The principality founded by Deiokes about the beginning of the seventh century B.C., seemed at first destined to play but a modest part; it shared the fortune of the semi-barbarous states with which the Ninevite conquerors came in contact on the western boundary of the Iranian plateau, and from which the governors of Arrapkha or of Kharkhar had extorted tribute to the utmost as often as occasion offered. According to one tradition, it had only three kings in an entire century: Deiokes up till 655 B.C., Phraortes from 655 to 633, and after the latter year Cyaxares, the hero of his race.* Another tradition claimed an earlier foundation for the monarchy, and doubled both the number of the kings and the age of the kingdom.**

* This is the tradition gleaned by Herodotus, probably at Sardes, from the mouths of Persians residing in that city.

** This is the tradition derived from the court of Artaxerxes by Ctesias of Cnidus. Volney discovered the principle upon which the chronology of his Median dynasty was based by Ctesias. If we place his list side by side with that of Herodotus—



We see that, while rejecting the names given by Herodotus, Ctesias repeats twice over the number of years assigned by the latter to the reigns of his kings, at least for the four last generations—

At the beginning Herodotus gives before Deiokes an interregnum of uncertain duration. Ctesias substituted the round number of fifty years for the fifty-three assigned to Deiokes, and replaced the interregnum by a reign which he estimated at the mean duration of a human generation, thirty years; he then applied to this new pair of numbers the process of doubling he had employed for the couple mentioned above—

The number twenty-eight has been attributed to the reign of Arbakes, instead of the number thirty, to give an air of truthfulness to the whole catalogue.

This tradition ignored the monarchs who had rendered the second Assyrian empire illustrious, and substituted for them a line of inactive sovereigns, reputed to be the descendants of Ninus and Semiramis. The last of them, Sardanapalus, had, according to this account, lived a life of self-indulgence in his harem, surrounded by women, dressing himself in their garb, and adopting feminine occupations and amusements. The satrap of Media, Arbakes, saw him at his toilet, and his heart turned against yielding obedience to such a painted doll: he rebelled in concert with Belesys the Babylonian. The imminence of the danger thus occasioned roused Sardanapalus from his torpor, and revived in him the warlike qualities of his ancestors; he placed himself at the head of his troops, overcame the rebels, and was about to exterminate them, when his hand was stayed by the defection of some Bactrian auxiliaries. He shut himself up in Nineveh, and for two whole years heroically repulsed all assaults; in the third year, the Tigris, swollen by the rains, overflowed its banks and broke down the city walls for a distance of twenty stadia. The king thereupon called to mind an oracle which had promised him victory until the day when the river should betray him. Judging that the prediction was about to be accomplished, he resolved not to yield himself alive to the besieger, and setting fire to his palace, perished therein, together with his children and his treasures, about 788 B.C. Arbakes, thus rendered an independent sovereign, handed down the monarchy to his son Mandaukas, and he in his turn was followed successively by Sosarmos, Artykas, Arbianes, Artaios, Artynes, and Astibaras.* These names are not the work of pure invention; they are met with in more than one Assyrian text: among the petty kings who paid tribute to Sargon are enumerated some which bear such names as Mashdaku,** Ashpanda,*** Arbaku, and Khartukka,*** and many others, of whom traces ought to be found some day among the archives of princely families of later times.

* Oppert thought that the names given by Herodotus represented "Aryanised forms of Turanian names, of which Otesias has given the Persian translation."

** Mashdaku is identified by Post with the Mandaukas or Maydaukas of Ctesias, which would then be a copyist's error for Masdaukas. The identification with Vashd[t]aku, Vashtak, the name of a fabulous king of Armenia, is rejected by Rost; Mashdaku would be the Iranian Mazdaka, preserved in the Mazakes of Arrian.

*** Ashpanda is the Aspandas or Aspadas which Ctesias gives instead of the Astyages of Herodotus.

**** The name of Artykas is also found in the secondary form Kardikoas, which is nearer the Khartukka of the Assyrian texts.

There were in these archives, at the disposal of scribes and strangers inclined to reconstruct the history of Asia, a supply of materials of varying value—authentic documents inscribed on brick tablets, legends of fabulous exploits, epic poems and records of real victories and conquests, exaggerated in accordance with the vanity or the interest of the composer: from these elements it was easy to compile lists of Median kings which had no real connection with each other as far as their names, order of succession, or duration of reign were concerned. The Assyrian chronicles have handed down to us, in place of these dynasties which were alleged to have exercised authority over the whole territory, a considerable number of noble houses scattered over the country, each of them autonomous, and a rival of its neighbour, and only brought into agreement with one another at rare intervals by their common hatred of the invader. Some of them were representatives of ancient races akin to the Susians, and perhaps to the first inhabitants of Chaldaea; others belonged to tribes of a fresh stock, that of the Aryans, and more particularly to the Iranian branch of the Aryan family. We catch glimpses of them in the reign of Shalmaneser III., who calls them the Amadai; then, after this first brush with Assyria, intercourse and conflict between the two nations became more and more frequent every year, until the "distant Medes" soon began to figure among the regular adversaries of the Ninevite armies, and even the haughtiest monarchs refer with pride to victories gained over them. Ramman-nirari waged ceaseless war against them, Tiglath-pileser III. twice drove them before him from the south-west to the north-east as far as the foot of Demavend, while Sargon, Sennacherib, and Esarhaddon, during their respective reigns, kept anxious watch upon them, and endeavoured to maintain some sort of authority over the tribes which lay nearest to them. Both in the personal names and names of objects which have come down to us in the records of these campaigns, we detect Iranian characteristics, in spite of the Semitic garb with which the inscriptions have invested them: among the names of countries we find Partukka, Diristanu, Patusharra, Nishaia, Urivzan, Abiruz, and Ariarma, while the men bear such names as Ishpabarra, Eparna, Shitirparna, Uarzan, and Dayaukku. As we read through the lists, faint resemblances in sound awaken dormant classical memories, and the ear detects familiar echoes in the names of those Persians whose destinies were for a time linked with those of Athens and Sparta in the days of Darius and of Xerxes: it is like the first breath of Greek influence, faint and almost imperceptible as yet, wafted to us across the denser atmosphere of the East.

