Chapter III: The Medes and the Second Chaldæan Empire (2)

He needed but to win two victories, one upon leaving the mountains, the other at the passage of the Zab, and two or three weeks steady marching would bring him from Hamadân right up to the ramparts of Nineveh. Cyaxares won a victory over Assur-bani-pals generals, and for the first time in over a hundred years Assyria proper suffered the ignominy of foreign invasion. The various works constructed by twenty generations of kings had gradually transformed the triangle enclosed between the Upper Zab, the Tigris, and the Jebel-Makhlub into a regular fortified camp. The southern point of this triangle was defended by Calah from the attacks of Chaldoa or from foes coming down from Media by Iïolwân and Suleimanyeh, while Nineveh guarded it on the northeast, and several lines of walled cities--among which Dur-Sharrukîn and Imgur-Bel can still be identified--protected it on the north and east, extending from the Tigris as far as the G-hazîr and Zab. It was necessary for an enemy to break through this complex defensive zone, and even after this had been successfully accomplished and the walls of the capital had been reached, the sight which would meet the eye was well calculated to dismay even the most resolute invader. Viewed as a whole, Nineveh appeared as an irregular quadrilateral figure, no two sides of which were parallel, lying on the left bank of the Tigris.

The river came right up to the walls on the west, and the two mounds of Kouyunjik and Nebi-Yunus, on which stood the palaces of the Sargonides, were so skilfully fortified that a single wall connecting the two sufficed to ward off all danger of attack on this side. The south wall, which was the shortest of the four, being only about 870 yards in length, was rendered inaccessible by a muddy stream, while the north wall, some 2150 yards long, was protected by a wide moat which could be filled from the waters of the Khuzur.

Drawn by Boudier, from a sketch in Layard.

The eastern front had for a long time depended for its safety on a single wall reinforced by a moat, but Sennacherib, deeming it insufficiently protected against a sudden attack, had piled up obstacles in front of it, so that it now presented a truly formidable appearance. It was skirted throughout its whole length by a main rampart, 5400 yards long, which described a gentle curve from north to south, and rose to a height of about 50 feet, being protected by two small forts placed close to the main gates. The fosse did not run along the foot of the wall, but at a distance of about fifty yards in front of it, and was at least some 20 feet deep and over 150 feet in width. It was divided into two unequal segments by the Khuzur: three large sluice-gates built on a level with the wall and the two escarpments allowed the river to be dammed back, so that its waters could be diverted into the fosse and thus keep it full in case of siege. In front of each segment was a kind of demi-lune, and--as though this was not precaution enough--two walls, each over 4300 yards long, were built in front of the demi-lunes, the ditch which separated them being connected at one end with the Khuzur, and allowed to empty itself into a stream on the south. The number of inhabitants sheltered behind these defences was perhaps 300,000 souls;* each separate quarter of the city was enclosed by ramparts, thus forming, as it were, a small independent town, which had to be besieged and captured after a passage had been cut through the outer lines of defence.

* Jones and G. Rawlinson credit Nineveh with a population of
not more than 175,000.

Cyaxares might well have lost heart in the face of so many difficulties, but his cupidity, inflamed by reports of the almost fabulous wealth of the city, impelled him to attack it with extraordinary determination: the spoils of Susa, Babylon, and Thebes, in fact, of the whole of Western Asia and Ethiopia, were, he felt, almost within his reach, and would inevitably fall into his hands provided his courage and perseverance did not fail him. After shutting up the remnant of the Assyrian army inside Nineveh he laid patient siege to the city, and the fame of his victories being noised abroad on all sides, it awoke among the subject races that longing for revenge which at one time appeared to have been sent to sleep for ever. It almost seemed as though the moment was approaching when the city of blood should bleed in its turn, when its kings should at length undergo the fate which they had so long imposed on other monarchs. Nahum the Elkoshite,* a Hebrew born in the Assyrian province of Samaria, but at that time an exile in Judah, lifted up his voice, and the echo of his words still resounds in our ears, telling us of the joy and hope felt by Judah, and with Judah, by the whole of Asia, at the prospect. Speaking as the prophet of Jahveh, it was to Jahveh that he attributed the impending downfall of the oppressor: Jahveh is a jealous God and avengeth; Jahveh avengeth and is full of wrath; Jahveh taketh vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserveth wrath for His enemies. Jahveh is slow to anger and great in power, and will by no means clear the guilty; Jahveh hath His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet. He rebuketh the sea and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth. * And, Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good tidings. Then he goes on to unfold before the eyes of his hearers a picture of Nineveh, humiliated and in the last extremity.

* Elkosh is identified by Eusebius with Elkese, which St.
Jerome declares to have been in Galileo, the modern el-
Kauzeh, two and a half hours walk south of Tibnin. The
prophecy of Nahum has been taken by some as referring to the
campaign of Phraortes against Assyria, but more frequently
to the destruction of Nineveh by the Medes and Chaldæans. It
undoubtedly refers to the siege interrupted by the Scythian
invasion.

