Chapter III: The Medes and the Second Chaldæan Empire (4)

Even were a prophet or dreamer of dreams to arise in the midst of the faithful and direct them by a sign or a miracle to turn aside after those accursed gods, they must not follow the teaching of these false guides, not even if the sign or miracle actually came to pass, but must seize and slay them. Even if thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods,... thou shalt not consent unto him nor hearken unto him: neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: but thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and, afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones that he die; because he hath sought to draw thee away from Jahveh!* And this Jahveh was not the Jahveh of any special place. He was not the Jahveh of Bethel, or of Dan, or of Mizpah, or of Geba, or of Beersheba; He is simply Jahveh.** Yet the seat of His worship was not a matter of indifference to Him. Unto the place which Jahveh shall choose out of all your tribes to put His name there, even unto His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shalt thou come: and thither shall ye bring your... sacrifices and your tithes. *** Jerusalem is not mentioned by name, but the reference to it was clear, since every one knew that the suppression of the provincial sanctuaries must necessarily benefit it. One part of the new code dealt with the relations between different members of the community. The king was to approximate as closely as possible to the ideal priest; he was not to lift up his heart above his brethren, nor set his mind on the possession of many chariots, horses, or wives, but must continually read the law of God and ponder over His ordinances, and observe them word for word all the days of his life.****

* Deut. xiii. 1-10.

** Deut. vi. 4. The expression found in Zecli. xiv. 9 was
borrowed from the second of the introductions added to
_Deuteronomy_ at a later date; the phrase harmonises so
closely with the main purpose of the book itself, that there
can be no objection to employing it here.

*** Deut. xii. 5, 6.

**** Deut. xvii. 14-20; cf. xx. 1-9 for the regulations in
regard to the levying of troops.

Even in time of war he was not to put his trust in his soldiers or in his own personal valour; here again he must allow himself to be guided by Jahveh, and must undertake nothing without first consulting Him through the medium of His priests. The poor,* the widow, and the orphan,** the bondservant,*** and even the stranger within the gates--in remembrance of the bondage in Egypt ****--were all specially placed under the divine protection; every Jew who had become enslaved to a fellow-countryman was to be set at liberty at the end of six years, and was to receive a small allowance from his master which would ensure him for a time against starvation.^

* As to the poor, and the charitable obligations towards
them imposed by their common religion, cf. Deut. xv. 7-11;
as to the rights of the hired servant, cf. xxiv. 14, 15.

** Deut. xxiv. 17-22 forbids the taking of a widows
clothing in pledge, and lays down regulations in regard to
gleaning permitted to widows and orphans (cf. Lev. xix. 9,
10); reference is also made to their share in triennial
tithe (Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13) and in the solemn
festivals (Deut. xvi. 11-14).

*** Slaves were allowed to share in the rejoicings during
the great festivals (Deut. xvi. 11, 14), and certain rights
were accorded to women taken prisoners in war who had become
their captors concubines (Deut. xxi. 10-14).

****Participation of the stranger in the triennial tithe
(Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13).

^ Deut. xv. 12-18.

The regulations in regard to divine worship had not as yet been drawn up in that spirit of hair-splitting minuteness which, later on, became a characteristic of Hebrew legislation. Only three great festivals are mentioned in the Book of the Law. The Passover was celebrated in the month of Abîb, when the grain is in the ear, and had already come to be regarded as commemorative of the Exodus; but the other two, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles, were merely associated with the agricultural seasons, and took place, the former seven weeks after the beginning of the harvest, the latter after the last of the crops had been housed.* The claim of the priest to a share in the victim and in the offerings made on various occasions is maintained, and the lawgiver allows him to draw a similar benefit from the annual and triennial tithes which he imposes on corn and wine and on the firstborn of cattle, the produce of this tithe being devoted to a sort of family festival celebrated in the Holy Place.** The priest was thus placed on the same footing as the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, and his influence was but little greater than it had been in the early days of the monarchy. It was to the prophet and not to the priest that the duty belonged of directing the public conscience in all those cases for which the law had made no provision. I will put My words into his mouth (said Jahveh), and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass that whosoever will not hearken unto My words which he shall speak in My name, I will require it of him. But the prophet which shall speak a word presumptuously in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?--when a prophet speaketh in the name of Jahveh, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jahveh hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously; thou shalt not be afraid of him.

* Deut. xvi. 1-17.

** Deut. xviii. 1-8; as to the share in the triennial tithe,
cf. Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13.

When the reading of the law had ended, Josiah implored the people to make a covenant with Jahveh; that is to say, to walk after Jahveh, and to keep His commandments, and His testimonies, and His statutes, with all their hearts and all their souls, to confirm the words of this covenant that were written in this book. The final words, which lingered in every ear, contained imprecations of even more terrible and gloomy import than those with which the prophets had been wont to threaten Judah. If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jahveh thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command thee this day; then all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, the increase of thy kine, and the young of thy flock.... Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her; thou shalt build an house, and shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not use the fruit thereof. Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof.... Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people; and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day: and there shall be naught in the power of thine hand.... Jahveh shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand; a nation of fierce countenance, which shalt not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young. This enemy was to burn and destroy everything: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, throughout all thy land, which Jahveh thy God hath given thee. And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters... in the straitness wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee. Those who escape must depart into captivity, and there endure for many a long year the tortures of direst slavery; thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. *

* Deut. xxviii. The two sets of imprecations (xxvii.,
xxviii.) which terminate the actual work are both of later
redaction, but the original MS. undoubtedly ended with some
analogous formula. I have quoted above the most
characteristic parts of the twenty-eighth chapter.

