Chapter 7

the seventh or eighth month, which is not usually accepted, as it is in contradiction with what is affirmed in chap, xxiii. 21-23, viz. that the Passover celebrated at Jerusalem was in the same year as the reform, in the eighteenth year. It is to do away with the contradiction between these two passages that the Hebrew text has suppressed the mention of the month. I think, however, it ought to be considered authentic and be retained, if we are allowed to place the celebration of the Passover in what would be one year after. To do this it would not be needful to correct the regnal date in the text: admitting that the reform took place in 621, the Passover of 620 would still quite well have taken place in the eighteenth year of Josiah, that being dependent on the time of year at which the king had ascended the throne.

The first outburst of zeal having spent itself, a reaction was ere long bound to set in both among the ruling classes and among the people, and the spectacle that Asia at that time presented to their view was truly of a nature to incite doubts in the minds of the faithful. Assyria--that Assyria of which the prophets had spoken as the irresistible emissary of the Most High--had not only failed to recover from the injuries she had received at the hands, first of the Medes, and then of the Scythians, but had with each advancing year seen more severe wounds inflicted upon her, and hastening her irretrievably to her ruin. And besides this, Egypt and Chaldæa, the ancient kingdoms which had for a short time bent beneath her yoke, had now once more arisen, and were astonishing the world by their renewed vigour. Psammetichus, it is true, after having stretched his arm across the desert and laid hands upon the citadel which secured to him an outlet into Syria for his armies, had proceeded no further, and thus showed that he was not inclined to reassert the ancient rights of Egypt over the countries of the Jordan and the Orontes; but he had died in 611, and his son, Necho II., who succeeded him, did not manifest the same peaceful intentions.*

* The last dated stele of Psammetichus I. is the official epitaph of the Apis which died in his fifty-second year. On the other hand, an Apis, born in the fifty-third year of Psammetichus, died in the sixteenth year of Necho, after having lived 16 years, 7 months, 17 days. A very simple calculation shows that Psammetichus I. reigned fifty-four years, as stated by Herodotus and Manetho, according to Julius Africanus.

If he decided to try his fortune in Syria, supported by his Greek and Egyptian battalions, what would be the attitude that Judah would assume between moribund Assyria and the kingdom of the Pharaohs in its renewed vigour? It was in the spring of 608 that the crisis occurred. Nineveh, besieged by the Medes, was on the point of capitulating, and it was easy to foresee that the question as to who should rule there would shortly be an open one: should Egypt hesitate longer in seizing what she believed to be her rightful heritage, she would run the risk of finding the question settled and another in possession. Necho quitted Memphis and made his way towards the Asiatic frontier with the army which his father had left to him. It was no longer composed of the ill-organised bands of the Ethiopian kings or the princes of the Delta, temporarily united under the rule of a single leader, but all the while divided by reciprocal hatreds and suspicions which doomed it to failure. All the troops which constituted it--Egyptians, Libyans, and Greeks alike--were thoroughly under the control of their chief, and advanced in a compact and irresistible mass “like the Nile: like a river its volume rolls onward. It said: I arise, I inundate the earth, I will drown cities and people! Charge, horses! Chariots, fly forward at a gallop! Let the warriors march, the Ethiopian and the Libyan under the shelter of his buckler, the fellah bending the bow!”*

* Jer. xlvi. 7-9, where the prophet describes, not the army which marched against Josiah, but that which was beaten at Carchemish. With a difference of date of only three or four years, the constituent elements of the army were certainly the same, so that the description of one would apply to the other.

As soon as Josiah heard the news, he called together his troops and prepared to resist the attack. Necho affected not to take his demonstrations seriously, and sent a disdainful message recommending him to remain neutral: “What have I to do with thee, thou King of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have war: and God hath commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling with God who is with me, that He destroy thee not!”*

* The message of Necho to Josiah is known to us from 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-22.

Having despatched the message, probably at the moment of entering the Shephelah, he continued in a northerly direction, nothing doubting that his warning had met a friendly reception; but however low Nineveh had fallen, Josiah could not feel that he was loosed from the oaths which bound him to her, and, trusting in the help of Jahveh, he threw himself resolutely into the struggle. The Egyptian generals were well acquainted with the route as far as the farther borders of Philistia, having passed along it a few years previously, at the time of the campaign of Psammetichus; but they had no experience of the country beyond Ashdod, and were solely dependent for guidance on the information of merchants or the triumphant records of the old Theban Pharaohs. These monuments followed the traditional road which had led their ancestors from Gaza to Megiddo, from Megiddo to Qodshu, from Qodshu to Carchemish, and they were reckoning on passing through the valley of the Jordan, and then that of the Orontes, without encountering any resistance, when, at the entrance to the gorges of Carmel, they were met by the advance guard of the Judæan army.