The Iranians had a vague remembrance of a bygone epoch, during which they had wandered, in company with other nations of the same origin as themselves, in that cradle of the Aryan peoples, Aryanem-Vaejo. Modern historians at first placed their mythical birthplace in the wilder regions of Central Asia, near the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and not far from the so-called table-land of Pamir, which they regarded as the original point of departure of the Indo-European races. They believed that a large body of these primitive Aryans must have descended southwards into the basin of the Indus and its affluents, and that other detachments had installed themselves in the oases of Margiana and Khorasmia, while the Iranians would have made their way up to the plateau which separates the Caspian Sea from the Persian Gulf, where they sought to win for themselves a territory sufficient for their wants. The compilers of the sacred books of the Iranians claimed to be able to trace each stage of their peregrinations, and to describe the various accidents which befell them during this heroic period of their history. According to these records, it was no mere chance or love of adventure which had led them to wander for years from clime to clime, but rather a divine decree. While Ahuromazdao, the beneficent deity whom they worshipped, had provided them with agreeable resting-places, a perverse spirit, named Angromainyus, had on every occasion rendered their sojourn there impossible, by the plagues which he inflicted on them. Bitter cold, for instance, had compelled them to forsake Aryanem-Vaejo and seek shelter in Sughdha and Muru.* Locusts had driven them from Sughdha; the incursions of the nomad tribes, coupled with their immorality, had forced them to retire from Muru to Bakhdhi, "the country of lofty banners,"** and subsequently to Nisaya, which lies to the south-east, between Muru and Bakhdhi. From thence they made their way into the narrow valleys of the Haroyu, and overran Vaekereta, the land of noxious shadows.***

* Sughdha is Sogdiana; Muru, in ancient Persian Margush, is the modern Merv, the Margiana of classical geographers.

** Bakhdhi is identical with Bactriana, but, as Spiegel points out, this Avestic form is comparatively recent, and readily suggests the modern Balkh, in which the consonants have become weakened.

*** The Avesta places Nisaya between Muru and Bakhdhi to distinguish it from other districts of the same name to be found in this part of Asia: Eugene Burnouf is probably correct in identifying it with the Nessea of Strabo and of Ptolemy, which lay to the south of Margiana, at the junction of the roads leading to Hyrcania in one direction and Bactriana in the other.

From this point forwards, the countries mentioned by their chroniclers are divided into two groups, lying in opposite directions: Arahvaiti, Haetumant, and Haptahindu* on the east; and on the west, Urva,** Haroyu or Haraeva is the Greek Aria, the modern province of Herat.

* Arahvaiti, the Harauvatish of the Achsemenian inscriptions, is the Greek Arachosia, and Haetumant the basin of their Etymander, the modern Helmend; in other words, the present province of Seistan. Hapta-Hindu is the western part of the Indian continent, i.e. the Punjaub.

** The Pehlevi commentators identify Urva with Mesone, mentioned by classical writers, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, or perhaps the plain around Ispahan which bore the name of Masan in the Sassanid period. Fr. Lenormant had connected it with the name Urivzan, which is applied in the Assyrian inscriptions to a district of Media in the time of Tiglath-pileser III.



The Pehlevi commentators identify Vaekereta with Kabulistan, and also volunteer the following interpretation of the title which accompanies the name: "The shadow of the trees there is injurious to the body, or as some say, the shadow of the mountains," and it produces fever there. Arguing from passages of similar construction, Lassen was led to recognise in the epithet duzhako-shayanem a place-name, "inhabitant of Duzhako," which he identified with a ruined city in this neighbourhood called Dushak; Haug believed he had found a confirmation of this hypothesis in the fact that the Pairika Khnathaiti created there by Angro-mainyus recalls in sound, at any rate, the name of the people Parikani mentioned by classical writers, as inhabiting these regions. Khnenta-Vehrkana,* Bhaga,** and Chakhra,*** as far as the districts of Varena**** and the basin of the Upper Tigris.^ This legend was composed long after the event, in order to explain in the first place the relationship between the two great families into which the Oriental Aryans were divided, viz. the Indian and Iranian, and in the second to account for the peopling by the Iranians of a certain number of provinces between the Indus and the Euphrates. As a matter of fact, it is more likely that the Iranians came originally from Europe, and that they migrated from the steppes of Southern Russia into the plains of the Kur and the Araxes by way of Mount Caucasus.^^

* The name Khnenta seems to have been Hellenised into that of Kharindas, borne by a river which formed the frontier between Hyrcania and Media; according to the Pehlevi version it was really a river of Hyrcania, the Djordjan. The epithet Vehrkana, which qualifies the name Khnenta, has been identified by Burnouf with the Hyrcania of classical geographers.