The assembly took the oath required of them, and the king at once displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the ordinances contained in the Book of the Law. His first step was to purify the temple: Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in honour of strange gods--the Baals, the Asherim, and all the Host of Heaven--and, carrying them out of Jerusalem into the valley of the Kidron, cast them into the flames, and scattered the ashes upon the place where all the filth of the city was cast out. The altars and the houses of the Sodomites which defiled the temple courts were demolished, the chariots of the sun broken in pieces, and the horses of the god sent to the stables of the kings chamberlain;* the sanctuaries and high places which had been set up at the gates of the city, in the public places, and along the walls were razed to the ground, and the Tophet, where the people made their children pass through the fire, was transformed into a common sewer.

* [The Hebrew text admits of this meaning, which is,
however, not clear in the English A.V.--Tr.]

The provincial sanctuaries shared the fate of those of the capital; in a short time, from Geba to Beersheba, there remained not one of those high places, at which the ancestors of the nation and their rulers had offered prayers for generations past. The wave of reform passed even across the frontier and was borne into the Assyrian province of Samaria; the temple and image which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel were reduced to ashes, and human bones were burnt upon the altar to desecrate it beyond possibility of purification.*

* 2 Kings xxiii. 3-20, 24-27, where several glosses and
interpolations are easily recognisable, such as the episode
at Bethel (v. 15-20), the authenticity of which is otherwise
incontestable. The account in 2 Chron. xxxiv. is a defaced
reproduction of that of 2 Kings, and it places the reform,
in part at least, before the discovery of the new law.

The governor offered no objection to these acts; he regarded them, in the first place, as the private affairs of the subjects of the empire, with which he had no need to interfere, so long as the outburst of religious feeling did not tend towards a revolt: we know, moreover, that Josiah, guided on this point by the prophets, would have believed that he was opposing the divine will had he sought to free himself from the Assyrian yoke by ordinary political methods; besides this, in 621, under Assur-etililâni, five years after the Scythian invasion, the prefect of Samaria had possibly not sufficient troops at his disposal to oppose the encroachments of the vassal princes. It was an affair of merely a few months. In the following year, when the work of destruction was over, Josiah commanded that the Passover should be kept in the manner prescribed in the new book; crowds flocked into Jerusalem, from Israel as well as from Judah, and the festival made a deep impression on the minds of the people. Centuries afterwards the Passover of King Josiah was still remembered: There was not kept such a Passover from the days of the Judges... nor in all the days of the Kings of Israel, nor of the Kings of Judah. *

1 2 Kings xxiii. 21-23; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 1-19. The text of
the Soptuagint appears to imply that it was the first
Passover celebrated in Jerusalem. It also gives in chap.
xxii. 3, after the mention of the eighteenth year, a date of
the seventh or eighth month, which is not usually accepted,
as it is in contradiction with what is affirmed in chap,
xxiii. 21-23, viz. that the Passover celebrated at Jerusalem
was in the same year as the reform, in the eighteenth year.
It is to do away with the contradiction between these two
passages that the Hebrew text has suppressed the mention of
the month. I think, however, it ought to be considered
authentic and be retained, if we are allowed to place the
celebration of the Passover in what would be one year after.
To do this it would not be needful to correct the regnal
date in the text: admitting that the reform took place in
621, the Passover of 620 would still quite well have taken
place in the eighteenth year of Josiah, that being dependent
on the time of year at which the king had ascended the
throne.

The first outburst of zeal having spent itself, a reaction was ere long bound to set in both among the ruling classes and among the people, and the spectacle that Asia at that time presented to their view was truly of a nature to incite doubts in the minds of the faithful. Assyria--that Assyria of which the prophets had spoken as the irresistible emissary of the Most High--had not only failed to recover from the injuries she had received at the hands, first of the Medes, and then of the Scythians, but had with each advancing year seen more severe wounds inflicted upon her, and hastening her irretrievably to her ruin. And besides this, Egypt and Chaldæa, the ancient kingdoms which had for a short time bent beneath her yoke, had now once more arisen, and were astonishing the world by their renewed vigour. Psammetichus, it is true, after having stretched his arm across the desert and laid hands upon the citadel which secured to him an outlet into Syria for his armies, had proceeded no further, and thus showed that he was not inclined to reassert the ancient rights of Egypt over the countries of the Jordan and the Orontes; but he had died in 611, and his son, Necho II., who succeeded him, did not manifest the same peaceful intentions.*

* The last dated stele of Psammetichus I. is the official
epitaph of the Apis which died in his fifty-second year. On
the other hand, an Apis, born in the fifty-third year of
Psammetichus, died in the sixteenth year of Necho, after
having lived 16 years, 7 months, 17 days. A very simple
calculation shows that Psammetichus I. reigned fifty-four
years, as stated by Herodotus and Manetho, according to
Julius Africanus.