Josiah, not having been warned in time to meet them as they left the desert, had followed a road parallel to their line of march, and had taken up his position in advance of them on the plain of Megiddo, on the very spot where Thutmosis III. had vanquished the Syrian confederates nearly ten centuries before. The King of Judah was defeated and killed in the confusion of the battle, and the conqueror pushed on northwards without, at that moment, giving the fate of the scattered Jews a further thought.* He rapidly crossed the plain of the Orontes by the ancient caravan track, and having reached the Euphrates, he halted under the walls of Carchemish. Perhaps he may have heard there of the fall of Nineveh, and the fear of drawing down upon himself the Medes or the Babylonians prevented him from crossing the river and raiding the country of the Balikh, which, from the force of custom, the royal scribes still persisted in designating by the disused name of Mitanni.**

* 2 Kings xxiii. 29; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 22, 23. It is probably to this battle that Herodotus alludes when he says that Necho overcame the Syrians at Magdôlos. The identity of Magdôlos and Megiddo, accepted by almost all historians, was disputed by Gutschmid, who sees in the Magdôlos of Herodotus the Migdol of the Syro-Egyptian frontier, and in the engagement itself, an engagement of Necho with the Assyrians and their Philistine allies; also by Th. Reinach, who prefers to identify Magdôlos with one of the Migdols near Ascalon, and considers this combat as fought against the Assyrian army of occupation. If the information in Herodotus were indeed borrowed from Hecatasus of Miletus, and by the latter from the inscription placed by Necho in the temple of Branchidae, it appears to me impossible to admit that Magdôlos does not here represent Megiddo.

** The text of 2 Kings xxiii. 29 says positively that Necho was marching towards the Euphrates. The name Mitanni is found even in Ptolemaic times.

He returned southwards, after having collected the usual tributes and posted a few garrisons at strategic points; at Biblah he held a kind of _Durbar_ to receive the homage of the independent Phoenicians* and of the old vassals of Assyria, who, owing to the rapidity of his movements, had not been able to tender their offerings on his outward march.

* The submission of the Phoenicians to Necho is gathered from a passage in Berosus, where he says that the Egyptian army beaten at Carchemish comprised Phoenicians, besides Syrians and Arabs.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph published in Mariette. This scarab, now in the Gizeh Museum, is the only Egyptian monument which alludes to the victories of Necho. Above, the king stands between Nît and Isis; below, the vanquished are stretched on the ground.

The Jews had rescued the body of their king and had brought it back in his chariot to Jerusalem; they proclaimed in his stead, not his eldest son Eliakim, but the youngest, Shallum, who adopted the name of Jehoahaz on ascending the throne. He was a young man, twenty-three years of age, light and presumptuous of disposition, opposed to the reform movement, and had doubtless been unwise enough to display his hostile feelings towards the conqueror. Necho summoned him to Eiblah, deposed him after a reign of three months, condemned him to prison, and replaced him by Eliakim, who changed his name to that of Jehoiakim--“he whom Jahveh exalts;” and after laying Judah under a tribute of one hundred talents of silver and one of gold, the Egyptian monarch returned to his own country. Certain indications lead us to believe that he was obliged to undertake other punitive expeditions. The Philistines, probably deceived by false rumours of his defeat, revolted against him about the time that he was engaged in hostilities in Northern Syria, and on receiving news not only of his safety, but of the victory he had gained, their alarm was at once aroused. Judah forgot her own sorrows on seeing the peril in which they stood, and Jeremiah pronounced against them a prophecy full of menace. “Behold,” he cried, “waters rise up out of the north, and shall become an overflowing stream, and shall overflow the land and all that is therein, the city and them that dwell therein; and the men shall cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl... for the Lord will spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the Isle of Caphtor. Baldness is come upon Gaza; Ascalon is dumb with terror, and you, all that are left of the giants, how long will ye tear your faces in your mourning?” * Ascalon was sacked and then Gaza,** and Necho at length was able to re-enter his domains, doubtless by the bridge of Zalu, following in this his models, his heroic ancestors of the great Theban dynasties.

* [R.V., “Ashkolon is brought to nought, the remnant of their valley: how long wilt thou cut thyself?”--Tr.]

** Jer. xlvii., which is usually attributed to a period subsequent to the defeat at Carchemish or even later; the title, which alone mentions the Egyptians, is wanting in the LXX. If we admit that the enemy coming from the north is the Egyptian and not the Chaldaean, as do most writers, the only time that danger could have threatened Philistia from the Egyptians coming from the north, was when Necho, victorious, was returning from his first campaign. In this case, the Kadytis of Herodotus, which has caused so much trouble to commentators, would certainly be Gaza, and there would be no difficulty in explaining how the tradition preserved by the Greek historian placed the taking of this town after the battle of Megiddo.

He wished thereupon to perpetuate the memory of the Greeks who had served him so bravely, and as soon as the division of the spoil had been made, he sent as an offering to the temple of Apollo at Miletus, the cuirass which he had worn throughout the campaign.

