* This episode is regarded as legendary by many modern
historians. Winckler even goes so far as to deny the defeat
of the Scythians: according to his view, they held
possession of Media till their chief, Astyages, was
overthrown by Cyrus; Rost has gone even further, deeming
even Cyaxares himself to have been a Scythian. For my part,
I see no reason to reject the tradition of the fatal
banquet. Without referring to more ancient illustrations,
Noldeke recalls the fact that in a period of only ten years,
from 1030 to 1040 a.d., the princes reigning over the
Iranian lands rid themselves by similar methods of the
Turcoman bands which harassed them. Such a proceeding has
never been repugnant to Oriental morality, and it is of a
kind to fix itself in the popular mind: far from wishing to
suppress it, I should be inclined to see in it the nucleus
of the whole tradition.
The barbarians made a brave resistance, in spite of the treason which had deprived them of their leaders: they yielded only after a long and bloody campaign, the details of which are unknown to us. Iranian legends wove into the theme of their expulsion all kinds of fantastic or romantic incidents. They related, for instance, how, in combination with the Parthians, the Scythians, under the leadership of their queen Zarinsea, several times defeated the Medes: she consented at last to conclude a treaty on equal terms, and peace having been signed, she retired to her capital of Boxanakê, there to end her days. One body of the survivors re-entered Europe through the Caspian Gates, another wandered for some time between the Araxes and the Halys, seeking a country adapted to their native instincts and customs.* Cyaxares, relieved from the pressure put upon him by the Scythians, immediately resumed his efforts against Assyria, and was henceforward able to carry his plans to completion without encountering any serious obstacle. It would be incorrect to say that the Scythian invasion had overthrown the empire of the Sargonids: it had swept over it like a whirlwind, but had not torn from it one province, nor, indeed, even a single city. The nations, already exhausted by their struggles for independence, were incapable of displaying any energy when the barbarians had withdrawn, and continued to bow beneath the Ninevite yoke as much from familiarity with habitual servitude as from inability to shake themselves free. Assur-bani-pal had died about the year 625 B.C., after a reign of forty-two years, and his son Assur-etililâni had assumed the double crown of Assyria and Babylon without opposition.**
* Herodotus speaks of these Scythians as having lived at
first on good terms with Cyaxares.
** The date of Assur-bani-pal’s death is not furnished by
any Assyrian monument, but is inferred from the Canon of
Ptolemy, where Saosduchîn or Shamash-shumukin and Chinaladan
or Assur-bani-pal each reigns forty-two years, from 668 or
667 to 626 or 625 B.C. The order of succession of the last
Assyrian kings was for a long time doubtful, and Sin-shar-
ishkun was placed before Assur-etililâni; the inverse order
seems to be now conclusively proved. The documents which
seemed at one time to prove the existence of a last king of
Assyria named Esarhaddon, identical with the Saracos of
classical writers, really belong to Esarhaddon, the father
of Assur-bani-pal. [Another king, Sin-sum-lisir, is
mentioned in a contract dated at Nippur in his accession
year. He may have been the immediate predecessor of
Sarakos.—? Ed.]
Nineveh had been saved from pillage by the strength of her ramparts, but the other fortresses, Assur, Calah, and Dur-Sharrukîn, had been destroyed during the late troubles; the enemy, whether Medes or Scythians, had taken them by storm or reduced them by famine, and they were now mere heaps of ruin, deserted save for a few wretched remnants of their population. Assur-etililâni made some feeble attempts to restore to them a semblance of their ancient splendour. He erected at Calah, on the site of the palaces which had been destroyed by fire, a kind of castle rudely built, and still more rudely decorated, the rooms of which were small and low, and the walls of sun-dried brick were panelled only to the height of about a yard with slabs of limestone roughly squared, and without sculpture or inscription: the upper part of the walls was covered with a coating of uneven plaster. We do not know how long the inglorious reign of Assur-etililâni lasted, nor whether he was assassinated or died a natural death. His brother, Sin-shar-ishkun,* who succeeded him about 620 B.C., at first exercised authority, as he had done, over Babylon as well as Nineveh,** and laboured, like his predecessor, to repair the edifices which had suffered by the invasion, making war on his neighbours, perhaps even on the Medes, without incurring serious losses.
* The name of this king was discovered by G. Smith on the
fragments of a cylinder brought from Kouyunjik, where he
read it as Bel-zakir-iskun. The real reading is Sin-shar-
ishkun, and the similarity of this name with that of
Saracos, the last king of Assyria according to Greek
tradition, strikes one immediately. The relationship of this
king to Assur-etililâni was pointed out by Father Scheil
from the fragment of a tablet on which Sin-shar-ishkun is
declared to be the son of Assur-bani-pal, king of Assyria.
** This may be deduced from a passage of Abydenus, where
Saracos or Sin-shar-ishkun sends Bussalossoros (that is,
Nabopolassar) to defend Chaldæ against the invasion of the
peoples of the sea; so according to Abydenus, or rather
Berosus, from whom Abydenus indirectly obtained his
information, Saracos was King of Babylon as well as of
Nineveh at the beginning of his reign.
The Chaldæans, however, merely yielded him obedience from force of habit, and the moment was not far distant when they would endeavour to throw off his yoke. Babylon was at that time under the rule of a certain Nabu-bal-uzur, known to us as Nabopolassar, a Kaldu of ancient lineage, raised possibly by Assur-bani-pal to the dignity of governor, but who, in any case, had assumed the title of king on the accession of Assur-etililâni.*
* The Canon of Ptolemy makes Nabopolassar the direct
successor of Chinaladan, and his testimony is justified by
the series of Babylonian contracts which exist in fairly
regular succession from the second to the twenty-first years
of Nabopolassar. The account given by Berosus makes him a
general of Saracos, but the contradiction which this offers
to the testimony of the Canon can be explained if he is
considered as a vassal-king; the kings of Egypt and of Media
were likewise only satraps, according to Babylonian
tradition.
