All that we can guess is that the last sovereign of Nineveh fell before a coalition in which Media and Chaldæa played the chief parts[77]. Nabopolassar, the general to whom he confided the defence of Babylon, entered into an alliance with Cyaxares. Assuredilani shut himself up in his capital, where he resisted as long as he could, and finally set fire to his palace and allowed himself to be burned alive rather than fall living into the hands of his enemies (625 B.C.). Nineveh, "the dwelling of the lions," "the bloody city," saw its last day; "Nineveh is laid waste," says the prophet Nahum, "who will bemoan her?"[78]
The modern historian will feel more pity for Assyria than the Jewish poet, the sincere interpreter of a national hatred which was fostered by frequent and cruel wounds to the national pride. We can forgive Nineveh much, because she wrote so much and built so much, because she covered so much clay with her arrow-heads, and so many walls with her carved reliefs. We forgive her because to the ruins of her palaces and the broken fragments of her sculpture we owe most of our present knowledge of the great civilization which once filled the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. The kings of Assyria went on building palaces up to the last moment. Each reign added to the series of royal dwellings in which every chamber was filled with inscriptions and living figures. Some of these structures were raised in Nineveh itself, some in the neighbouring cities. At the south-east angle of the mound at Nimroud, the remains of a palace begun by Assuredilani have been excavated. Its construction had been interrupted by the Medes and Scythians, for it was left unfinished. Its proposed area was very small. The rooms were narrow and ill arranged, and their walls were decorated at foot with slabs of bare limestone instead of sculptured alabaster. Above the plinth thus formed they were covered with roughly executed paintings upon plaster, instead of with enamelled bricks. Both plan and decoration show evidence of haste and disquiet. The act of sovereignty had to be done, but all certainty of the morrow had vanished. From the moment in which Assyrian sculpture touched its highest point in the reign of Assurbanipal, the material resources of the kingdom and the supply of skilled workmen had slowly but constantly diminished.[79]
Nineveh destroyed, the empire of which it was the capital vanished with it. The new Babylonian empire, the Empires of the Medes and of the Persians followed each other with such rapidity that the Assyrian heroes and their prowess might well have been forgotten. The feeble recollections they left in men's minds became tinged with the colours of romance. The Greeks took pleasure in the fable of Sardanapalus: they developed it into a moral tale with elaborate conceits and telling contrasts, but they did not invent it from the foundation. The first hint of it must have been given by legends of the fall and destruction of Nineveh current in the cities of Ecbatana, Susa, and Babylon when Ctesias was within their walls.
After the obliteration of Nineveh the Medes and Chaldæans divided western Asia between them. A family alliance was concluded between Nabopolassar and Cyaxares at the moment of concerting the attack which was to have such a brilliant success, and either in consequence of that alliance or for some unknown motive, the two nations remained good friends after their common victory. The Medes kept Assyria, and extended themselves to the north, over the whole country between the Caspian and the Black Sea. They would have carried their frontiers to the Ægæan but for the existence of the Lydian monarchy, which arrested them on the left bank of the Halys. To the south of these regions the Second Chaldæan Empire took shape (625-536 B.C.). It made no effort to expand eastwards over that plateau of Iran where the Aryan element, as represented by the Medes and soon afterwards by the Persians, had acquired an ever-increasing preponderance, but it pretended to the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria. In the former country, however, the Saite princes had rekindled the national spirit, and the frontiers were held successfully against the invaders. It was otherwise with the Jewish people. Sargon had taken Samaria and put an end to the Israelitish kingdom; that of Judah was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Thanks to its insular position, Tyre escaped the lot of Jerusalem, but the rest of Phœnicia and all northern Syria were subdued by Babylon.
In all this region the Semitic element had long been encroaching upon those other elements which had preceded and been associated with it at the commencement. In all Mesopotamia only one tongue was spoken and written, the tongue we now know as Assyrian, but should call Assyro-Chaldæan. The differences of dialect between north and south were of little importance, and the language in question is that of the inscriptions in both countries.
Another change requires to be mentioned. Our readers will remember the names of Ur, Erech, and many other cities which played a great part in the early history of the country, and were all capitals in turn. Babylon, however, in time acquired an unquestioned supremacy over them all. The residence of the Assyrian viceroys during the supremacy of the northern kingdom, it became the metropolis of the new empire after the fall of Nineveh. Without having lost either their population or their prosperity, the other cities sunk to the condition of provincial towns.
For some hundred years Babylon had been cruelly ill-treated by the Assyrians, and never-ending revolts had been the consequence. Nabopolassar began the work of restoration, and his son Nebuchadnezzar, the real hero of the Second Chaldee Empire, carried it on with ardour during the whole of his long reign. "He restored the canals which united the Tigris to the Euphrates above Babylon; he rebuilt the bridge which gave a means of communication between the two halves of the city; he repaired the great reservoirs in which the early kings had caught and stored the superfluous waters of the Euphrates during the annual inundation. Upon these works his prisoners of war, Syrians and Egyptians, Jews and Arabs, were employed in vast numbers. The great wall of Babylon was set up anew; so was the temple of Nebo at Borsippa; the reservoir at Sippara, the royal canal, and a part at least of Lake Pallacopas, were excavated; Kouti, Sippara, Borsippa, Babel, rose upon their own ruins. Nebuchadnezzar was to Chaldæa what Rameses II. was to Egypt, and there is not a place in Babylon or about it where his name and the signs of his marvellous activity cannot be found."[80]
Nebuchadnezzar reigned forty-three years (604-561), and left Babylon the largest and finest city of Asia. After his death the decadence was rapid. A few years saw several kings succeed one another upon the throne, while a revolution was being accomplished upon the plateau of Iran which was destined to be fatal to Chaldæa. The supremacy in that region passed from the feeble and exhausted Medes into the hands of the Persians, another people of the same stock. The latter were a tribe of mountaineers teeming with native energy, and their strength had been systematically organized by a young and valiant chief, in whom they had full confidence because he had given them confidence in themselves. Cyrus began by leading them to the conquest of Media, Assyria, and Asia Minor, and by forcing the nations who dwelt between the southern confines of Persia and the mountains of Upper India to acknowledge his supremacy. Finally, he collected his forces for an attack upon Chaldæa, and, in 536, Babylon fell before his arms.