The title of this book needs a word of explanation, since each of its terms can legitimately be used to denote more than one conception both of time and place. “The East” is understood widely and vaguely nowadays to include all the continent and islands of Asia, some part of Africa—the northern part where society and conditions of life are most like the Asiatic—and some regions also of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. Therefore it may appear arbitrary to restrict it in the present book to Western Asia. But the qualifying term in my title must be invoked in justification. It is the East not of to-day but of antiquity with which I have to deal, and, therefore, I plead that it is not unreasonable to understand by “The East” what in 
antiquity European historians understood by that term.