There she lies, behind her bastions of brick, anxiously listening for the approach of the victorious Medes. The noise of the whip, and the noise of the rattling of wheels; and prancing horses and jumping chariots; the horsemen mounting, and the flashing sword, and the glittering spear; and a multitude of slain and a great heap of carcases: and there is no end of the corpses; they stumble upon their corpses: because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the well-favoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts. Behold, I am against thee, saith Jahveh of hosts, and I will discover thy skirts upon they face; and I will show the nations thy nakedness, and the kingdoms thy shame. And I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazing-stock. And it shall come to pass that all they that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her? Whence shall I seek comforters for thee? Thebes, the city of Amon, did not escape captivity; why then should Nineveh prove more fortunate? All thy fortresses shall be like fig trees with the firstripe figs: if they be shaken they fall into the mouth of the eater. Behold, thy people in the midst of thee are women; the gates of thy land are set wide open unto thine enemies: the fire hath devoured thy bars. Draw thee water for the siege, strengthen thy fortresses: go into the clay and tread the mortar, make strong the brick-kiln. There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off,... make thyself many as the cankerworm, make thyself many as the locusts. Thou hast multiplied thy merchants as the stars of heaven: the cankerworm spoileth and flieth away. Thy crowned are as the locusts and thy marshals as the swarms of grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are. Thy shepherds slumber, O King of Assyria: thy worthies are at rest: thy people are scattered upon the mountains, and there is none to gather them. There is no assuaging of thy hurt; thy wound is grievous: all that hear the bruit of thee clap the hands over thee; for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?

On this occasion Nineveh escaped the fate with which the prophet had threatened it, but its safety was dearly bought. According to the tradition accepted in Asia Minor two hundred years later, a horde of Scythians under King Madyes, son of Protothyes, setting out from the Bussian steppes in pursuit of the Cimmerians, made their appearance on the scene in the nick of time. We are told that they flung themselves through the Caspian Gates into the basin of the Kur, and came into contact with the Medes at the foot of Mount Caucasus. The defeat of the Medes here would necessarily compel them to raise the siege of Nineveh. This crisis in the history of Asia was certainly not determined by chance. For eighty years Assyria had been in contact with the Scythians, and the Assyrian kings had never ceased to keep an eye upon their movements, or lose sight of the advantage to which their bellicose temper might be turned in circumstances like the present. They had pitted them against the Cimmerians, then against the Medes, and probably against the kings of Urartu as well, and the intimacy between the two peoples came to be so close that the Scythian king Bartatua did not hesitate to demand one of the daughters of Bsarhaddon in marriage. From the very beginning of his reign Assur-bani-pal had shown them the utmost consideration, and when King Madyes, son of his ally Bartatua, intervened thus opportunely in the struggle, he did so, not by mere chance, as tradition would have us believe, but at the urgent request of Assyria. He attacked Media in the rear, and Cyaxares, compelled to raise the siege of Nineveh, hastened to join battle with him. The engagement probably took place on the banks of the Lower Araxes or to the north of Lake Urumiah, in the region formerly inhabited by the Mannai; but after defeating his foe and dictating to him the terms of submission, Madyes, carried away by the lust of conquest, did not hesitate to turn his arms against his ally. Exhausted by her recent struggle, Assyria lay at his mercy, her fortresses alone being able to offer any serious resistance: he overran the country from end to end, and though the walled cities withstood the fury of his attack, the rural districts were plundered right and left, and laid desolate for many a year to come. The Scythians of this epoch probably resembled those whom we find represented on the monuments of Greek art two centuries later. Tall fierce-looking men, with unkempt beards, their long and straggling locks surmounted by the _kyrbasis_, or pointed national cap of felt; they wore breeches and a blouse of embroidered leather, and were armed with lances, bows, and battle-axes. They rode bareback on untrained horses, herds of which followed their tribes about on their wanderings; each man caught the animal he required with the help of a lasso, put bit and bridle on him, and vaulting on to his back at a single bound, reduced him to a state of semi-obedience. No troops could stand their ground before the frantic charge of these wild horsemen; like the Huns of Roman times, the Scythians made a clean sweep of everything they found in their path. They ruined the crops, carried off or slaughtered the herds, and set fire to the villages from sheer love of destruction, or in order to inspire terror; every one who failed to fly to the mountains or take refuge in some fortress, was either massacred on the spot or led away into slavery.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the reliefs on a silver vase
from Kul-Oba.

Too ignorant of the arts of war to undertake a siege in the regular way, they usually contented themselves with levying ransoms on fortified towns; occasionally, however, when the wealth accumulated behind the walls held out a prospect of ample booty, they blockaded the place until famine compelled it to surrender. More than one ancient city which, thanks to the good government of its rulers and the industry of its citizens, had amassed treasure of inestimable value, was put to fire and sword, and more than one fertile and populous region left unfilled and deserted.* Most of the states which for the last three centuries had fought so stubbornly against the Assyrians for independence, went down before the storm, including the kingdoms of Urartu, of the Mushku, and of the Tabal,** the miserable end furnishing the Hebrew prophets full fifty years later with a theme of sombre rejoicing. There is Meshech, Tubal, and all her multitude; her graves are round about her: all of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword; for they caused their terror in the land of the living. And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war, and have laid their swords under their heads,*** and their iniquities are upon their bones; for they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living. ****

* This may be deduced from the passage in Herodotus, where
he says that the Scythians were masters of Asia for
twenty-eight years, and overturned everything by their
brutality and stupidity: for, in addition to tribute, they
exacted from every one whatever they chose, and, moreover,
they prowled here and there, plundering as they thought
good.

