects. Like Sumeria and Egypt, China was originally a land of city-states; the art of writing originated with pictorial signs in China as in Egypt; there were Chinese dynasties, the Shang (1750-1125 B.C.), the Chu (1125-250 B. C.), and then the Tsin and the Han; there was a feudal age in China as in Egypt, followed by a centralizing empire; Chinese civilization, like that of the Egyptians and the Sumerians, owed much to its rivers, the Hwang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang.

From the tenth century B. C. to about 220 B. C. China was under a feudal system, and the various feudal nobles were constantly at war with one another; but, when they were not engaged in killing each other, the Chinese of this period enjoyed a high degree of civilization. The men occupied them

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selves in hunting, fishing, and agriculture, the women in spinning and weaving; there were skilled workers in gold, silver, iron, and bronze; there are vessels of bronze in existence to-day which date from the Shang dynasty; the written language was almost as far advanced as it is to-day; the art of silk-weaving seems to have been highly developed ; and the attention paid to it at the courts of the emperor and the princes must have aided its progress. Little is known of Chinese pottery. Proofs exist of the production of pots and tiles of clay in the second and third centuries B. C., but there is no doubt that earthenware had been made very much earlier. Porcelain ware, however, does not appear until the sixth or seventh century A.D.

The books which were read in ancient China consisted of thin slips of wood or bamboo on which the characters were written by means of a pencil of bamboo slightly frayed at the end so as to pick up a coloured liquid easily and transfer it to the tablets. The Chinese did not, as was once supposed, scratch their characters on the wood with a knife; the knife was only used to scratch out what had been wrongly written. Later in Chinese history, paper made of silk was used for writing purposes, and then, about A.D. 105, a more serviceable kind of paper was discovered, made of the bark of trees, hemp, rags, and old nets. Silk paper, however, remained in use until A. D. 418, if not later.

About 220 B. C. the feudal system came to an end in China. Its continued existence was certainly a menace to good order and security; in the valleys of the Hwang-ho and Yang-tsekiang there were no fewer than five or six thousand small states with a dozen powerful states dominating over them. The man who put an end to this condition of affairs and ultimately made himself ruler of a united China called himself Shi-Hwang-ti, which means First Emperor. Among his feats were the defeat of the Huns, who were menacing his northern frontiers, and the building of the Great Wall of

China, largely by convict labour, criminals being sentenced to long terms of penal servitude at the work. The Great Wall was erected as a protection against the Huns. It is eighteen hundred miles long, about twenty-two feet high, and twenty feet broad. At intervals of a hundred yards are towers forty feet high. The whole structure was originally of brick. It has been glorified as the last trace of man's handiwork on the earth which would fade from the view of an imaginary person receding into space. The building of the Great Wall was not popular among the Chinese, largely because of the forced labour which it entailed: it is reputed to have taken only ten years to complete. It was not, of course, an entirely new structure; it linked up, extended, and fortified a number of previously existing walls. Still more unpopular was another act of Shi-Hwang-ti. He desired to give a stimulus to literary effort, but adopted a singularly unfortunate method of so doing. Listening to the flattery of his courtiers, he determined that literature should begin again with his reign. He therefore ordered that all existing books should be destroyed except those dealing with medicine, fortune-telling, and agriculture. Many scholars were put to death for concealing books; many others were sent to hard labour on the Great Wall; and numbers of valuable books were destroyed. The wonder is that any were preserved, particularly the writings of Confucius,' against which there was special enmity, for they upheld the feudal institutions which it was the emperor's mission to overthrow.

In 210 B.C. Shi-Hwang-ti died. His son, who succeeded him, only reigned four years. Then followed the Han dynasty, which ruled over China for over four hundred years. During this time the Chinese were very warlike. There were frequent conflicts with the Tartar tribes to the north, whom the Great Wall failed to keep out; with the Huns and the Koreans; and before the end of the second century B.C. I See Ch. XII.

Chinese armies had penetrated far into Central Asia, annexing the Pamirs and Kokand. At home the stability of the empire was endangered by constant intrigues: for about thirteen years in the middle of the first century B.C. the imperial power was in the hands of a usurper named Wang Mang, who secured it by treachery and poison, and ultimately lost it when his own soldiers revolted against him and killed him. But despite foreign wars and unrest at home, the period of the Han dynasty was one in which Chinese civilization made very pronounced advance. Paper and ink were invented and also the camel's-hair brush, which gave a great impetus to the art of painting; the custom of burying slaves with the dead was abolished; literary degrees were established; efforts made to repair the injury done to literature by the unbalanced enthusiasm of Shi-Hwang-ti; the writings of Confucius restored to favour once again, and perpetual nobility conferred upon the eldest male descendant of the teacher. Their military campaigns in Central Asia brought the Chinese into contact with Bactria, at that time an outlying province of Greece. Thus we get the first outside influences upon Chinese civilization. The grape was imported and a wine made from it which remained a favourite drink in China until a few centuries ago; the water-clock was introduced as an improvement upon the sundial, upon which the Chinese were formerly wholly dependent for their knowledge of time. It now became possible to divide the day into twelve accurate divisions of two hours each. The calendar was regulated anew, and music modified and reconstructed so that it closely approximated to that of Greece.

The art of sculpture in bas-relief was widely spread throughout China in the second century B. C. Tombs have been discovered in the province of Shan-tung, with various figures carved in stone on the inside walls, representing chariots, riders, battles, hunting, fishing, imperial receptions, and solemn processions of elephants, camels, and apes. The