Six years later,--in 600 B.C.--this was the position of that part of the
East which had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldaean
king of Babylon, who had succeeded his father about 605, held the
greater share of it to obedience and tribute, but not, apparently, by
means of any such centralized bureaucratic organization as the Assyrians
had established. Just before his father's death he had beaten the
Egyptians in a pitched battle under the walls of Carchemish, and
subsequently had pursued them south through Syria, and perhaps across
the frontier, before being recalled to take up his succession. He had
now, therefore, no rival or active competitor in Syria, and this part of
the lost empire of Assyria seems to have enjoyed a rare interval of
peace under native client princes who ruled more or less on Assyrian
lines. The only fenced places which made any show of defiance were Tyre
and Jerusalem, which both relied on Egypt. The first would outlast an
intermittent siege of thirteen years; but the other, with far less
resources, was soon to pay full price for having leaned too long on the
"staff of a broken reed."
About the east and north a different story would certainly have to be
told, if we could tell it in full. But though Greek traditions come to
our aid, they have much less to say about these remote regions than the
inscribed annals of that empire, which had just come to its end, have
had hitherto: and unfortunately the Median inheritors of Assyria have
left no epigraphic records of their own--at least none have been found.
If, as seems probable, the main element of Kyaxares' war strength was
Scythian, we can hardly expect to find records either of his conquest or
the subsequent career of the Medes, even though Ecbatana should be laid
bare below the site of modern Hamadan; for the predatory Scyth, like the
mediaeval Mongol, halted too short a time to desire to carve stones, and
probably lacked skill to inscribe them. To complete our discomfiture,
the only other possible source of light, the Babylonian annals, sheds
none henceforward on the north country and very little on any country.
Nebuchadnezzar--so far as his records have been found and read--did not
adopt the Assyrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his
expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures,
we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the
rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have
constituted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike
operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but
probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past
Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.
We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three
recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service.
First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides
overrunning all Assyria and the northern part of Babylonia after the
fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west
Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession
to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come
into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The
reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power
of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed
part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552
B.C.
Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred
about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the
fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an
expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained,
under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince
of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the
north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the
power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti
country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in
the widest sense of this vague term.
Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same
passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly
coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents
as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held
such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have
been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of
influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar--for he it
must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him
by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown--was not a wholly independent
ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client
states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of
expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to
domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an
alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their
achievements.
In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the
raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching
westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be),
and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point
south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included
Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam
on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of
this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there
too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom
interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power
westward to Asia Minor, the Medes followed routes north of Taurus, not
the old Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of so much we can be fairly
sure. Much else that we are told of Media by Herodotus--his marvellous
account of Ecbatana and scarcely less wonderful account of the reigning
house--must be passed by till some confirmation of it comes to light;
and that, perhaps, will never be.