** Strabo refers in general terms to the presence of
Scythians (or, as he calls them, Sacae) in Armenia,
Cappadocia, and on the shores of the Black Sea.

*** This, doubtless, means that the Mushku and Tabal had
been so utterly defeated that they could not procure
honourable burial for their dead, i.e. with their swords
beneath their heads and their weapons on their bodies.

**** 1 Ezek. xxxii. 26, 27.

The Cimmerians, who, since their reverses in Lydia and on Mount Taurus, had concentrated practically the whole of their tribes in Cappadocia and in the regions watered by the Halys and Thermodon, shared the good fortune of their former adversaries. At that time they lived under the rule of a certain Kôbos, who seems to have left a terrible reputation behind him; tradition gives him a place beside Sesostris among the conquerors of the heroic age, and no doubt, like his predecessor Dugdamis, he owed this distinction to some expedition or other against the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the Ægean Sea, but our knowledge of his career is confined to the final catastrophe which overtook him. After some partial successes, such as that near Zela, for instance, he was defeated and made prisoner by Madyes. His subjects, as vassals of the Scythians, joined them in their acts of brigandage,* and together they marched from province to province, plundering as they went; they overran the western regions of the Assyrian kingdom from Melitene and Mesopotamia to Northern Syria, from Northern Syria to Phoenicia, Damascus, and Palestine,** and at length made their appearance on the Judaean frontier.

* It seems probable that this was so, when we consider the
confusion between the Scythians or Sakse, and the Cimmerians
in the Babylonian and Persian inscriptions of the
Achsemenian epoch.

** Their migration from Media into Syria and Palestine is
expressly mentioned by Herodotus.

Since the day when Sennacherib had been compelled to return to Assyria without having succeeded in destroying Jerusalem, or even carrying it by storm, Judah had taken little or no part in external politics. Divided at first by a conflict between the party of prudence, who advised submission to Nineveh, and the more warlike spirits who advocated an alliance with Egypt, it had ended by accepting its secondary position, and had on the whole remained fairly loyal to the dynasty of Sargon.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the cast of a cylinder given by
Cunningham. The cylinder is usually described as Persian,
but the dress is that of the Medes as well as of the
Persians.

On the death of Hezekiah, his successor, Manasseh, had, as we know, been tempted to intervene in the revolutions of the hour, but the prompt punishment which followed his first attempt put an end for ever to his desire for independence. His successor, Amon, during his brief reign of two years,* had no time to desert the ways of his father, and Josiah,** who came to the throne in 638 B.C., at the age of eight, had so far manifested no hostility towards Assyria.

* 2 Kings xxi. 18-26; cf. 2 Chron. xxxiii. 20-25. The reign
of fifty-five years attributed to Manasseh by the Jewish
annalists cannot be fitted into the chronology of the
period; we must either take off ten years, thus reducing the
duration of the reign to forty-five years, or else we must
assume the first ten of Manasseh to be synchronous with the
last ten of Hezekiah.

** 2 Kings xxii. 1; cf. 2 Chron. xxxiv. 1.

Thus, for more than fifty years, Judah enjoyed almost unbroken peace, and led as happy and prosperous an existence as the barrenness of its soil and the unruly spirit of its inhabitants would permit.

But though its political activity had been almost nothing during this interval, its spiritual life had seldom been developed with a greater intensity. The reverse sustained by Sennacherib had undoubtedly been a triumph for Isaiah, and for the religious party of which we are accustomed to regard him as the sole representative. It had served to demonstrate the power of Jahveh, and His aversion for all idolatrous worship and for all foreign alliances. In vain did the partisans of Egypt talk loudly of Pharaoh and of all those principalities of this world which were drawn round in Pharaohs orbit; Egypt had shown herself incapable of safeguarding her friends, and things had gone steadily from bad to worse so long as these latter held the reins of government; their removal from office had been, as it were, the signal for a welcome change in the fortunes of the Jews. Jahveh had delivered His city the moment when, ceasing to rely upon itself, it had surrendered its guidance into His hands, and the means of avoiding disaster in the future was clearly pointed out to it. Judah must be content to follow the counsels which Isaiah had urged upon it in the name of the Most High, and submissively obey the voice of its prophets. Thine eyes shall see thy teachers: and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. And ye shall defile the over-laying of thy graven images of silver, and the plating of thy molten images of gold: thou shalt cast them away as an unclean thing; thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence. Isaiah seems to disappear after his triumph, and none of his later prophecies have come down to us: yet the influence of his teaching lasted throughout the reign of Hezekiah, and the court, supported by the more religious section of the people, not only abjured the worship of false gods, but forsook the high places and discontinued the practices which he had so strenuously denounced. The great bulk of the nation, however, soon returned to their idolatrous practices, if, indeed, they had ever given them up, and many of the royal advisers grew weary of the rigid observances which it was sought to impose upon them; rites abhorrent to Jahveh found favour even among members of the kings own family, and on Hezekiahs death, about 686 B.C., a reaction promptly set in against both his religious views and the material reforms he had introduced.*

* 2 Kings xxi. 2-7 (cf. 2 Chron. xxxiii. 2-7), where, in
spite of manifest recensions of the text, the facts
themselves seem to have been correctly set forth.