** Ragha is identified with Azerbaijan in the Pehlevi version of the Vendidad, but is, more probably, the Rhago of classical geographers, the capital of Eastern Media.

*** Chakhra seems to be identical with the country of Karkh, at the northwestern extremity of Khorassan.

**** Varena is identified by the Pehlevi commentators with Patishkhvargar, i.e. probably the Patusharra of the Assyrian inscriptions.

^ Haug proposed to identify this last station with the regions situated on the shores of the Caspian, near the south-western corner of that sea. But, as Garrez points out, the Pehlevi commentators prove that it must be the countries on the Upper Tigris.

^^ Spiegel has argued that Aryanem-Vaojo is probably Arran, the modern Kazabadagh, the mountainous district between the Kur and the Aras, and his opinion is now gaining acceptance. The settlement of the Iranians in Russia, and their entrance into Asia by way of the Caucasus, have been admitted by Rost. Classical writers reversed this order of things, and derived the Sauromato and other Scythian tribes from Media.

It is possible that some of their hordes may have endeavoured to wedge themselves in between the Halys and the Euphrates as far as the centre of Asia Minor. Their presence in this quarter would explain why we encounter Iranian personal names in the Sargonide epoch on the two spurs of Mount Taurus, such as that of the Kushtashpi, King of Kummukh, in the time of Tiglath-pileser III., and of the Kundashpi mentioned in the Annals of Shalmaneser III. in the ninth century B.C.*

* The name Kushtashpi has been compared with that of Vistaspa or Gushtasp by Fr. Lenormant, the name Kundashpi with that of Vindaspa by Gutschmid, and, later on, Ball has added to these a long list of names in Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions which he looks upon as Iranian. Kundashpi recalls at first sight Gundobunas, a name of the Sassanid epoch, if this latter form be authentic. Tiele adopts the identification of Kushtashpi with Vistaspa, and Justi has nothing to say against it, nor against the identification of Kundashpi with Vindaspa.

The main body, finding its expansion southwards checked by Urartu, diverged in a south-easterly direction, and sweeping before it all the non-Aryan or Turanian tribes who were too weak to stem its progress, gradually occupied the western edge of the great plateau, where it soon became mainly represented by the two compact groups, the Persians to the south on the farthest confines of Elam, and the Medes between the Greater Zab, the Turnat, and the Caspian. It is probable that the kingdom founded by Deiokes originally included what was afterwards termed Media Magna by the Graeco-Roman geographers. This sovereignty was formed by the amalgamation under a single monarch of six important tribes—the Buzo, Paraatakeni, Struchatas, Arizanti, Budii, and Magi. It extended north-westwards as far as the Kiziluzon, which formed the frontier between the Persians and the Mannai on this side. Northwards, it reached as far as Demavend; the salt desert that rendered Central Iran a barren region, furnished a natural boundary on the east; on both the south and west, the Assyrian border-lands of Ellipi, Kharkhar, and Arrapkha prevented it from extending to the chief ranges of the Zagros and Cordioan mountains. The soil, though less fertile than that of Chaldaea or of Egypt, was by no means deficient in resources. The mountains contained copper, iron, lead, some gold and silver,* several kinds of white or coloured marble,** and precious stones, such as topaz, garnets, emeralds, sapphires, cornelian, and lapis-lazuli, the latter being a substance held in the highest esteem by Eastern jewellers from time immemorial; Mount Bikni was specially celebrated for the fine specimens of this stone which were obtained there.*** Its mountains were in those days clothed with dense forests, in which the pine, the oak, and the poplar grew side by side with the eastern plane tree, the cedar, lime, elm, ash, hazel, and terebinth.****

* Rawlinson has collected traditions in reference to gold and silver mining among the mountains in the neighbourhood of Takht-i-Suleiman; one of these is still called Zerreh- Shardn, the mount of the gold-washers.

** The best known was the so-called Tauris marble quarried from the hills in the neighbourhood of Lake Urumiyah.

*** The list of precious stones which Pliny tells us were found in Media, contains several kinds which we are unable to identify, e.g. the Zathene, the gassinades and narcissitis. Pliny calls lapis-lazuli sapphirus, and declares that the bright specks of pyrites it contained rendered it unsuitable for engraving. In the Assyrian inscriptions Mount Bikni, the modern Demavend, is described as a mountain of Uknu, or lapis-lazuli.

**** A large part of the mountains and plains is now treeless, but it is manifest, both from the evidence of the inscriptions and from the observations of travellers, that the whole of Media was formerly well wooded.