If he decided to try his fortune in Syria, supported by his Greek and Egyptian battalions, what would be the attitude that Judah would assume between moribund Assyria and the kingdom of the Pharaohs in its renewed vigour? It was in the spring of 608 that the crisis occurred. Nineveh, besieged by the Medes, was on the point of capitulating, and it was easy to foresee that the question as to who should rule there would shortly be an open one: should Egypt hesitate longer in seizing what she believed to be her rightful heritage, she would run the risk of finding the question settled and another in possession. Necho quitted Memphis and made his way towards the Asiatic frontier with the army which his father had left to him. It was no longer composed of the ill-organised bands of the Ethiopian kings or the princes of the Delta, temporarily united under the rule of a single leader, but all the while divided by reciprocal hatreds and suspicions which doomed it to failure. All the troops which constituted it--Egyptians, Libyans, and Greeks alike--were thoroughly under the control of their chief, and advanced in a compact and irresistible mass like the Nile: like a river its volume rolls onward. It said: I arise, I inundate the earth, I will drown cities and people! Charge, horses! Chariots, fly forward at a gallop! Let the warriors march, the Ethiopian and the Libyan under the shelter of his buckler, the fellah bending the bow!*

* Jer. xlvi. 7-9, where the prophet describes, not the army
which marched against Josiah, but that which was beaten at
Carchemish. With a difference of date of only three or four
years, the constituent elements of the army were certainly
the same, so that the description of one would apply to the
other.

As soon as Josiah heard the news, he called together his troops and prepared to resist the attack. Necho affected not to take his demonstrations seriously, and sent a disdainful message recommending him to remain neutral: What have I to do with thee, thou King of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have war: and God hath commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling with God who is with me, that He destroy thee not!*

* The message of Necho to Josiah is known to us from 2
Chron. xxxv. 20-22.

Having despatched the message, probably at the moment of entering the Shephelah, he continued in a northerly direction, nothing doubting that his warning had met a friendly reception; but however low Nineveh had fallen, Josiah could not feel that he was loosed from the oaths which bound him to her, and, trusting in the help of Jahveh, he threw himself resolutely into the struggle. The Egyptian generals were well acquainted with the route as far as the farther borders of Philistia, having passed along it a few years previously, at the time of the campaign of Psammetichus; but they had no experience of the country beyond Ashdod, and were solely dependent for guidance on the information of merchants or the triumphant records of the old Theban Pharaohs. These monuments followed the traditional road which had led their ancestors from Gaza to Megiddo, from Megiddo to Qodshu, from Qodshu to Carchemish, and they were reckoning on passing through the valley of the Jordan, and then that of the Orontes, without encountering any resistance, when, at the entrance to the gorges of Carmel, they were met by the advance guard of the Judæan army.

Josiah, not having been warned in time to meet them as they left the desert, had followed a road parallel to their line of march, and had taken up his position in advance of them on the plain of Megiddo, on the very spot where Thutmosis III. had vanquished the Syrian confederates nearly ten centuries before. The King of Judah was defeated and killed in the confusion of the battle, and the conqueror pushed on northwards without, at that moment, giving the fate of the scattered Jews a further thought.* He rapidly crossed the plain of the Orontes by the ancient caravan track, and having reached the Euphrates, he halted under the walls of Carchemish. Perhaps he may have heard there of the fall of Nineveh, and the fear of drawing down upon himself the Medes or the Babylonians prevented him from crossing the river and raiding the country of the Balikh, which, from the force of custom, the royal scribes still persisted in designating by the disused name of Mitanni.**

* 2 Kings xxiii. 29; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 22, 23. It is
probably to this battle that Herodotus alludes when he says
that Necho overcame the Syrians at Magdôlos. The identity of
Magdôlos and Megiddo, accepted by almost all historians, was
disputed by Gutschmid, who sees in the Magdôlos of Herodotus
the Migdol of the Syro-Egyptian frontier, and in the
engagement itself, an engagement of Necho with the Assyrians
and their Philistine allies; also by Th. Reinach, who
prefers to identify Magdôlos with one of the Migdols near
Ascalon, and considers this combat as fought against the
Assyrian army of occupation. If the information in Herodotus
were indeed borrowed from Hecatasus of Miletus, and by the
latter from the inscription placed by Necho in the temple of
Branchidae, it appears to me impossible to admit that
Magdôlos does not here represent Megiddo.

** The text of 2 Kings xxiii. 29 says positively that Necho
was marching towards the Euphrates. The name Mitanni is
found even in Ptolemaic times.

He returned southwards, after having collected the usual tributes and posted a few garrisons at strategic points; at Biblah he held a kind of _Durbar_ to receive the homage of the independent Phoenicians* and of the old vassals of Assyria, who, owing to the rapidity of his movements, had not been able to tender their offerings on his outward march.

* The submission of the Phoenicians to Necho is gathered
from a passage in Berosus, where he says that the Egyptian
army beaten at Carchemish comprised Phoenicians, besides
Syrians and Arabs.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph published in
Mariette. This scarab, now in the Gizeh Museum, is the only
Egyptian monument which alludes to the victories of Necho.
Above, the king stands between Nît and Isis; below, the
vanquished are stretched on the ground.