Manasseh was only thirteen years old when he came to the throne, and his youth naturally inclined him towards the less austere forms of divine worship: from the very first he tolerated much that his father had forbidden, and the spirit of eclecticism which prevailed among his associates rendered him, later on, an object of special detestation to the orthodox historians of Jerusalem. Worshippers again began openly to frequent the high places; they set up again the prostrate idols, replanted the sacred groves, and even built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of Jahveh. The chariots and horses of the sun reappeared within the precincts of the temple, together with the sacred courtesans. Baal and the Phoenician Astarte were worshipped on Mount Sion. The valley of Hinnom, where Ahaz had already burnt one of his children during a desperate crisis in the Syrian wars, was again lighted up by the flames of the sacred pyre. We are told that Manasseh himself set the example by passing his son through the flames; he also had recourse to astrologers, soothsayers, fortune-tellers, and sorcerers of the lowest type. The example of Assyria in matters of this kind exercised a preponderant influence on Jewish customs, and certainly it would have been a miracle if Jerusalem had succeeded in escaping it; did not Nineveh owe the lofty place it occupied to these occult sciences and to the mysterious powers of its gods? In thus imitating its conqueror, Judah was merely borrowing the weapons which had helped him to subdue the world. The partisans of the ancient religions who were responsible for these innovations must have regarded them as perfectly legitimate reforms, and their action was received with favour in the provinces: before long the latter contained as many sanctuaries as there were towns,* and by thus multiplying the centres of worship, they hoped that, in accordance with ancient belief, the ties which existed between Jahveh and His chosen people would also be increased.

* Jer. ii. 26-30. For the quotation see also Jer. xi. 13:
For according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O
Judah; and according to the number of the streets of
Jerusalem have ye set up altars to the shameful thing, even
altars to burn incense unto Baal.

The fact that the provinces had been ravaged from end to end in the days of Sennacherib, while Jerusalem had been spared, was attributed to the circumstance that Hezekiah had destroyed the provincial sanctuaries, leaving the temple on Mount Sion alone standing. Wherever Jahveh possessed altars, He kept guard over His people, but His protection was not extended to those places where sacrifices were no longer offered to Him. The reaction was not allowed to take place without opposition on the part of the prophets and their followers. We are told that Manasseh shed innocent blood very much till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another; there is even a Kabbinic tradition to the effect that, weary of the admonitions of the aged Isaiah, he put him to death by shutting him up in the hollow trunk of a tree, and causing him to be sawn in two.*

* 2 Kings xxi. 16. The tradition in regard to the fate of
Isaiah took its foundation in this text, and it is perhaps
indirectly referred to in Heb. xi. 37.

For a long time after this no instance can be found of a prophet administering public affairs or directing the actions of the king himself; the priests and reformers, finding no outlet for their energy in this direction, fell back on private preaching and literary propaganda. And, above all, they applied themselves to the task of rewriting the history of Israel, which, as told by the chroniclers of the previous century, presented the national Deity in too material a light, and one which failed to harmonise with the ideals then obtaining. So long as there were two separate Hebrew kingdoms, the existence of the two parallel versions of the Elohist and Jahvist gave rise to but little difficulty: each version had its own supporters and readers, whose consciences were readily satisfied by the interpolation of a few new facts into the text as occasion arose. But now that Samaria had fallen, and the whole political and religious life of the Hebrew race was centred in Judah alone, the necessity for a double and often contradictory narrative had ceased to exist, and the idea occurred of combining the two in a single work. This task, which was begun in the reign of Hezekiah and continued under Manasseh, resulted in the production of a literature of which fragments have been incorporated into the historical books of our Bible.*

The reign of Amon witnessed no alteration in the policy initiated by his predecessor Manasseh; but when, after less than two years rule, he was suddenly struck down by the knife of an assassin, the party of reform carried the day, and the views of Hezekiah and Isaiah regained their ascendency. Josiah had been king, in name at any rate, for twelve years,** and was learning to act on his own responsibility, when the Scythian danger appeared on the horizon.

* The scheme of the present work prevents me from doing more
than allude in passing to these preliminary stages in the
composition of the Priestly Code. I shall have occasion to
return briefly to the subject at the close of Volume IX.

