Only one other matter of interest concerning these countries need detain us, and that is the fact that they are the nations which Jeremiah believed would work the vengeance of the Lord upon Babylon. The prophet undoubtedly thought that a period of greatness was in store for these peoples, and he looked to them, and not to Elam and Persia, to fulfil his prophecies.
“Make bright the arrows; gather the shields; the Lord hath raised up the spirit of the kings of the Medes.… Set ye up a standard in the land, blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations against her [Babylon], call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat [Urartu], Minni, and Ashchenaz.[28] … Prepare against her the nations with the kings of the Medes, the captains thereof and all the rulers thereof.…” (Jeremiah li. 11, 27, 28.)
It is clear that Jeremiah had the “true Medes” in mind when he uttered these words, since he speaks of the “kings of the Medes,” whereas the Manda, as we shall presently see, had a strongly organised government under one king.
Modern investigation is tending to establish the fact that this prophecy of Jeremiah is one originally uttered against Nineveh and subsequently changed to apply to the capital of Nebuchadrezzar, since the mention of Urartu and Minni with at least a possible future describes conditions that could scarcely have existed at a date much later than the fall of Nineveh. There are other examples of this sort of adaptation in the Bible; for example, Isaiah’s prophecy of Moab’s doom.
We come now to that recently discovered people, of great importance as the first of the Indo-European family to affect the current of world-history in Western Asia, but of whose story the modern world has remained in complete ignorance until the present day.
By the time of Esarhaddon the wave of Indo-European migration had begun to assume threatening proportions to the Semitic nations of Mesopotamia, although from southern Russia the tide had been pouring in for many centuries. Media was populated, and then the nomadic stream parted, one great mass moving westward into Asia Minor, and another to the east, and then south as far as Elam, neither making any disturbance in the Assyrian empire. Nevertheless the Semites soon found themselves surrounded, peacefully but positively, by an alien race.
Northeast of Assyria, and extending to the southern shores of the Caspian, was the ancient kingdom of Ellipi, with its capital at Ecbatana—the Achmetha of the Bible. Of its fortunes we got a glimpse now and then in the course of Assyrian history: Sargon laid it under tribute, and it entered into alliance with Elam in the desperate struggle with Sennacherib—and then the curtain of oblivion falls. We know its fate—the nomads descended upon it. In this region the new-comers seem quickly to have effected the organisation of a new state. To the Assyrians they are known as the Manda, and there is little doubt that they are identical with the Scythians of classical history.
As far back as Esarhaddon’s day there are allusions to this people on the monuments. That monarch perceived the danger threatening his country, and made at least one successful effort to prevent the Scythian or Cimmerian stream from pouring into Mesopotamia. At a battle fought in Cilicia he boasts that he conquered the Cimmerian leader, Teuspa or Teispes, whom he calls a “Manda.” Asshurbanapal, too, in a recently discovered inscription, expresses gratitude to the gods for a victory over “that limb of Satan,” Tuktammu of the Manda. “It is possible,” says Professor Sayce, “that Tuktammu is the Lygdamis of Strabo, who led the Cimmerians into Cilicia, from whence they afterward marched westward and burned Sardis.”
In the course of a single century, therefore, new political conditions had rapidly developed. In the border regions of Assyria “was enacted the same drama which centuries later took place in Italy, as the northern barbarians came southward over the mountains and seized the plains of Lombardy. Rome could only make a feeble resistance, and a little later even the capital went down before them. The parallel goes even that far also, for Nineveh likewise was done to destruction through the help of these same barbarians who now settled in her outlying provinces.”