His was but a local sovereignty, restricted probably to the city and its environs; and for twelve or thirteen years he had rested content with this secondary position, when an unforeseen incident presented him with the opportunity of rising to the first rank. Tradition asserted that an immense army suddenly landed at the mouths of the Euphrates and the Tigris; probably under this story is concealed the memory of one of those revolts of the Bît-Yakîn and the tribes dwelling on the shores of the Nar-Marratum, such as had often produced consternation in the minds of the Sargonid kings.* Sin-shar-ishkun, distracted doubtless by other anxieties, acted as his ancestors had done in similar circumstances, and enjoined on his vassal to march against the aggressors and drive them into the sea; but Nabopolassar, instead of obeying his suzerain, joined forces with the rebels, and declared his independence. Assur-etililâni and his younger brother had possibly neglected to take the hands of Bel, and were therefore looked upon as illegitimate sovereigns. The annalists of later times erased their names from the Royal Canon, and placed Nabopolassar immediately after Assur-bani-pal, whom they called Kandalanu. But however feeble Assyria had become, the cities on the Lower Euphrates feared her still, and refused to ally themselves with the pretender. Nabopolassar might perhaps have succumbed, as so many before him had done, had he been forced to rely entirely on his own resources, and he might have shared the sad fate of Merodach-baladan or of Shamash-shumukîn; but Marduk, who never failed to show favour to his faithful devotees, “raised up help for him and secured him an ally.” The eyes of all who were oppressed by the cruel yoke of Nineveh were now turned on Cyaxares, and from the time that he had dispersed the Scythian hordes it was to him that they looked for salvation. Nabopolassar besought his assistance, which the Median king graciously promised;** it is even affirmed that a marriage concluded between one of his daughters, Amyfcis, and Nebuchadrezzar, the heir to the throne of Babylon, cemented the alliance.***
* Formerly these barbarians were identified with the remains
of the Scythian hordes, and this hypothesis has been
recently revived by Prashek. G. Rawlinson long ago
recognised that the reference must be to the Chaldæans, who
were perhaps joined by the Susians.
** The Cylinder of Nabonichs, the only original document
in which allusion is made to the destruction of Nineveh,
speaks of the Ummân-Manda and their king, whom it does not
name, and it has been agreed to recognise Cyaxares in this
sovereign. On the other hand, the name of Ummân-Manda
certainly designates in the Assyrian texts the wandering
Iranian tribes to whom the Greeks gave the name of Sakse or
Scythians; the result, in the opinions of several
Assyriologists of the present day, is that neither Astyages
nor Cyaxares were Medes in the sense in which we have
hitherto accepted them as such on the evidence of Herodotus,
but that they were Scythians, the Scythians of the great
invasion. This conclusion does not seem to me at present
justified. The Babylonians, who up till then had not had any
direct intercourse either with the Madai or the Ummân-Manda,
did as the Egyptians had done whether in Saite or Ptolemaic
times, continuing to designate as Kharî, Kafîti, Lotanu, and
Khâti the nations subject to the Persians or Macedonians;
they applied a traditional name of olden days to present
circumstances, and I see, at present, no decisive reason to
change, on the mere authority of this one word, all that the
classical writers have handed down concerning the history of
the epoch according to the tradition current in their days.
*** The name of the princess is written Amuhia, Amyitis. The
classical sources, the only ones which mention her, make her
the daughter of Astyages, and this has given rise to various
hypotheses. According to some, the notice of this princess
has no historical value. According to others, the Astyages
mentioned as her father is not Cyaxares the Mede, but a
Scythian prince who came to the succour of Nabopolassar,
perhaps a predecessor of Cyaxares on the Median throne, and
in this case Phraortes himself under another name. The most
prudent course is still to admit that Abydenus, or one of
the compilers of extracts to whom we owe the information,
has substituted the name of the last king of Media for that
of his predecessor, either by mistake, or by reason of some
chronological combinations. Amyitis, transported into the
harem of the Chaldæan monarch, served, like all princesses
married out of their own countries, as a pledge for the
faithful observance by her relatives of the treaty which had
been concluded.
The western provinces of the empire did not permit themselves to be drawn into the movement, and Judah, for example, remained faithful to its suzerain till the last moment,* but Sin-shar-ishkun received no help from them, and was obliged to fight his last battles single-handed. He shut himself up in Nineveh, and held out as long as he could; but when all his resources were exhausted—ammunitions of war, men and food supplies—he met his fate as a king, and burnt himself alive in his palace with his children and his wives, rather than fall alive into the hands of his conquerors (608 B.C.). The Babylonians would take no part in pillaging the temples, out of respect for the gods, who were practically identical with their own, but the Medes felt no such scruples. “Their king, the intrepid one, entirely destroyed the sanctuaries of the gods of Assur, and the cities of Accad which had shown themselves hostile to the lord of Accad, and had not rendered him assistance. He destroyed their holy places, and left not one remaining; he devastated their cities, and laid them waste as it were with a hurricane.” Nineveh laid low, Assyria no longer existed. After the lapse of a few years, she was named only among the legends of mythical days: two centuries later, her very site was forgotten, and a Greek army passed almost under the shadow of her dismantled towers, without a suspicion that there lay before it all that remained of the city where Semiramis had reigned in her glory.**