** The date is supplied by the opening passage of the
prophecy of Jeremiah, to whom the word of Jehovah came in
the days of Josiah, the son of Amon, King of Judah, in the
thirteenth year of his reign (i. 2). Volney recognised
that chaps, i., iv., v., and vi. of Jeremiah refer to the
Scythian invasion, and since his time it has been admitted
that, with the exception of certain interpolations in chaps,
i. and iii., the whole of the first six chapters date from
this period, but that they underwent slight modifications in
the recension which was made in the fourth year of
Jehoiachin in order to make them applicable to the
threatened Chaldæan invasion. The date is important, since
by using it as a basis we can approximately restore the
chronology of the whole period. If we assume the thirteenth
year of Josiah to have been 627-626 B.C., we are compelled
to place all the early Medic wars in the reign of Assur-
bani-pal, as I have done.

This barbarian invasion, which burst upon the peace of Assyria like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky, restored to the faithful that confidence in the omnipotence of their God which had seemed about to fail them; when they beheld the downfall of states, the sack of provinces innumerable, whole provinces in flames and whole peoples irresistibly swept away to death or slavery, they began to ask themselves whether these were not signs of the divine wrath, indicating that the day of Jahveh was at hand. Prophets arose to announce the approaching judgment, among the rest a certain Zephaniah, a great-grandson of Hezekiah:* I will utterly consume all things from off the face of the ground, saith Jahveh. I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumbling-blocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from the face of the earth, saith Jahveh. And I will stretch out My hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place, and the name of the Chemarim with the priests; and them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops; and them that worship, which swear to Jahveh and swear by Malcham; and them that are turned back from following Jahveh; and those that have not sought Jahveh nor inquired after Him. Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord Jahveh; for the day of Jahveh is at hand; for Jahveh hath prepared a sacrifice, He hath sanctified His guests.

* Zephaniah gives his own genealogy at the beginning of his
prophecy (i. 1), though, it is true, he does not add the
title King of Judah after the name of his ancestor
Hezekiah.

That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and alarm, against the fenced cities, and against the high battlements. And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against Jahveh: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as dung. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of Jahvehs wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of His jealousy; for He shall make an end, yea, a terrible end, of all them that dwell in the land. During this same period of stress and terror, there came forward another prophet, one of the greatest among the prophets of Israel--Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah. He was born in the village of Anathoth, near Jerusalem, being descended from one of those priestly families in which the faith had been handed down from generation to generation in all its original purity.*

* The descent and birthplace of Jeremiah are given at the
beginning of his prophecies (i. 1). He must have been quite
young in the thirteenth year of Josiah, as is evident from
the statement in i. 6. We are told in chap, xxxvi. that in
the fourth year of Jehoiakim he dictated a summary of all
the prophecies delivered by him from the thirteenth year of
Josiah up to the date indicated to his servant Baruch, and
that later on he added a number of others of the same kind.

When Jahveh called him, he cried out in amazement, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But Jahveh reassured him, and touching his lips, said unto him, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth: see, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Then the prophet perceived a seething cauldron, the face of which appeared from the north, for the Eternal declared to him that Out of the north evil shall break out upon all the inhabitants of the land. Already the enemy is hastening: Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as the whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we are spoiled. O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest be saved. How long shall thine evil thoughts lodge within thee? For a voice declareth from Dan, and publisheth evil from the hills of Ephraim: make ye mention to the nations; behold, publish against Jerusalem! The Scythians had hardly been mentioned before they were already beneath the walls, and the prophet almost swoons with horror at the sound of their approach. My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart: my heart is disquieted in me; I cannot hold my peace; because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is spoiled, and my curtains in a moment. How long shall I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet? It would seem that the torrent of invasion turned aside from the mountains of Judah; it flowed over Galilee, Samaria, and the Philistine Shephelah, its last eddies dying away on the frontiers of Egypt. Psammetiehus is said to have bribed the barbarians to retire. As they fell back they plundered the temple of Derketô, near Ashkelon: we are told that in order to punish them for this act of sacrilege, the goddess visited them with a disease which caused serious ravages amongst them, and which the survivors carried back with them to their own country.*

* Herodotus calls the goddess Aphrodite Urania, by which we
must understand Derketô or Atargatis, who is mentioned by
several other classical authors, e.g. Xanthus of Lydia,
Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny. According to Justin, the
Scythians were stopped only by the marshes of the Delta. The
disease by which the Scythians were attacked is described by
Hippocrates; but in spite of what he tells us about it, its
precise nature has not yet been determined.

There was, however, no need to introduce a supernatural agency in order to account for their rapid disappearance. The main body of invaders had never quitted Media or the northern part of the Assyrian empire, and only the southern regions of Syria were in all probability exposed to the attacks of isolated bands. These stragglers, who year after year embarked in one desperate adventure after another, must have found great difficulty in filling up the gaps which even victories made in their ranks; enervated by the relaxing nature of the climate, they could offer little resistance to disease, and excess completed what the climate had begun, the result being that most of them died on the way, and only a few survived to rejoin the main body with their booty. For several months the tide of invasion continued to rise, then it ebbed as quickly as it had risen, till soon nothing was left to mark where it had passed save a pathway of ruins, not easily made good, and a feeling of terror which it took many a year to efface. It was long before Judah forgot the mighty nation, the ancient nation, the nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest thou what they say. * Men could still picture in imagination their squadrons marauding over the plains, robbing the fellah of his crops, his bread, his daughters, his sheep and oxen, his vines and fig trees, for they lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel and have no mercy; their voice roareth like the sea, and they ride upon horses; every one set in array as a man to the battle,** against thee, O daughter of Sion. We have heard the fame thereof; our hands wax feeble; anguish hath taken hold of us, and pangs as of a woman in travail. *** The supremacy of the Scythians was of short duration. It was said in after-times that they had kept the whole of Asia in a state of terror for twenty-eight years, dating from their defeat of Cyaxares; but the length of this period is exaggerated.****

