585 Treaty with the Phrygians fixing boundaries of the two countries. Lydia is now threatened with the growing power of the Manda or eastern Scythians, and a six years’ struggle is ended by the marriage of Alyattes’ daughter, Aryenis, to Astyages, king of the Manda. The two kingdoms become friendly.
560 Crœsus ascends the throne on the death of his father Alyattes. He makes friends with Miltiades, the tyrant of the Thracian Chersonesus.
546 Crœsus heads an alliance with Aahmes II of Egypt, Nabonidus of Babylon, and the Spartans against Cyrus of Elam, who has overthrown his suzerain Astyages of the Manda. He enters Cappadocia on his way to meet Cyrus, is defeated in two battles and retires to Sardis. The allies do not send aid and the city falls. Lydia is absorbed into the Persian empire and then into the Greek. At Alexander’s death Lydia passed to Antigonus; then Achæus made himself king of Sardis, but Antiochus put him to death. Eumenes presented the country to the Romans, and subsequently it formed part of the province of Asia.
FOOTNOTES
[10] [There still exists an uncertainty as to the chronological order of these two kings. Meyer places Mari first, although the Biblical narrative would indicate the reverse to be the true order.]
CHAPTER I. THE HITTITES
When we pass to the north and west from Syria and Mesopotamia, we enter a region by no means so well known as the home of the Semites. The peninsula of Asia Minor is so situated, geographically, that it is the only highway between Asia and Europe, much as Palestine is the highway between Asia and Africa. The peoples which inhabited it were therefore necessarily, in some sense, a buffer between the great nations of the two continents. For the most part, the rôle they played, at any rate in later history, was a comparatively insignificant one. It is becoming more and more evident, however, that there was a time in ancient history,—using the term in the ordinary or relative sense,—when the people who inhabited Asia Minor took a foremost rank among the nations of their time as a warlike and conquering race.