The Jews had rescued the body of their king and had brought it back in his chariot to Jerusalem; they proclaimed in his stead, not his eldest son Eliakim, but the youngest, Shallum, who adopted the name of Jehoahaz on ascending the throne. He was a young man, twenty-three years of age, light and presumptuous of disposition, opposed to the reform movement, and had doubtless been unwise enough to display his hostile feelings towards the conqueror. Necho summoned him to Eiblah, deposed him after a reign of three months, condemned him to prison, and replaced him by Eliakim, who changed his name to that of Jehoiakim--he whom Jahveh exalts; and after laying Judah under a tribute of one hundred talents of silver and one of gold, the Egyptian monarch returned to his own country. Certain indications lead us to believe that he was obliged to undertake other punitive expeditions. The Philistines, probably deceived by false rumours of his defeat, revolted against him about the time that he was engaged in hostilities in Northern Syria, and on receiving news not only of his safety, but of the victory he had gained, their alarm was at once aroused. Judah forgot her own sorrows on seeing the peril in which they stood, and Jeremiah pronounced against them a prophecy full of menace. Behold, he cried, waters rise up out of the north, and shall become an overflowing stream, and shall overflow the land and all that is therein, the city and them that dwell therein; and the men shall cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl... for the Lord will spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the Isle of Caphtor. Baldness is come upon Gaza; Ascalon is dumb with terror, and you, all that are left of the giants, how long will ye tear your faces in your mourning? * Ascalon was sacked and then Gaza,** and Necho at length was able to re-enter his domains, doubtless by the bridge of Zalu, following in this his models, his heroic ancestors of the great Theban dynasties.

* [R.V., Ashkolon is brought to nought, the remnant of
their valley: how long wilt thou cut thyself?--Tr.]

** Jer. xlvii., which is usually attributed to a period
subsequent to the defeat at Carchemish or even later; the
title, which alone mentions the Egyptians, is wanting in the
LXX. If we admit that the enemy coming from the north is the
Egyptian and not the Chaldaean, as do most writers, the only
time that danger could have threatened Philistia from the
Egyptians coming from the north, was when Necho, victorious,
was returning from his first campaign. In this case, the
Kadytis of Herodotus, which has caused so much trouble to
commentators, would certainly be Gaza, and there would be no
difficulty in explaining how the tradition preserved by the
Greek historian placed the taking of this town after the
battle of Megiddo.

He wished thereupon to perpetuate the memory of the Greeks who had served him so bravely, and as soon as the division of the spoil had been made, he sent as an offering to the temple of Apollo at Miletus, the cuirass which he had worn throughout the campaign.

We can picture the reception which his subjects gave him, and how the deputations of priests and nobles in white robes flocked out to meet him with garlands of flowers in their hands, and with acclamations similar to those which of old had heralded the return of Seti I. or Ramses II. National pride, no doubt, was flattered by this revival of military glory, but other motives than those of vanity lay at the root of the delight exhibited by the whole country at the news of the success of the expedition. The history of the century which was drawing to its close, had demonstrated more than once how disadvantageous it was to Egypt to be separated from a great power merely by the breadth of the isthmus. If Taharqa, instead of awaiting the attack on the banks of the Nile, had met the Assyrians at the foot of Carmel, or even before Gaza, it would have been impossible for Esarhaddon to turn the glorious kingdom of the Pharaohs into an Assyrian province after merely a few weeks of fighting. The dictates of prudence, more than those of ambition, rendered, therefore, the conquest of Syria a necessity, and Necho showed his wisdom in undertaking it at the moment when the downfall of Nineveh reduced all risk of opposition to a minimum; it remained to be seen whether the conquerors of Sin-shar-ishkun would tolerate for long the interference of a third robber, and would consent to share the spoil with these Africans, who, having had none of the trouble, had hastened to secure the profit. All the Mediterranean dependencies of Assyria, such as Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judæ, fell naturally within the sphere of Babylon rather than that of Media, and, indeed, Cyaxares never troubled himself about them; and Nabopolassar, who considered them his own by right, had for the moment too much in hand to permit of his reclaiming them. The Aramæans of the Khabur and the Balikh, the nomads of the Mesopotamian plain, had not done homage to him, and the country districts were infested with numerous bands of Cimmerians and Scythians, who had quite recently pillaged the sacred city of Harrân and violated the temple of the god Sin.* Nabopolassar, who was too old to command his troops in person, probably entrusted the conduct of them to Nebuchadrezzar, who was the son he had appointed to succeed him, and who had also married the Median princess. Three years sufficed this prince to carry the frontier of the new Chaldæan empire as far as the Syrian fords of the Euphrates, within sight of Thapsacus and Carchemish. Harrân remained in the hands of the barbarians,** probably on condition of their paying a tribute, but the district of the Subaru was laid waste, its cities reduced to ashes, and the Babylonian suzerainty established on the southern slopes of the Masios.