* Jer. v. 15; it seems curious that the Hebrew prophet
should use the epithet ancient, when we remember that the
Scythians claimed to be the oldest nation in the world,
older than even the Egyptians themselves.

** An obvious allusion to the regular formation adopted by
the Scythian squadrons.

*** Jer. v. 17; vi. 23, 24.

**** The authenticity of the number of years given in
Herodotus has been energetically defended by some modern
historians, and not less forcibly denied by others, who
reduce it, for example, in accordance with a doubtful
passage of Justin, to eight years. By assigning all the
events relating to the Scythian invaders to the mean period
of twenty years, we should obtain the length of time which
best corresponds to what is actually known of the general
history of this epoch.

The Medes soon recovered from their disaster, but before engaging their foes in open conflict, they desired to rid themselves of the prince who had conquered them, and on whom the fortunes of the whole Scythian nation depended. Cyaxares, therefore, invited Madyes and his officers to a banquet, and after plying them to excess with meat and drink, he caused them all to be slain.*

* This episode is regarded as legendary by many modern
historians. Winckler even goes so far as to deny the defeat
of the Scythians: according to his view, they held
possession of Media till their chief, Astyages, was
overthrown by Cyrus; Rost has gone even further, deeming
even Cyaxares himself to have been a Scythian. For my part,
I see no reason to reject the tradition of the fatal
banquet. Without referring to more ancient illustrations,
Noldeke recalls the fact that in a period of only ten years,
from 1030 to 1040 a.d., the princes reigning over the
Iranian lands rid themselves by similar methods of the
Turcoman bands which harassed them. Such a proceeding has
never been repugnant to Oriental morality, and it is of a
kind to fix itself in the popular mind: far from wishing to
suppress it, I should be inclined to see in it the nucleus
of the whole tradition.

The barbarians made a brave resistance, in spite of the treason which had deprived them of their leaders: they yielded only after a long and bloody campaign, the details of which are unknown to us. Iranian legends wove into the theme of their expulsion all kinds of fantastic or romantic incidents. They related, for instance, how, in combination with the Parthians, the Scythians, under the leadership of their queen Zarinsea, several times defeated the Medes: she consented at last to conclude a treaty on equal terms, and peace having been signed, she retired to her capital of Boxanakê, there to end her days. One body of the survivors re-entered Europe through the Caspian Gates, another wandered for some time between the Araxes and the Halys, seeking a country adapted to their native instincts and customs.* Cyaxares, relieved from the pressure put upon him by the Scythians, immediately resumed his efforts against Assyria, and was henceforward able to carry his plans to completion without encountering any serious obstacle. It would be incorrect to say that the Scythian invasion had overthrown the empire of the Sargonids: it had swept over it like a whirlwind, but had not torn from it one province, nor, indeed, even a single city. The nations, already exhausted by their struggles for independence, were incapable of displaying any energy when the barbarians had withdrawn, and continued to bow beneath the Ninevite yoke as much from familiarity with habitual servitude as from inability to shake themselves free. Assur-bani-pal had died about the year 625 B.C., after a reign of forty-two years, and his son Assur-etililâni had assumed the double crown of Assyria and Babylon without opposition.**

* Herodotus speaks of these Scythians as having lived at
first on good terms with Cyaxares.

** The date of Assur-bani-pals death is not furnished by
any Assyrian monument, but is inferred from the Canon of
Ptolemy, where Saosduchîn or Shamash-shumukin and Chinaladan
or Assur-bani-pal each reigns forty-two years, from 668 or
667 to 626 or 625 B.C. The order of succession of the last
Assyrian kings was for a long time doubtful, and Sin-shar-
ishkun was placed before Assur-etililâni; the inverse order
seems to be now conclusively proved. The documents which
seemed at one time to prove the existence of a last king of
Assyria named Esarhaddon, identical with the Saracos of
classical writers, really belong to Esarhaddon, the father
of Assur-bani-pal. [Another king, Sin-sum-lisir, is
mentioned in a contract dated at Nippur in his accession
year. He may have been the immediate predecessor of
Sarakos.--? Ed.]