The intermediate valleys were veritable orchards, in which the vegetation of the temperate zones mingled with tropical growths. The ancients believed that the lemon tree came originally from Persia.* To this day the peach, pear, apple, quince, cherry, apricot, almond, filbert, chestnut, fig, pistachio-nut, and pomegranate still flourish there: the olive is easily acclimatised, and the vine produces grapes equally suitable for the table or the winepress.** The plateau presents a poorer and less promising appearance—not that the soil is less genial, but the rivers become lost further inland, and the barrenness of the country increases as they come to an end one after another. Where artificial irrigation has been introduced, the fertility of the country is quite as great as in the neighbourhood of the mountains;*** outside this irrigated region no trees are to be seen, except a few on the banks of rivers or ponds, but wheat, barley, rye, oats, and an abundance of excellent vegetables grow readily in places where water is present.

* The apple obtained from Media was known as the Modicum malum, and was credited with the property of being a powerful antidote to poison: it was supposed that it would not grow anywhere outside Media.

** In some places, as, for instance, at Kirmanshahan, the vine stocks have to be buried during the winter to protect them from the frost.

*** Irrigation was effected formerly, as now, by means of subterranean canals with openings at intervals, known as kanat.

The fauna include, besides wild beasts of the more formidable kinds, such as lions, tigers, leopards, and bears, many domestic animals, or animals capable of being turned to domestic use, such as the ass, buffalo, sheep, goat, dog, and dromedary, and the camel with two humps, whose gait caused so much merriment among the Ninevite idlers when they beheld it in the triumphal processions of their kings; there were, moreover, several breeds of horses, amongst which the Nisasan steed was greatly prized on account of its size, strength, and agility.* In short, Media was large enough and rich enough to maintain a numerous population, and offered a stable foundation to a monarch ambitious of building up a new empire.**

* In the time of the Seleucides, Media supplied nearly the whole of Asia with these animals, and the grazing-lands of Bagistana, the modern Behistun, are said to have supported 160,000 of them. Under the Parthian kings Media paid a yearly tribute of 3000 horses, and the Nisaean breed was still celebrated at the beginning of the Byzantine era. Horses are mentioned among the tribute paid by the Medic chiefs to the kings of Assyria.

** The history of the Medes remains shrouded in greater obscurity than that of any other Asiatic race. We possess no original documents which owe their existence to this nation, and the whole of our information concerning its history is borrowed from Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, and from the various legends collected by the Greeks, especially by Herodotus and Ctesias, from Persian magnates in Asia Minor or at the court of the Achaemenian kings, or from fragments of vanished works such as the writings of Borosus. And yet modern archaeologists and philologists have, during the last thirty years, allowed their critical faculties, and often their imagination as well, to run riot when dealing with this very period. After carefully examining, one after another, most of the theories put forward, I have adopted those hypotheses which, while most nearly approximating to the classical legends, harmonise best with the chronological framework—far too imperfect as yet—furnished by the inscriptions dealing with the closing years of Nineveh; I do not consider them all to be equally probable, but though they may be mere stop-gap solutions, they have at least the merit of reproducing in many cases the ideas current among those races of antiquity who had been in direct communication with the Medes and with the last of their sovereigns.



Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the bas-relief from Persepolis now in the British Museum.

The first person to conceive the idea of establishing one was, perhaps, a certain Fravartish, the Phraortes of the Greeks, whom Herodotus declares to have been the son and successor of Deiokes.*

* The ancient form of the name, Fravartish or Frawarti, has been handed down to us by a passage in the great inscription of Behistun; it means the man who proclaims faith in Ahura- mazda, the believer.



He came to the throne about 655 B.C. at a time when the styar of Assur-bani-pal was still in the ascendant, and at first does not seem to have thought of trying to shake off the incubus of Assyrian rule. He began very wisely by annexing such of the petty neighbouring states as had hitherto remained independent, and then set himself to attack the one other nation of Iranian blood which, by virtue of the number and warlike qualities of its clans, was in a position to enter into rivalry with his own people. The Persians, originally concentrated in the interior, among the steep valleys which divide the plateau on the south, had probably taken advantage of the misfortunes of Elam to extend their own influence at its expense. Their kings were chosen from among the descendants of a certain Akhamanish, the Achaemenes of the Greeks, who at the time of the Iranian invasion had been chief of the Pasargadae, one of the Persian clans. Achaemenes is a mythical hero rather than a real person; he was, we are told, fed during infancy by an eagle—that mighty eagle whose shadow, according to a Persian belief in mediaeval times, assured the sovereignty to him on whom it chanced to fall. Achaemenes would seem to have been followed by a certain Chaispi—or Teispes—a less fabulous personage, described in the legends as his son. It was, doubtless, during his reign that Assur-bani-pal, in hot pursuit of Tiumman and Khumban-khaldash, completed the downfall of Susa; Chaispi claimed the eastern half of Elam as his share of the spoil, and on the strength of his victory styled himself King of Anshan—a title on which his descendants still prided themselves a hundred years after his death.*

* The fact that Teispes was the immediate successor of Achaemenes, indicated by Herodotus, is affirmed by Darius himself in the Behistun inscription. According to Billet- beck, the Anzan (Anshan) of the early Achaemenidae was merely a very small part of the ancient Anzan (Anshan), viz. the district on the east and south-east of Kuh-i-Dena, which includes the modern towns of Yezdeshast, Abadeh, Yoklid, and Kushkiserd.

