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Though the Seleucidae possessed for some time a great part of Darius Hystaspes' empire, and, except Egypt, all the old imperial seats of the foregone manvantara, they do not belong to West Asia at all; their history is not West-Asian, but European; they are a part of that manvantara whose forces were drifting West from Greece to Italy.
I look eastward, to the next garden below on the slope; and see my neighbors busy there: their faucet has been turned on, and is flowing royally; and I know where the water is going. The West-Asian faucet was due to be turned on in the two-twenties; now watch the spray from the sprinklers in the Chinese and Roman gardens.
But under the dominance of a stronger, but less advanced, people, they tend to seek refuge the more keenly in their own cultural sources: as the Finns and Poles have done under the Russians. This explains in part the difference between Egypt and Persia it the dawn of the new West-Asian manvantara.
All through the long West-Asian pralaya, West-Asian includes Egyptian, the seeds of the Esoteric Wisdom remained in those parts; they lacked vitalization, because the world-currents were not playing there then; but they survived in Egypt from the Egyptian Mysteries of old; and as in India you might have found men who knew about them, but not how to use them for the uplifting of the world, so doubtless you should have found such men in Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.
Among the birds, peacocks, parrots, and partridges have been recognized; among the beasts, besides lions and wild boars, buffaloes, panthers, lynxes, and gazelles. In another panel a winged lion, the "lineal descendant of those found at Nineveh and Persepolis," reflects the mythological symbolism of Assyria, and shows how tenacious was its hold on the West-Asian mind.
We have seen that in the former the seeds were ready to sprout, and did, in Ammonius Saccas and his movement. They were Egyptian seeds; but the soil and fertilizers were so Greek that the blossom when it appeared seemed not Egyptian, not West-Asian, but Neo-Greek; and turned not to the rising, but to the setting sun.
The position of this Byzantine Empire was a curious one: European in origin, mainly West-Asian in location. Its situation permitted it to last on so long into the West-Asian manvantara; its origin doomed that long survival to be, for the most part, devoid of the best characteristics of life.
Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism. Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a thing of the past.
The intellect of the empire, in that third century, and the spiritual force, all incarnated in the Roman West-Asian seats; in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria, as we shall see in a moment. For it was in that third century, while disaster on disaster was engulfing the power and prestige of Rome, that the strongest spiritual movement of all the Roman period came into being.
The new growth affiliated itself to the European manvantara that was passing, not to the West-Asian one that was to begin. Persia was in a different position. Certain events went to quicken the Persian seed within the Parthian empire. One was the rise of the Yueh Chi.
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