Nineveh had been saved from pillage by the strength of her ramparts, but the other fortresses, Assur, Calah, and Dur-Sharrukîn, had been destroyed during the late troubles; the enemy, whether Medes or Scythians, had taken them by storm or reduced them by famine, and they were now mere heaps of ruin, deserted save for a few wretched remnants of their population. Assur-etililâni made some feeble attempts to restore to them a semblance of their ancient splendour. He erected at Calah, on the site of the palaces which had been destroyed by fire, a kind of castle rudely built, and still more rudely decorated, the rooms of which were small and low, and the walls of sun-dried brick were panelled only to the height of about a yard with slabs of limestone roughly squared, and without sculpture or inscription: the upper part of the walls was covered with a coating of uneven plaster. We do not know how long the inglorious reign of Assur-etililâni lasted, nor whether he was assassinated or died a natural death. His brother, Sin-shar-ishkun,* who succeeded him about 620 B.C., at first exercised authority, as he had done, over Babylon as well as Nineveh,** and laboured, like his predecessor, to repair the edifices which had suffered by the invasion, making war on his neighbours, perhaps even on the Medes, without incurring serious losses.

* The name of this king was discovered by G. Smith on the
fragments of a cylinder brought from Kouyunjik, where he
read it as Bel-zakir-iskun. The real reading is Sin-shar-
ishkun, and the similarity of this name with that of
Saracos, the last king of Assyria according to Greek
tradition, strikes one immediately. The relationship of this
king to Assur-etililâni was pointed out by Father Scheil
from the fragment of a tablet on which Sin-shar-ishkun is
declared to be the son of Assur-bani-pal, king of Assyria.

** This may be deduced from a passage of Abydenus, where
Saracos or Sin-shar-ishkun sends Bussalossoros (that is,
Nabopolassar) to defend Chaldæ against the invasion of the
peoples of the sea; so according to Abydenus, or rather
Berosus, from whom Abydenus indirectly obtained his
information, Saracos was King of Babylon as well as of
Nineveh at the beginning of his reign.

The Chaldæans, however, merely yielded him obedience from force of habit, and the moment was not far distant when they would endeavour to throw off his yoke. Babylon was at that time under the rule of a certain Nabu-bal-uzur, known to us as Nabopolassar, a Kaldu of ancient lineage, raised possibly by Assur-bani-pal to the dignity of governor, but who, in any case, had assumed the title of king on the accession of Assur-etililâni.*

* The Canon of Ptolemy makes Nabopolassar the direct
successor of Chinaladan, and his testimony is justified by
the series of Babylonian contracts which exist in fairly
regular succession from the second to the twenty-first years
of Nabopolassar. The account given by Berosus makes him a
general of Saracos, but the contradiction which this offers
to the testimony of the Canon can be explained if he is
considered as a vassal-king; the kings of Egypt and of Media
were likewise only satraps, according to Babylonian
tradition.

His was but a local sovereignty, restricted probably to the city and its environs; and for twelve or thirteen years he had rested content with this secondary position, when an unforeseen incident presented him with the opportunity of rising to the first rank. Tradition asserted that an immense army suddenly landed at the mouths of the Euphrates and the Tigris; probably under this story is concealed the memory of one of those revolts of the Bît-Yakîn and the tribes dwelling on the shores of the Nar-Marratum, such as had often produced consternation in the minds of the Sargonid kings.* Sin-shar-ishkun, distracted doubtless by other anxieties, acted as his ancestors had done in similar circumstances, and enjoined on his vassal to march against the aggressors and drive them into the sea; but Nabopolassar, instead of obeying his suzerain, joined forces with the rebels, and declared his independence. Assur-etililâni and his younger brother had possibly neglected to take the hands of Bel, and were therefore looked upon as illegitimate sovereigns. The annalists of later times erased their names from the Royal Canon, and placed Nabopolassar immediately after Assur-bani-pal, whom they called Kandalanu. But however feeble Assyria had become, the cities on the Lower Euphrates feared her still, and refused to ally themselves with the pretender. Nabopolassar might perhaps have succumbed, as so many before him had done, had he been forced to rely entirely on his own resources, and he might have shared the sad fate of Merodach-baladan or of Shamash-shumukîn; but Marduk, who never failed to show favour to his faithful devotees, raised up help for him and secured him an ally. The eyes of all who were oppressed by the cruel yoke of Nineveh were now turned on Cyaxares, and from the time that he had dispersed the Scythian hordes it was to him that they looked for salvation. Nabopolassar besought his assistance, which the Median king graciously promised;** it is even affirmed that a marriage concluded between one of his daughters, Amyfcis, and Nebuchadrezzar, the heir to the throne of Babylon, cemented the alliance.***

* Formerly these barbarians were identified with the remains
of the Scythian hordes, and this hypothesis has been
recently revived by Prashek. G. Rawlinson long ago
recognised that the reference must be to the Chaldæans, who
were perhaps joined by the Susians.