Persia, as then constituted, extended from the mouths of the Oroatis—the modern Tab—as far as the entrance to the Straits of Ormuzd.* The coast-line, which has in several places been greatly modified since ancient times by the formation of alluvial deposits, consists of banks of clay and sand, which lie parallel with the shore, and extend a considerable distance inland; in some places the country is marshy, in others parched and rocky, and almost everywhere barren and unhealthy. The central region is intersected throughout its whole length by several chains of hills, which rise terrace-like, one behind the other, from the sea to the plateau; some regions are sterile, more especially in the north and east, but for the most part the country is well wooded, and produces excellent crops of cereals. Only a few rivers, such as the Oroatis, which forms the boundary between Persia and Susiana,** the Araxes, and the Bagradas succeed in breaking through the barriers that beset their course, and reach the Persian Gulf;*** most of the others find no outlet, and their waters accumulate at the bottom of the valleys, in lakes whose areas vary at the different seasons.

* Herodotus imagined Carmania and Persia Proper to be one and the same province; from the Alexandrine period onwards historians and geographers drew a distinction between the two.

** The form of the name varies in different writers. Strabo calls it the Oroatis, Nearchus the Arosis; in Pliny it appears as Oratis and Zarotis, and in Ammianus Marcellinus as Oroates.

*** The Araxes is the modern Bendamir. The Kyros, which flowed past Persepolis, is now the Pulwar, an affluent of the Bendamir. The Bagradas of Ptolemy, called the Hyperis by Juba, is the modern Nabend.



Drawn by Boudier, from Costs and Flandin, Voyage en Perse, vol. i. pl. xcvi.



Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the Naksh-i-Rustem bas-relief taken by Dieulafoy.

The mountainous district is furrowed in all directions by deep ravines, with almost vertical sides, at the bottom of which streams and torrents follow a headlong course. The landscape wears a certain air of savage grandeur; giant peaks rise in needle-like points perpendicularly to the sky; mountain paths wind upward, cut into the sides of the steep precipices; the chasms are spanned by single-arched bridges, so frail and narrow that they seem likely to be swept away in the first gail that blows. No country could present greater difficulties to the movements of a regular army or lend itself more readily to a system of guerrilla warfare. It was unequally divided between some ten or twelve tribes:* chief among these were the Pasargadaa, from which the royal family took its origin; after them came the Maraphii and Maspii.

* Herodotus only mentions ten Persian tribes; Xenophon speaks of twelve.

The chiefs of these two tribes were elected from among the members of seven families, who, at first taking equal rank with that of the Pasargadaae, had afterwards been reduced to subjection by the Achaemenidae, forming a privileged class at the court of the latter, the members of which shared the royal prerogatives and took a part in the work of government. Of the remaining tribes, the Panthialad, Derusiaei, and Carmenians lived a sedentary life, while the Dai, Mardians, Dropici, and Sagartians were nomadic in their habits. Each one of these tribes occupied its own allotted territory, the limits of which were not always accurately defined; we know that Sagartia, Parseta-kone, and Mardia lay towards the north, on the confines of Media and the salt desert,* Taokene extended along the seaboard, and Carmania lay to the east. The tribes had constructed large villages, such as Armuza, Sisidona, Apostana, Gogana, and Taoke, on the sea-coast (the last named possessing a palace which was one of the three chief residences of the Achaemenian kings),** and Carmana, Persepolis, Pasargadae, and Gabae in the interior.***

* Parsetakene, which has already been identified with the Partukkanu (or Partakkanu) of the Assyrian inscriptions, is placed by Ptolemy in Persia; Mardia corresponds to the mountainous district of Bebahan and Kazrun.

** The position of most of these towns is still somewhat doubtful. Armuza is probably Ormuz (or Hormuz) on the mainland, the forerunner of the insular Hormuz of the Portuguese, as the French scholar d'Anville has pointed out; Sisidona has been identified with the modern village of Mogu, near Ras-Jerd, Apostana with the town of Shewar, the name seeming to be perpetuated in that of the Jebel Asban which rises not far from there. Gogana is probably Bender Kongun, and Taoko, at the mouth of the Granis, is either Khor Gasseir or Rohilla at the mouth of the Bishawer. The palace, which was one of the three principal residences of the Achaemenian kings, is probably mentioned by Strabo, and possibly in Dionysius Periegetes.

*** Carmana is the modern Kerman; the exact position of Gabae, which also possesses a palace, is not known.



Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of one of the bas- reliefs at Persepolis, in Dieulafoy.

The Persians were a keen-witted and observant race, inured to all kinds of hardships in their occupation as mountain shepherds, and they were born warriors. The type preserved on the monuments differs but little from that which still exists at the present day in the more remote districts. It was marked by a tall and slender figure, with sturdy shoulders and loins, a small head, with a thick shock of hair and curling beard, a straight nose, a determined mouth, and an eye steady and alert. Yet, in spite of their valour, Phraortes overpowered them, and was henceforward able to reckon the princes of Anshan among his vassals; strengthened by the addition of their forces to his own, he directed his efforts to the subjection of the other races of the plateau. If we may believe the tradition of the Hellenic epoch, he reduced them to submission, and, intoxicated by his success, ventured at last to take up arms against the Assyrians, who for centuries past had held rule over Upper Asia.