* _Inscrip. of the Cylinder of Nabonidus_ mentions the
pillage of Harrân as having taken place fifty-four years
before the date of its restoration by Nabonidus. This was
begun, as we know, in the third year of that king, possibly
in 554-3. The date of the destruction is, therefore, 608-7,
that is to say, a few months before the destruction of
Nineveh.

** The passage in the _Cylinder of Nabonidus_ shows that the
barbarians remained in possession of the town.

Having brought these preliminary operations to a successful issue, Nabopolassar, considering himself protected on the north and north-east by his friendship with Cyaxares, no longer hesitated to make an effort to recover the regions dominated by Egyptian influence, and, if the occasion presented itself, to reduce to submission the Pharaoh who was in his eyes merely a rebellious satrap. Nebuchadrezzar again placed himself at the head of his troops; Necho, warned of his projects, hastened to meet him with all the forces at his disposal, and, owing probably to the resistance offered by the garrisons which he possessed in the Hittite fortresses, he had time to continue his march as far as the Euphrates. The two armies encountered each other at Carchemish; the Egyptians were completely defeated in spite of their bravery and the skilful tactics of their Greek auxiliaries, and the Asiatic nations, who had once more begun to rely on Egypt, were obliged to acknowledge that they were as unequal to the task of overcoming Chaldaea as they had been of sustaining a struggle with Assyria.*

* Jer. xlvi. 2; cf. 2 Kings xxiv. 7, where the editor,
without mentioning the battle of Carchemish, recalls in
passing that the King of Babylon had taken, from the brook
of Egypt unto the river Euphrates, all that pertained to the
King of Egypt.

The religious party in Judah, whose hopes had been disappointed by the victory of Pharaoh at Megiddo, now rejoiced at his defeat, and when the remains of his legions made their way back across the Philistine plain, closely pressed by the enemy, Jeremiah hailed them as they passed with cutting irony. Two or three brief, vivid sentences depicting the spirit that had fired them a few months before, and then the picture of their disorderly flight: Order ye the buckler and shield, and draw near to battle. Harness the horses; and get up, ye horsemen, and stand forth with your helmets; furbish the spears, put on the coats of mail. Wherefore have I seen it? They are dismayed and turn backward; and their mighty ones are beaten down, and are fled apace, and look not back; terror is on every side, saith the Lord. Let not the swift flee away, nor the mighty man escape; in the north by the river Euphrates have they stumbled and fallen.... Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin daughter of Egypt; in vain dost thou use many medicines; there is no healing for thee. The nations have heard of thy shame, and the earth is full of thy cry: for the mighty man hath stumbled against the mighty, they are fallen both of them together. * Nebuchadrezzar received by the way the submission of Jehoiakim, and of the princes of Ammon, Moab, and the Philistines;** he was nearing Pelusium on his way into Egypt, when a messenger brought him the news of his fathers death.

* Jer. xlvi. 3-6, 11, 12.

** The submission of all these peoples is implied by the
passage already cited in 2 Kings xxiv. 7; Berosus speaks of
the Phoenician, Jewish, and Syrian prisoners whom
Nebuchadrezzar left to his generals, when he resolved to
return to Babylon by the shortest route.

He feared lest a competitor should dispute his throne--perhaps his younger brother, that Nabu-shum-lishir who had figured at his side at the dedication of a temple to Marduk. He therefore concluded an armistice with Necho, by the terms of which he remained master of the whole of Syria between the Euphrates and the Wady el-Arish, and then hastily turned homewards. But his impatience could not brook the delay occasioned by the slow march of a large force, nor the ordinary circuitous route by Carchemish and through Mesopotamia. He hurried across the Arabian desert, accompanied by a small escort of light troops, and presented himself unexpectedly at the gates of Babylon. He found all in order. His Chaldæan ministers had assumed the direction of affairs, and had reserved the throne for the rightful heir; he had only to appear to be acclaimed and obeyed (B.C. 605).

His reign was long, prosperous, and on the whole peaceful. The recent changes in Asiatic politics had shut out the Chaldæans from the majority of the battle-fields on which the Assyrians had been wont to wage warfare with the tribes on their eastern and northern frontiers. We no longer see stirring on the border-land those confused masses of tribes and communities of whose tumultuous life the Ninevite annals make such frequent record: Elam as an independent state no longer existed, neither did Philipi and Namri, nor the Cossæans, nor Parsua, nor the Medes with their perpetual divisions, nor the Urartians and the Mannai in a constant state of ferment within their mountain territory; all that remained of that turbulent world now constituted a single empire, united under the hegemony of the Medes, and the rule of a successful conqueror. The greater part of Blam was already subject to those Achæmenides who called themselves sovereigns of Anshân as well as of Persia, and whose fief was dependent on the kingdom of Ecbatana:* it is probable that Chaldasa received as her share of the ancient Susian territory the low countries of the Uknu and the Ulai, occupied by the Aramæan tribes of the Puqudu, the Eutu, and the Grambulu;** but Susa fell outside her portion, and was soon transformed into a flourishing Iranian town.

* The king and the princes of Elam mentioned in Jer. xxv.
25, xlix.35-39, and in Ezele. xxxii. 24, 25, in the time of
Nebuchadrezzar, are probably the Persian kings of Anshân and
their Elamite vassals--not only, as is usually believed, the
kings and native princes conquered by Assur-bani-pal; the
same probably holds good of the Elam which an anonymous
prophet associates with the Medes under Nabonidus, in the
destruction of Babylon (Isa. xxi. 2). The princes of Malamîr
appear to me to belong to an anterior epoch.

