Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained, under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in the widest sense of this vague term.
Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar--for he it must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown--was not a wholly independent ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their achievements.
In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be), and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power westward to Asia Minor, the Medes followed routes north of Taurus, not the old Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of so much we can be fairly sure. Much else that we are told of Media by Herodotus--his marvellous account of Ecbatana and scarcely less wonderful account of the reigning house--must be passed by till some confirmation of it comes to light; and that, perhaps, will never be.
SECTION 6. ASIA MINOR
A good part of the East, however, remains which owed allegiance neither to Media nor to Babylon. It is, indeed, a considerably larger area than was independent of the Farther East at the date of our last survey. Asia Minor was in all likelihood independent from end to end, from the Aegean to the Euphrates--for in 600 B.C. Kyaxares had probably not yet come through Urartu--and from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Issus. About much of this area we have far more trustworthy information now than when we looked at it last, because it had happened to fall under the eyes of the Greeks of the western coastal cities, and to form relations with them of trade and war. But about the residue, which lay too far eastward to concern the Greeks much, we have less information than we had in 800 B.C., owing to the failure of the Assyrian imperial annals.
The dominant fact in Asia Minor in 600 B.C. is the existence of a new imperial power, that of Lydia. Domiciled in the central west of the peninsula, its writ ran eastwards over the plateau about as far as the former limits of the Phrygian power, on whose ruins it had arisen. As has been stated already, there is reason to believe that its "sphere of influence," at any rate, included Cilicia, and the battle to be fought on the Halys, fifteen years after our present survey, will argue that some control of Cappadocia also had been attempted. Before we speak of the Lydian kingdom, however, and of its rise to its present position, it will be best to dispose of that outlying state on the southeast, probably an ally or even client of Lydia, which, we are told, was at this time one of the "four powers of Asia." These powers included Babylon also, and accordingly, if our surmise that the Mede was then the overlord of Nebuchadnezzar be correct, this statement of Eusebius, for what it is worth, does not imply that Cilicia had attained an imperial position. Doubtless of the four "powers," she ranked lowest.
SECTION 7. CILICIA
It will be remembered how much attention a great raiding Emperor of the Middle Assyrian period, Shalmaneser II, had devoted to this little country. The conquering kings of later dynasties had devoted hardly less. From Sargon to Ashurbanipal they or their armies had been there often, and their governors continuously. Sennacherib is said to have rebuilt Tarsus "in the likeness of Babylon," and Ashurbanipal, who had to concern himself with the affairs of Asia Minor more than any of his predecessors, was so intimately connected with Tarsus that a popular tradition of later days placed there the scene of his death and the erection of his great tomb. And, in fact, he may have died there for all that we know to the contrary; for no Assyrian record tells us that he did not. Unlike the rest of Asia Minor, Cilicia was saved by the Assyrians from the ravages of the Cimmerians. Their leader, Dugdamme, whom the Greeks called Lygdamis, is said to have met his death on the frontier hills of Taurus, which, no doubt, he failed to pass. Thus, when Ashurbanipal's death and the shrinking of Ninevite power permitted distant vassals to resume independence, the unimpaired wealth of Cilicia soon gained for her considerable importance. The kings of Tarsus now extended their power into adjoining lands, such as Kue on the east and Tabal on the north, and probably over even the holding of the Kummukh; for Herodotus, writing a century and a half after our date, makes the Euphrates a boundary of Cilicia. He evidently understood that the northernmost part of Syria, called by later geographers (but never by him) Commagene, was then and had long been Cilician territory. His geographical ideas, in fact, went back to the greater Cilicia of pre-Persian time, which had been one of the "four great powers of Asia."
The most interesting feature of Cilician history, as it is revealed very rarely and very dimly in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom, consists in its relation to the earliest eastward venturing of the Greeks. The first Assyrian king with whom these western men seem to have collided was Sargon, who late in the eighth century, finding their ships in what he considered his own waters, i.e. on the coasts of Cyprus and Cilicia, boasts that he "caught them like fish." Since this action of his, he adds, "gave rest to Kue and Tyre," we may reasonably infer that the "Ionian pirates" did not then appear on the shores of Phoenicia and Cilicia for the first time; but, on the contrary, that they were already a notorious danger in the easternmost Levant. In the year 720 we find a nameless Greek of Cyprus (or Ionia) actually ruling Ashdod. Sargon's successor, Sennacherib, had serious trouble with the Ionians only a few years later, as has been learned from the comparison of a royal record of his, only recently recovered and read, with some statements made probably in the first place by the Babylonian historian, Berossus, but preserved to us in a chronicle of much later date, not hitherto much heeded. Piecing these scraps of information together, the Assyrian scholar, King, has inferred that, in the important campaign which a revolt of Tarsus, aided by the peoples of the Taurus on the west and north, compelled the generals of Sennacherib to wage in Cilicia in the year 698, Ionians took a prominent part by land, and probably also by sea. Sennacherib is said (by a late Greek historian) to have erected an "Athenian" temple in Tarsus after the victory, which was hardly won; and if this means, as it may well do, an "Ionic" temple, it states a by no means incredible fact, seeing that there had been much local contact between the Cilicians and the men of the west. Striking similarities of form and artistic execution between the early glyptic and toreutic work of Ionia and Cilicia respectively have been mentioned in the last chapter; and it need only be added here, in conclusion, that if Cilicia had relations with Ionia as early as the opening of the seventh century--relations sufficient to lead to alliance in war and to modification of native arts--it is natural enough that she should be found allied a few years later with Lydia rather than with Media.