This was about 635 B.C., or less than ten years after the downfall of Elam, and it does not seem likely that the vital forces of Assyria can have suffered any serious diminution within so short a space of time.*

* The date is indicated by the figures given by Herodotus in regard to the Medic kings, based on the calculations of himself or his authorities. Phraortes died in 634 B.C., after a reign of twenty-two years, and as the last year of his reign coincides with the war against Assyria, the preparations for it cannot have been much earlier than 635 or 636 B.C., a year or two before the catastrophe.

Assur-bani-pal, weary of fighting, even though he no longer directed operations in person, had apparently determined to remain entirely on the defensive, and not to take the field, unless absolutely compelled to do so by rebellion at home or an attack from outside. In view of the growing need of rest for the Assyrian nation, he could not have arrived at a wiser decision, provided always that circumstances allowed of its being carried into effect, and that the tributary races and frontier nations were willing to fall in with his intentions. They did so at first, for the fate of Elam had filled even the most unruly among them with consternation, and peace reigned supreme from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Assur-bani-pal took advantage of this unexpected lull to push forward the construction of public works in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. The palace of Sennacherib, though it had been built scarcely fifty years before, was already beginning to totter on its foundations; Assur-bani-pal entirely remodeled and restored it—a proceeding which gave universal satisfaction. The common people had, as usual, to make the bricks with their own hands and convey them to the spot, but as the chariots employed for this purpose formed part of the booty recently brought back from Elam, the privilege of using these trophies did something to lighten the burden of the tasks imposed on them. Moreover, they had the satisfaction of seeing at work among the squads of labourers several real kings, the Arabian chiefs who had been pursued and captured in the heart of the desert by Assur-bani-pal's generals; they plodded along under their heavy baskets, stimulated by the crack of the whip, amid insults and jeers. This palace was one of the largest and most ornate ever built by the rulers of Assyria. True, the decoration does not reveal any novel process or theme; we find therein merely the usual scenes of battle or of the chase, but they are designed and executed with a skill to which the sculptor of Nineveh had never before attained. The animals, in particular, are portrayed with a light and delicate touch—the wild asses pursued by hounds, or checked while galloping at full speed by a cast of the lasso; the herds of goats and gazelles hurrying across the desert; the wounded lioness, which raises herself with a last dying effort to roar at the beaters. We are conscious of Egyptian influence underlying the Asiatic work, and the skilful arrangement of the scenes from the Elamite campaigns also reminds us of Egypt. The picture of the battle of Tulliz recalls, in the variety of its episodes and the arrangement of the perspective, the famous engagement at Qodshu, of which Ramses II. has left such numerous presentments on the Theban pylons. The Assyrians, led by the vicissitudes of invasion to Luxor and the Ramesseum, had, doubtless, seen these masterpieces of Egyptian art in a less mutilated state than that in which we now possess them, and profited by the remembrance when called upon to depict the private life of their king and the victories gained by his armies.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the sketch by Place.

It was in this magnificent residence that Assur-bani-pal led an existence of indolent splendour, such as the chroniclers of a later age were wont to ascribe to all the Assyrian monarchs from the time of Semiramis onwards.*

* Stories of the effeminacy of Sardanapalus had been collected by Ctesias of Cnidus; they soon grew under the hands of historians in the time of Alexander, and were passed on by them to writers of the Roman and Byzantine epochs.