** The enumeration given in Ezelc. xxiii. 23, the
Babylonians and all the Chaldæans, Pelted, and Shoa, and
Koa, shows us probably that the Aramæans of the Lower
Tigris represented by Pekôd, as those of the Lower Euphrates
are by the Chaldæans, belonged to the Babylonian empire in
the time of the prophet. They are also considered as
belonging to Babylon in the passage of an anonymous prophet
(Jer. I. 21), who wrote in the last days of the Chaldæn
empire: Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against
it and the inhabitants of Pekod. Translators and
commentators have until quite recently mistaken the import
of the name Pekôd.

The plains bordering the right bank of the Tigris, from the Uknu to the Turnat or the Eadanu, which had belonged to Babylon from the very earliest times, were no doubt still retained by her;* but the mountain district which commanded them certainly remained in the hands of Cyaxares, as well as the greater part of Assyria proper, and there is every reason to believe that from the Eadanu northwards the Tigris formed the boundary between the two allies, as far as the confluence of the Zab.

* This is what appears to me to follow from the account of
the conquest o£ Babylon by Cyrus, as related by Herodotus.

The entire basin of the Upper Tigris and its Assyrian colonies, Amidi and Tushkân were now comprised in the sphere of Medic influence, and the settlement of the Scythians at Harrân, around one of the most venerated of the Semitic sanctuaries, shows to what restrictions the new authority of Chaldasa was subjected, even in the districts of Mesopotamia, which were formerly among the most faithful possessions of Nineveh. If these barbarians had been isolated, they would not long have defied the King of Babylon, but being akin to the peoples who were subject to Cyaxares, they probably claimed his protection, and regarded themselves as his liege men; it was necessary to treat them with consideration, and tolerate the arrogance of their presence upon the only convenient road which connected the eastern with the western provinces of the kingdom. It is therefore evident that there was no opening on this side for those ever-recurring struggles in which Assyria had exhausted her best powers; one war was alone possible, that with Media, but it was fraught with such danger that the dictates of prudence demanded that it should be avoided at all costs, even should the alliance between the two courts cease to be cemented by a royal marriage. However great the confidence which he justly placed in the valour of his Chaldæans, Nebuchadrezzar could not hide from himself the fact that for two centuries they had always been beaten by the Assyrians, and that therefore he would run too great a risk in provoking hostilities with an army which had got the better of the conquerors of his people. Besides this, Cyaxares was fully engaged in subjecting the region which he had allotted to himself, and had no special desire to break with his ally. Nothing is known of his history during the years which followed the downfall of Nineveh, but it is not difficult to guess what were the obstacles he had to surmount, and the result of the efforts which he made to overcome them. The country which extends between the Caspian and the Black Sea--the mountain block of Armenia, the basins of the Araxes and the Kur, the valleys of the Halys, the Iris, and the Thermodon, and the forests of the Anti-Taurus and the Taurus itself--had been thrown into utter confusion by the Cimmerians and the Scythians. Nothing remained of the previous order of things which had so long prevailed there, and the barbarians who for a century and a half had destroyed everything in the country seemed incapable of organising anything in its place. Urartu had shrunk within its ancient limits around Ararat, and it is not known who ruled her; the civilisation of Argistis and Menuas had almost disappeared with the dynasty which had opposed the power of Assyria, and the people, who had never been much impregnated by it, soon fell back into their native rude habits of life. Confused masses of European barbarians were stirring in Etiaus and the regions of the Araxes, seeking a country in which to settle themselves, and did not succeed in establishing themselves firmly till a much later period in the district of Sakasênê, to which was attached the name of one of their tribes.*

* Strabo states that Armenia and the maritime regions of
Cappadocia suffered greatly from the invasion of the
Scythians.

Such of the Mushku and the Tabal as had not perished had taken refuge in the north, among the mountains bordering the Black Sea, where they were ere long known to the Greeks as the Moschi and the Tibarenians. The remains of the Cimmerian hordes had taken their place in Cappadocia, and the Phrygian population which had followed in their wake had spread themselves over the basin of the Upper Halys and over the ancient Milidu, which before long took from them the name of Armenia.* All these elements constituted a seething, struggling, restless mass of people, actuated by no plan or method, and subject merely to the caprice of its chiefs; it was, indeed, the seething cauldron of which the Hebrew prophets had had a vision, which at times overflowed over the neighbouring nations, and at others was consumed within and wasted itself in fruitless ebullition.**

* The Phrygian origin of the Armenians is pointed out by
Herodotus and by Eudoxius.

** Jer. i. 13.

It took Cyaxares years to achieve his conquests; he finally succeeded, however, in reducing the various elements to subjection--Urartians, Scythians, Cimmerians, Chaldæ, and the industrious tribes of the Chalybes and the White Syrians--and, always victorious, appeared at last on the right hank of the Halys; but having reached it, he found himself face to face with foes of quite a different calibre from those with whom he had hitherto to deal. Lydia had increased both in wealth and in vigour since the days when her king Ardys informed his ally Assur-bani-pal that he had avenged the death of his father and driven the Cimmerians from the valley of the Msoander.

