The might of Babylon, as I have said, must have seemed so great to the Jews, carried away into exile, that it never could be overthrown. And yet, within less than fifty years from the siege and capture of Jerusalem, Babylon itself was taken by a power of such overmastering strength that the Babylonians only once afterwards, and to no effect, attempted to regain independence.
This extraordinary "judgment," as the Jews regarded it, was executed by the hand of the Persians under their great leader Cyrus.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PERSIANS AND THE GREEKS
The Persians are a people that up to this point come into the story hardly at all. Suddenly, out of the East, they come right into its very centre and are the principal actors in it for a century or two.
After the break-up of the Assyrian power, the strongest nation in the alliance that had done that breaking was the nation of the Medes. The Medes and Persians were of the same race, different altogether from the Semitic. They were of that great race called Aryan, or Indo-European, that came from the high lands in the centre of Asia. Probably their numbers so increased that they had to find new country. They pressed down southward and westward, towards the sun and the more fertile lands. They were hardy and accustomed to moving about. It was no hardship to them to make migrations. They moved with their wives and children, flocks and herds, and all their small household goods. A great number pressed down into India. Another big stream flowing towards the west came as far as the Babylonian eastern border.
These Aryan people from the north-west were great riders. It is thought that they introduced the horse to the Babylonians, and that from the Babylonians it came to Egypt.
The country of Elam had been invaded, and its power shattered, by the Assyrians shortly before the break-up of their own empire, and this shattering, together with the fighting between the Assyrians and the alliance formed against them, gave the Persians (who inhabited a country to the east called Iran, and especially the part of that country called Persis) the chance of getting possession of Elam. This they did, and established themselves in Susa, the old capital city of the Elamites. Persia was actually the vassal of Media, until Cyrus, who was the Persian king at Susa, led a revolt against them. Within three years he had conquered and taken their capital, and Media was now a subject state to its own late subject, Persia.
Thus they were, then, established in their power along the Eastern boundary of Babylonia, which had now become the master empire by the defeat of Assyria. Nevertheless Cyrus, at the head of the Persian army, took this mighty Babylon without a battle! But he had to fight some hard battles first. It seems that the Medes had made treaties with their allies of Babylon and Egypt which the Persians did not feel disposed to pay attention to. This aroused such opposition to the Persians that an alliance of Babylonians and Egyptians with Crœsus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, and with the Spartans, was formed against them.