** The _Cylinder of Nabonichs_, the only original document
in which allusion is made to the destruction of Nineveh,
speaks of the Ummân-Manda and their king, whom it does not
name, and it has been agreed to recognise Cyaxares in this
sovereign. On the other hand, the name of Ummân-Manda
certainly designates in the Assyrian texts the wandering
Iranian tribes to whom the Greeks gave the name of Sakse or
Scythians; the result, in the opinions of several
Assyriologists of the present day, is that neither Astyages
nor Cyaxares were Medes in the sense in which we have
hitherto accepted them as such on the evidence of Herodotus,
but that they were Scythians, the Scythians of the great
invasion. This conclusion does not seem to me at present
justified. The Babylonians, who up till then had not had any
direct intercourse either with the Madai or the Ummân-Manda,
did as the Egyptians had done whether in Saite or Ptolemaic
times, continuing to designate as Kharî, Kafîti, Lotanu, and
Khâti the nations subject to the Persians or Macedonians;
they applied a traditional name of olden days to present
circumstances, and I see, at present, no decisive reason to
change, on the mere authority of this one word, all that the
classical writers have handed down concerning the history of
the epoch according to the tradition current in their days.

*** The name of the princess is written Amuhia, Amyitis. The
classical sources, the only ones which mention her, make her
the daughter of Astyages, and this has given rise to various
hypotheses. According to some, the notice of this princess
has no historical value. According to others, the Astyages
mentioned as her father is not Cyaxares the Mede, but a
Scythian prince who came to the succour of Nabopolassar,
perhaps a predecessor of Cyaxares on the Median throne, and
in this case Phraortes himself under another name. The most
prudent course is still to admit that Abydenus, or one of
the compilers of extracts to whom we owe the information,
has substituted the name of the last king of Media for that
of his predecessor, either by mistake, or by reason of some
chronological combinations. Amyitis, transported into the
harem of the Chaldæan monarch, served, like all princesses
married out of their own countries, as a pledge for the
faithful observance by her relatives of the treaty which had
been concluded.

The western provinces of the empire did not permit themselves to be drawn into the movement, and Judah, for example, remained faithful to its suzerain till the last moment,* but Sin-shar-ishkun received no help from them, and was obliged to fight his last battles single-handed. He shut himself up in Nineveh, and held out as long as he could; but when all his resources were exhausted--ammunitions of war, men and food supplies--he met his fate as a king, and burnt himself alive in his palace with his children and his wives, rather than fall alive into the hands of his conquerors (608 B.C.). The Babylonians would take no part in pillaging the temples, out of respect for the gods, who were practically identical with their own, but the Medes felt no such scruples. Their king, the intrepid one, entirely destroyed the sanctuaries of the gods of Assur, and the cities of Accad which had shown themselves hostile to the lord of Accad, and had not rendered him assistance. He destroyed their holy places, and left not one remaining; he devastated their cities, and laid them waste as it were with a hurricane. Nineveh laid low, Assyria no longer existed. After the lapse of a few years, she was named only among the legends of mythical days: two centuries later, her very site was forgotten, and a Greek army passed almost under the shadow of her dismantled towers, without a suspicion that there lay before it all that remained of the city where Semiramis had reigned in her glory.**

* It was to oppose the march of Necho _against the King of
Assyria_ that Josiah fought the battle of Megiddo (2 Kings
xxiii. 29, 30; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-24, where the mention
of the King of Assyria is suppressed).

** This is what the _Ten Thousand_ did when they passed
before Larissa and Mespila. The name remained famous, and
later on the town which bore it attained a relative
importance.

It is true that Egypt, Chaldæa, and the other military nations of the East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued. But the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at least, accomplished a work of civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of reprisal. It was from Egypt and Chaldæa that the knowledge and the arts of antiquity--astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural sciences--spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though Chaldæa yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts of the sculptor and the architect. But on turning to Assyria, if, after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not borrowed from extraneous sources. She received all her inspirations from Chaldæa--her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature: one thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals and the excellence of her soldiery. From the day when Assyria first realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished, and she passed away.

Two great kingdoms rose simultaneously from her ruins. Cyaxares claimed Assyria proper and its dependencies on the Upper Tigris, but he specially reserved for himself the yet unconquered lands on the northern and eastern frontiers, whose inhabitants had only recently taken part in the political life of the times. Nabopolassar retained the suzerainty over the lowlands of Elam, the districts of Mesopotamia lying along the Euphrates, Syria, Palestine, and most of the countries which had hitherto played a part in history;* he claimed to exert his supremacy beyond the Isthmus, and the Chaldæan government looked upon the Egyptian kings as its feudatories because for some few years they had owned the suzerainty of Nineveh.**

* There was no actual division of the empire, as has been
often asserted, but each of the allies kept the portion
which fell into his power at the moment of their joint
effort. The two new states gradually increased in power by
successive conquests, each annexing by degrees the ancient
provinces of Assyria nearest to its own frontier.

** This seems to be implied by the terms in which Berosus
speaks of Necho: he considers him as a rebel satrap over the
provinces of Egypt, Coele-Syria, and Phoenicia, and
enumerates Egypt in conjunction with Syria, Phoenicia, and
Arabia among the dependencies of Nabopolassar and
Nebuchadrezzar. Just as the Egyptian state documents never
mentioned the Lotanu or the Kharu without entitling them
_Children of Rebellion_, so the Chaldæan government, the
heir of Assyria, could only look upon the kings of Syria,
Arabia, and Egypt as rebellious vassals.