He had by so doing averted all immediate danger; but as long as the principal horde remained unexterminated, another invasion was always to be feared; besides which, the barbarian inroad, although of short duration, had wrought such havoc in the country that no native power in Asia Minor appeared, nor in reality was, able to make the effort needful to destroy them. Their king Dugdamis, it will be remembered, met his death in Cilicia at the hands of the Assyrians about the year 640, and Kôbos, his successor, was defeated and killed by the Scythians under Madyes about 633. The repeated repulses they had suffered had the effect of quickly relieving Lydia, Phrygia, and the remaining states of the Ægean and the Black Sea from their inroads; the Milesians wrested Sinope from them about 630, and the few bands left behind when the main body set out for the countries of the Euphrates were so harried and decimated by the people over whom they had terrorised for nearly a century, that they had soon no refuge except round the fortress of Antandros, in the mountains of the Troad. Most of the kingdoms whose downfall they had caused never recovered from their reverses; but Lydia, which had not laid down its arms since the death of Gyges, became possessed by degrees of the whole of their territory; Phrygia proper came back to her in the general redistribution, and with it most of the countries which had been under the rule of the dynasty of Midas, from the mountains of Lycia to the shores of the Black Sea. The transfer was effected, apparently, with very slight opposition and with little loss of time, since in the four or five years which followed the death of Kôbos, Ardys had risen in the estimation of the Greeks to the position enjoyed by Gyges; and when, in 628, Aristomenes, the hero of the Messenian wars, arrived at Rhodes, it is said that he contemplated proceeding from thence, first to Sardes and then to Ecbatana, for the purpose of gaining the adherence of Lydia and Media to his cause.

Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.

Death put an end to his projects, but he would not for a moment have entertained them had not Ardys been at that time at the head of a renowned and flourishing kingdom. The renewal of international commerce followed closely on the re-establishment of peace, and even if the long period of Scythian invasion, followed by the destruction of Nineveh, rendered the overland route less available for regular traffic than before, at all events relations between the inhabitants of the Euphrates valley and those of the iEgean littoral were resumed to such good purpose that before long several fresh marts were opened in Lydia.

Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.

Kymê and Ephesus put the region of the Messogis and the Tmolus into communication with the sea, but the lower valleys of the Hermos and the Masander were closed by the existence of Greek colonies at Smyrna, Clazomenas, Colophon, Priênê, and Miletus--all hostile to the Mermnadæ--which it would be necessary to overcome if these countries were to enjoy the prosperity shared by other parts of the kingdom; hence the principal effort made by the Lydians was either directly to annex these towns, or to impose such treaties on them as would make them their dependencies. Ardys seized Priênê towards 620, and after having thus established himself on the northern shore of the Latrnio Gulf,* he proceeded to besiege Miletus in 616, at the very close of his career. Hostilities were wearily prolonged all through the reign of Sadyattes (615-610), and down to the sixth year of Alyattes.**

* The well-known story that Priênê was saved under Alyattes
by a stratagem of the philosopher Bias is merely a fable, of
which several other examples are found. It would not be
possible to conclude from it, as Grote did, that Ardys rule
over the town was but ephemeral.

** The periods of duration assigned here to the reigns of
these princes are those of Euschius--that is to say, 15
years for Crosus, 37 for Alyattes, 5 for Sadyattes, 37 for
Ardys; Julius Africanus gives 15 for Sadyattes and 38 for
Ardys, while Herodotus suggests 14 for Crosus, 57 for
Alyattes, 12 for Sadyattes, and 59 for Ardys.

The position of Miletus was too strong to permit of its being carried by a _coup de main_; besides which, the Lydians were unwilling to destroy at one blow a town whose colonies, skilfully planted at the seaports from the coasts of the Black Sea to those of Egypt, would one day furnish them with so many outlets for their industrial products. Their method of attacking it resolved itself into a series of exhausting raids. Every year, as soon as the fruit crops and the harvests began to ripen, Alyattes set out at the head of his troops, whom he caused to march and encamp to the sound of instruments. Having arrived in the Milesian territory, he completely destroyed the crops and the orchards, and then again withdrew. In these expeditions he was careful to avoid any excesses which would have made the injury inflicted appear irretrievable; his troops were forbidden to destroy dwelling-houses or buildings dedicated to the gods; indeed, on one occasion, when the conflagration which consumed the lands accidentally spread to the temple of Athena near Assêsos, he rebuilt two temples for the goddess at his own expense. The Milesians sustained the struggle courageously, until two reverses at Limeneion and in the plain of the Maeander at length induced them to make terms. Their tyrant, Thrasybulus, acting on the advice of the Delphic Apollo and by the mediation of Periander of Corinth, concluded a treaty with Alyattes in which the two princes, declaring themselves the guest and the ally one of the other, very probably conceded extensive commercial privileges to one another both by land and sea (604).*

* Thrasybulus stratagem is said to have taken place at
Priênê by Diogenes Laertes and by Polysenus. The war begins
under Ardys, lasts for five years under Sadyattes, instead
of the six years which Herodotus attributes to it, and five
years under Alyattes.