We would gladly believe that he varied the monotony of his hunting expeditions, his banquets, and entertainments in the gardens in company with the women of the harem, by pleasures of a more refined nature, and that he took an unusual interest in the history and literature of the races who had become subject to his rule. As a matter of fact, there have been discovered in several of the ruined chambers of his palaces the remains of a regular library, which must originally have contained thousands of clay tablets, all methodically arranged and catalogued for his use. A portion of them furnish us at first-hand with the records of his reign, and include letters exchanged with provincial governors, augural predictions, consultation of oracles, observations made by the royal astrologers, standing orders, accounts of income and expenditure, even the reports of physicians in regard to the health of members of the royal family or of the royal household: these documents reveal to us the whole machinery of government in actual operation, and we almost seem to witness the secret mechanism by which the kingdom was maintained in activity. Other tablets contain authentic copies of works which were looked upon as classics in the sanctuaries of the Euphrates. Probably, when Babylon was sacked, Sennacherib had ordered the books which lay piled up in E-Sagilla and the other buildings of the city to be collected and carried away to Nineveh along with the statues and property of the gods. They had been placed in the treasury, and there they remained until Esarhaddon re-established the kingdom of Karduniash, and Assur-bani-pal was forced to deliver up the statue of Marduk and restore to the sanctuaries, now rebuilt, all the wealth of which his grandfather had robbed them: but before sending back the tablets, he ordered copies to be made of them, and his secretaries set to work to transcribe for his use such of these works as they considered worthy of reproduction. The majority of them were treatises compiled by the most celebrated adepts in the sciences for which Chaldaea had been famous from time immemorial; they included collections of omens, celestial and terrestrial, in which the mystical meaning of each phenomenon and its influence on the destinies of the world was explained by examples borrowed from the Annals of world-renowned conquerors, such as Naramsin and Sargon of Agade; then there were formulae for exorcising evil spirits from the bodies of the possessed, and against phantoms, vampires, and ghosts, the recognised causes of all disease; prayers and psalms, which had to be repeated before the gods in order to obtain pardon for sin; and histories of divinities and kings from the time of the creation down to the latest date. Among these latter were several versions of the epic of Grilgames, the story of Etana, of Adapa, and many others; and we may hope to possess all that the Assyrians knew of the old Chaldaean literature in the seventh century B.C., as soon as the excavators have unearthed from the mound at Kouyunjik all the tablets, complete or fragmentary, which still lie hidden there. Even from the shreds of information which they have already yielded to us, we are able to piece together so varied a picture that we can readily imagine Assur-bani-pal to have been a learned and studious monarch, a patron of literature and antiquarian knowledge. Very possibly he either read himself, or had read to him, many of the authors whose works found a place in his library: the kings of Nineveh, like the Pharaohs, desired now and then to be amused by tales of the marvellous, and they were doubtless keenly alive to the delightful rhythm and beautiful language employed by the poets of the past in singing the praises of their divine or heroic ancestors. But the mere fact that his palace contained the most important literary collection which the ancient East has so far bequeathed to us, in no way proves that Assur-bani-pal displayed a more pronounced taste for literature than his predecessors; it indicates merely the zeal and activity of his librarians, their intelligence, and their respect and admiration for the great works of the past. Once he had issued his edict ordering new editions of the old masters to be prepared, Assur-bani-pal may have dismissed the matter from his mind, and the work would go on automatically without need for any further interference on his part. The scribes enriched his library for him, in much the same way as the generals won his battles, or the architects built his monuments: they were nothing more than nameless agents, whose individuality was eclipsed by that of their master, their skill and talent being all placed to his credit. Babylonia shared equally with Assyria in the benefits of his government. He associated himself with his brother Shamash-shumukin in the task of completing the temple of E-Sagilla; afterwards, when sole monarch, he continued the work of restoration, not only in Babylon, but in the lesser cities as well, especially those which had suffered most during the war, such as Uru, Uruk, Borsippa, and Cutha.*

He refers to the works at Borsippa and Kuta towards the end of the account of his campaign against Shamash-shumukin, and to those at Uruk in describing the war against Khumban- khaldash.

He remodelled the temple of Bel at Nippur, the walls built there by him being even now distinguishable from the rest by the size of the bricks and the careful dressing of the masonry. From the shores of the Persian Gulf to the mountains of Armenia, Assyria and Karduniash were covered with building-yards just as they had been in the most peaceful days of the monarchy.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the photograph published by Peters.

It was at this unique juncture of apparent grandeur and prosperity that Phraortes resolved to attack Assur-bani-pal. There is nothing to indicate that his action took place simultaneously with some movement on the part of other peoples, or with a serious insurrection in any of the Assyrian provinces. For my part, I prefer to set it down to one of those sudden impulses, those irresistible outbursts of self-confidence, which from time to time actuated the princes tributary to Nineveh or the kings on its frontier. The period of inactivity to which some previous defeat inflicted on them or on their predecessors had condemned them, allowed them to regain their strength, and one or two victories over less powerful neighbours served to obliterate the memory of former humiliation and disaster; they flew to arms full of hope in the result, and once more drew down defeat upon their heads, being lucky indeed if their abortive rising led to nothing worse than the slaughter of their armies, the execution of their generals, and an increase in the amount of their former tribute. This was the fate that overtook Phraortes; the conqueror of the Persians, when confronted by the veteran troops of Assyria, failed before their superior discipline, and was left dead upon the field of battle with the greater part of his army. So far the affair presented no unusual features; it was merely one more commonplace repetition of a score of similar episodes which had already taken place in the same region, under Tiglath-pileser III. or the early Sargonides; but Huvakshatara, the son of Phraortes, known to the Greeks as Cyaxares,* instead of pleading for mercy, continued to offer a stubborn resistance. Cyaxares belongs to history, and there can be no doubt that he exercised a decisive influence over the destinies of the Oriental world, but precise details of his exploits are wanting, and his personality is involved in such obscuring mists that we can scarcely seize it; the little we have so far been able to glean concerning him shows us, not so much the man himself, as a vague shadow of him seen dimly through the haze.

* The original form of the name is furnished by passages in the Behistun inscription, where Chitrantakhma of Sagartia and Fravartish of Media, two of the claimants for the throne who rose against Darius, are represented as tracing their descent from Huvakshatara.

His achievements prove him to have been one of those perfect rulers of men, such as Asia produces every now and then, who knew how to govern as well as how to win battles—a born general and lawgiver, who could carry his people with him, and shone no less in peace than in war.*

* G. Rawlinson takes a somewhat different view of Cyaxares' character; he admits that Cyaxares knew how to win victories, but refuses to credit him with the capacity for organisation required in order to reap the full benefits of conquest, giving as his reason for this view the brief duration of the Medic empire. The test applied by him does not seem to me a conclusive one, for the existence of the second Chaldaean empire was almost as short, and yet it would be decidedly unfair to draw similar inferences touching the character of Nabopolassar or Nebuchadrezzar from this fact.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after Coste and Flandin. The first and third figures are Medes, the second and fourth Persians.

