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.
Too ignorant of the arts of war to undertake a siege in the regular way, they usually contented themselves with levying ransoms on fortified towns; occasionally, however, when the wealth accumulated behind the walls held out a prospect of ample booty, they blockaded the place until famine compelled it to surrender. More than one ancient city which, thanks to the good government of its rulers and the industry of its citizens, had amassed treasure of inestimable value, was put to fire and sword, and more than one fertile and populous region left unfilled and deserted.* Most of the states which for the last three centuries had fought so stubbornly against the Assyrians for independence, went down before the storm, including the kingdoms of Urartu, of the Mushku, and of the Tabal,** the miserable end furnishing the Hebrew prophets full fifty years later with a theme of sombre rejoicing. “There is Meshech, Tubal, and all her multitude; her graves are round about her: all of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword; for they caused their terror in the land of the living. And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war, and have laid their swords under their heads,*** and their iniquities are upon their bones; for they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.” ****
* This may be deduced from the passage in Herodotus, where
he says that “ the Scythians were masters of Asia for
twenty-eight years, and overturned everything by their
brutality and stupidity: for, in addition to tribute, they
exacted from every one whatever they chose, and, moreover,
they prowled here and there, plundering as they thought
good.”
** Strabo refers in general terms to the presence of
Scythians (or, as he calls them, Sacae) in Armenia,
Cappadocia, and on the shores of the Black Sea.
*** This, doubtless, means that the Mushku and Tabal had
been so utterly defeated that they could not procure
honourable burial for their dead, i.e. with their swords
beneath their heads and their weapons on their bodies.
**** 1 Ezek. xxxii. 26, 27.
The Cimmerians, who, since their reverses in Lydia and on Mount Taurus, had concentrated practically the whole of their tribes in Cappadocia and in the regions watered by the Halys and Thermodon, shared the good fortune of their former adversaries. At that time they lived under the rule of a certain Kôbos, who seems to have left a terrible reputation behind him; tradition gives him a place beside Sesostris among the conquerors of the heroic age, and no doubt, like his predecessor Dugdamis, he owed this distinction to some expedition or other against the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the Ægean Sea, but our knowledge of his career is confined to the final catastrophe which overtook him. After some partial successes, such as that near Zela, for instance, he was defeated and made prisoner by Madyes. His subjects, as vassals of the Scythians, joined them in their acts of brigandage,* and together they marched from province to province, plundering as they went; they overran the western regions of the Assyrian kingdom from Melitene and Mesopotamia to Northern Syria, from Northern Syria to Phoenicia, Damascus, and Palestine,** and at length made their appearance on the Judaean frontier.
* It seems probable that this was so, when we consider the
confusion between the Scythians or Sakse, and the Cimmerians
in the Babylonian and Persian inscriptions of the
Achsemenian epoch.
** Their migration from Media into Syria and Palestine is
expressly mentioned by Herodotus.
Since the day when Sennacherib had been compelled to return to Assyria without having succeeded in destroying Jerusalem, or even carrying it by storm, Judah had taken little or no part in external politics. Divided at first by a conflict between the party of prudence, who advised submission to Nineveh, and the more warlike spirits who advocated an alliance with Egypt, it had ended by accepting its secondary position, and had on the whole remained fairly loyal to the dynasty of Sargon.
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.