Alyattes rewarded the oracle by the gift of a magnificent bowl, the work of Glaucus of Chios, which continued to be shown to travellers of the Roman period as one of the most remarkable curiosities of Delphi. Alyattes continued his expeditions against the other Greek colonies, but directed them prudently and leisurely, so as not to alarm his European friends, and provoke the formation against himself of a coalition of the Hellenic communities shattered over the isles or along the littoral of the Ægean. We know that towards the end of his reign he recovered Colophon, which had been previously acquired by Gyges, but had regained its independence during the Cimmerian crisis;* he razed Smyrna to the ground, and forced its inhabitants to occupy unfortified towns, where his suzerainty could not be disputed;** he half devastated Clazomense, whose citizens saved it by a despairing effort, and he renewed the ancient alliances with Ephesus, Kymê, and the cities of the region of the Caicus and the Hellespont,*** though it is impossible to attribute an accurate date to each of these particular events.

* Polysenus tells the story of the trick by which Alyattes,
after he had treated with the people of Colophon, destroyed
their cavalry and seized on their town. The fact that a
treaty was made seems to be confirmed by a fragment of
Phylarchus, and the surrender of the town to the Lydians by
a fragment of Xenophanes, quoted in Athenseus. Schubert does
not seem to believe that the town was taken by Alyattes; I
have adopted the opinion of Ladet on this point.

** Herodotus and Nicolas of Damascus confine themselves to
relating the capture of the city; adds that the Lydians
compelled the inhabitants to dwell in unfortified towns.
Schubert thinks that the passage in Strabo refers, not to
the time of Alyattes, but to a subsequent event in the fifth
century; he relies for this opinion on a fragment of Pindar,
which represents Smyrna as still flourishing in his time.
But, as Busolt has pointed out, the intention of the text of
Pindar is to represent the state of the city at about the
time of Homers birth, and not in the fifth century.

*** The peace between Ephesus and Lydia must have been
troubled for a little while in the reign of Sadyattes, but
it was confirmed under Alyattes by the marriage of Melas II.
with one of the kings daughters.

Most of them had already taken place or were still proceeding when the irruption of the Medes across the Halys obliged him to concentrate all his energies on the eastern portion of his kingdom.

The current tradition in Lydia of a century later attributed the conflict of the two peoples to a romantic cause. It related that Cyaxares had bestowed his favour on the bands of Scythians who had become his mercenaries on the death of Madyes, and that he had entrusted to them the children of some of the noblest Medic families, that they might train them to hunt and also teach them the use of the bow. One day, on their returning from the chase without any game, Cyaxares reproached them for their want of skill in such angry and insulting terms, that they resolved on immediate revenge. They cut one of the children in pieces, which they dressed after the same manner as that in which they were accustomed to prepare the game they had killed, and served up the dish to the king; then, while he was feasting upon it with his courtiers, they lied in haste and took refuge with Alyattes. The latter welcomed them, and refused to send them back to Cyaxares; hence the outbreak of hostilities. It is, of course, possible that the emigration of a nomad horde may have been the cause of the war,* but graver reasons than this had set the two nations at variance.

* Grote has collected a certain number of examples in later
times to show that the journeying of a nomad horde from one
state to another may provoke wars, and he concludes
therefrom that at least the basis of Herodotus account may
be considered as true.

The hardworking inhabitants of the valleys of the Iris and the Halys were still possessed of considerable riches, in spite of the losses they had suffered from the avaricious Cimmerians, and their chief towns, Comana, Pteria and Teiria, continued to enjoy prosperity under the rule of their priest-kings. Pteria particularly had developed in the course of the century, thanks to her favourable situation, which had enabled her to offer a secure refuge to the neighbouring population during the late disasters.

[Illustation: 396.jpg THE RUINS OF PTERIA]

Drawn by Boudier, from Charles Texier.

The town itself was crowded into a confined plain, on the left bank of a torrent which flowed into the Halys, and the city walls may still be clearly traced upon the soil; the outline of the houses, the silos, cisterns, and rock-cut staircases are still visible in places, besides the remains of a palace built of enormous blocks of almost rough-hewn limestone. The town was defended by wide ramparts, and also by two fortresses perched upon enormous masses of rock, while a few thousand yards to the east of the city, on the right bank of the torrent, three converging ravines concealed the sanctuary of one of those mysterious oracles whose fame attracted worshippers from far and wide during the annual fairs.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Chantre.

The bas-reliefs which decorate them belong to that semi-barbarous art which we have already met with in the monuments attributed to the Khâfci, near the Orontes and Euphrates, on both slopes of the Amanus, in Cilioia, and in the ravines of the Taurus.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Chantre.

Long processions of priests and votaries defile before figures of the gods and goddesses standing erect upon their sacred animals; in one scene, a tall goddess, a Cybele or an Anaitis, leans affectionately upon her chosen lover, and seems to draw him with her towards an image with a lions body and the head of a youth.*

* These bas-reliefs seem to me to have been executed at
about the time with which we are dealing, or perhaps a few
years later--in any case, before the Persian conquest.