The armies at the disposal of his predecessors had been little more than heterogeneous assemblies of feudal militia; each clan furnished its own contingent of cavalry, archers, and pikemen, but instead of all these being combined into a common whole, with kindred elements contributed by the other tribes, each one acted separately, thus forming a number of small independent armies within the larger one. Cyaxares saw that defeat was certain so long as he had nothing but these ill-assorted masses to match against the regular forces of Assyria: he therefore broke up the tribal contingents and rearranged the units of which they were composed according to their natural affinities, grouping horsemen with horsemen, archers with archers, and pikemen with pikemen, taking the Assyrian cavalry and infantry as his models.*

* Herodotus tells us that Cyaxares was "the first to divide the Asiatics into different regiments, separating the pikemen from the archers and horsemen; before his time, these troops were all mixed up haphazard together." I have interpreted his evidence in the sense which seems most in harmony with what we know of Assyrian military tactics. It seems incredible that the Medic armies can have fought pell-mell, as Herodotus declares, seeing that for two hundred years past the Medes had been frequently engaged against such well-drilled troops as those of Assyria: if the statement be authentic, it merely means that Cyaxares converted all the small feudal armies which had hitherto fought side by side on behalf of the king into a single royal army in which the different kinds of troops were kept separate.

The foot-soldiers wore a high felt cap known as a tiara; they had long tunics with wide sleeves, tied in at the waist by a belt, and sometimes reinforced by iron plates or scales, as well as gaiters, buskins of soft leather, and large wickerwork shields covered with ox-hide, which they bore in front of them like a movable bulwark; their weapons consisted of a short sword, which depended from the belt and lay along the thigh, one or two light javelins, a bow with a strongly pronounced curve, and a quiver full of arrows made from reeds.* Their horsemen, like those of other warlike nations II of the East, used neither saddle nor stirrups, and though they could make skilful use of lance and sword, their favourite weapon was the bow.**

* Herodotus describes the equipment of the Persians in much the same terms as I have used above, and then adds in the following chapter that "the Medes had the same equipment, for it is the equipment of the Medes and not that of the Persians."

** Herodotus says that the Medic horsemen were armed in the same manner as the infantry.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a cast of the Medic intaglio in the Cabinet des Medailles.

Accustomed from their earliest childhood to all kinds of equestrian exercises, they seemed to sit their horses as though they actually formed part of the animal. They seldom fought in line, but, from the very beginning of an action, hung like a dense cloud on the front and flanks of the enemy, and riddled them with missiles, without, however, coming to close quarters. Like the Parthians of a later epoch, they waited until they had bewildered and reduced the foe by their ceaseless evolutions before giving the final charge which was to rout them completely. No greater danger could threaten the Assyrians than the establishment of a systematically organised military power within the borders of Media. An invader starting from Egypt or Asia Minor, even if he succeeded in overthrowing the forces sent out to meet him, had still a long way to go before he could penetrate to the heart of the empire. Even if Cilicia and Syria should be conquered, nothing was easier than to oppose a further advance at the barrier of the Euphrates; and should the Euphrates be crossed, the Khabur still remained, and behind it the desert of Singar, which offered the last obstacle between Nineveh and the invaders. The distances were less considerable in the case of an army setting out from Urartu and proceeding along the basin of the Tigris or its affluents; but here, too, the difficulties of transit were so serious that the invader ran a great risk of gradually losing the best part of his forces on the road. On the north-east and east, however, the ancient heritage of Assur lay open to direct and swift attack. An enemy who succeeded in destroying or driving back the garrisons stationed as outposts on the rim of the plateau, from Kharkhar to Parsua, if he ventured to pursue his advantage and descended into the plain of the Tigris, had no less than three routes to choose from—the Kirind road on the south, the Baneh road on the north, and the Suleimanych road between the two. The last was the easiest of all, and led almost straight to the fords of Altun-Keupri and the banks of the Lesser Zab, on the confines of Assyria proper, close under the walls of Arbela, the holy city of Ishtar.



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 Hamadan right up to the ramparts of Nineveh. Cyaxares won a victory over Assur-bani-pal's 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 Iiolwan and Suleimanyeh, while Nineveh guarded it on the northeast, and several lines of walled cities—among which Dur-Sharrukin and Imgur-Bel can still be identified—protected it on the north and east, extending from the Tigris as far as the G-hazir 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 Chaldaeans. 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 Kobos, 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 AEgean 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 Pharaoh's 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 king's own family, and on Hezekiah's 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 Chaldaean 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 Jahveh's 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 Derketo, 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 Derketo 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 Boxanake, 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-etililani 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-pal's death is not furnished by any Assyrian monument, but is inferred from the Canon of Ptolemy, where Saosduchin 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-etililani; 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-Sharrukin, 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-etililani 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-etililani 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-etililani 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 Chaldae 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 Chaldaeans, 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-etililani.*

* 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.