From Kemi the Black-land it was but a step to Phoenicia, Judaea,[FN#232] Phrygia and Asia Minor, whence a ferry led over to Greece.  Here the Apologue found its populariser in {Greek}, AEsop, whose name, involved in myth, possibly connects with
      :—­ “AEsopus et Aithiops idem sonant” says the sage.  This
would show that the Hellenes preserved a legend of the land whence the Beast-fable arose, and we may accept the fabulist’s aera as contemporary with Croesus and Solon (B.C. 570,) about a century after Psammeticus (Psamethik 1st) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek.[FN#233] From Africa too the Fable would in early ages migrate eastwards and make for itself a new home in the second great focus of civilisation formed by the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.  The late Mr. George Smith found amongst the cuneiforms fragmentary Beast-fables, such as dialogues between the Ox and the Horse, the Eagle and the Sun.  In after centuries, when the conquests of Macedonian Alexander completed what Sesostris and Semiramis had begun, and mingled the manifold families of mankind by joining the eastern to the western world, the Orient became formally hellenised.  Under the Seleucidae and during the life of the independent Bactrian Kingdom (B.C. 255-125), Grecian art and science, literature and even language overran the old Iranic reign and extended eastwards throughout northern India.  Porus sent two embassies to Augustus in B.C. 19 and in one of them the herald Zarmanochagas (Shramanacharya) of Bargosa, the modern Baroch in Guzerat, bore an epistle upon vellum written in Greek (Strabo xv.  I section 78).  “Videtis gentes populosque mutasse sedes” says Seneca (De Cons. ad Helv. c. vi.).  Quid sibi volunt in mediis barbarorum regionibus Graecae artes?  Quid inter Indos Persasque Macedonicus sermo?  Atheniensis in Asia turba est.”  Upper India, in the Macedonian days would have been mainly Buddhistic, possessing a rude alphabet borrowed from Egypt through Arabia and Phoenicia, but still in a low and barbarous condition:  her buildings were wooden and she lacked, as far as we know, stone-architecture—­the main test of social development.  But the Bactrian Kingdom gave an impulse to her civilisation and the result was classical opposed to vedic Sanskrit.  From Persia Greek letters, extending southwards to Arabia, would find indigenous imitators and there AEsop would be represented by the sundry sages who share the name Lokman.[FN#234] One of these was of servile condition, tailor, carpenter or shepherd; and a “Habashi” (AEthiopian) meaning a negro slave with blubber lips and splay feet, so far showing a superficial likeness to the AEsop of history.