We can picture the reception which his subjects gave him, and how the deputations of priests and nobles in white robes flocked out to meet him with garlands of flowers in their hands, and with acclamations similar to those which of old had heralded the return of Seti I. or Ramses II. National pride, no doubt, was flattered by this revival of military glory, but other motives than those of vanity lay at the root of the delight exhibited by the whole country at the news of the success of the expedition. The history of the century which was drawing to its close, had demonstrated more than once how disadvantageous it was to Egypt to be separated from a great power merely by the breadth of the isthmus. If Taharqa, instead of awaiting the attack on the banks of the Nile, had met the Assyrians at the foot of Carmel, or even before Gaza, it would have been impossible for Esarhaddon to turn the glorious kingdom of the Pharaohs into an Assyrian province after merely a few weeks of fighting. The dictates of prudence, more than those of ambition, rendered, therefore, the conquest of Syria a necessity, and Necho showed his wisdom in undertaking it at the moment when the downfall of Nineveh reduced all risk of opposition to a minimum; it remained to be seen whether the conquerors of Sin-shar-ishkun would tolerate for long the interference of a third robber, and would consent to share the spoil with these Africans, who, having had none of the trouble, had hastened to secure the profit. All the Mediterranean dependencies of Assyria, such as Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judæ, fell naturally within the sphere of Babylon rather than that of Media, and, indeed, Cyaxares never troubled himself about them; and Nabopolassar, who considered them his own by right, had for the moment too much in hand to permit of his reclaiming them. The Aramæans of the Khabur and the Balikh, the nomads of the Mesopotamian plain, had not done homage to him, and the country districts were infested with numerous bands of Cimmerians and Scythians, who had quite recently pillaged the sacred city of Harrân and violated the temple of the god Sin.* Nabopolassar, who was too old to command his troops in person, probably entrusted the conduct of them to Nebuchadrezzar, who was the son he had appointed to succeed him, and who had also married the Median princess. Three years sufficed this prince to carry the frontier of the new Chaldæan empire as far as the Syrian fords of the Euphrates, within sight of Thapsacus and Carchemish. Harrân remained in the hands of the barbarians,** probably on condition of their paying a tribute, but the district of the Subaru was laid waste, its cities reduced to ashes, and the Babylonian suzerainty established on the southern slopes of the Masios.

* _Inscrip. of the Cylinder of Nabonidus_ mentions the pillage of Harrân as having taken place fifty-four years before the date of its restoration by Nabonidus. This was begun, as we know, in the third year of that king, possibly in 554-3. The date of the destruction is, therefore, 608-7, that is to say, a few months before the destruction of Nineveh.

** The passage in the _Cylinder of Nabonidus_ shows that the barbarians remained in possession of the town.

Having brought these preliminary operations to a successful issue, Nabopolassar, considering himself protected on the north and north-east by his friendship with Cyaxares, no longer hesitated to make an effort to recover the regions dominated by Egyptian influence, and, if the occasion presented itself, to reduce to submission the Pharaoh who was in his eyes merely a rebellious satrap. Nebuchadrezzar again placed himself at the head of his troops; Necho, warned of his projects, hastened to meet him with all the forces at his disposal, and, owing probably to the resistance offered by the garrisons which he possessed in the Hittite fortresses, he had time to continue his march as far as the Euphrates. The two armies encountered each other at Carchemish; the Egyptians were completely defeated in spite of their bravery and the skilful tactics of their Greek auxiliaries, and the Asiatic nations, who had once more begun to rely on Egypt, were obliged to acknowledge that they were as unequal to the task of overcoming Chaldaea as they had been of sustaining a struggle with Assyria.*

* Jer. xlvi. 2; cf. 2 Kings xxiv. 7, where the editor, without mentioning the battle of Carchemish, recalls in passing that “the King of Babylon had taken, from the brook of Egypt unto the river Euphrates, all that pertained to the King of Egypt.”

The religious party in Judah, whose hopes had been disappointed by the victory of Pharaoh at Megiddo, now rejoiced at his defeat, and when the remains of his legions made their way back across the Philistine plain, closely pressed by the enemy, Jeremiah hailed them as they passed with cutting irony. Two or three brief, vivid sentences depicting the spirit that had fired them a few months before, and then the picture of their disorderly flight: “Order ye the buckler and shield, and draw near to battle. Harness the horses; and get up, ye horsemen, and stand forth with your helmets; furbish the spears, put on the coats of mail. Wherefore have I seen it? They are dismayed and turn backward; and their mighty ones are beaten down, and are fled apace, and look not back; terror is on every side, saith the Lord. Let not the swift flee away, nor the mighty man escape; in the north by the river Euphrates have they stumbled and fallen.... Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin daughter of Egypt; in vain dost thou use many medicines; there is no healing for thee. The nations have heard of thy shame, and the earth is full of thy cry: for the mighty man hath stumbled against the mighty, they are fallen both of them together.” * Nebuchadrezzar received by the way the submission of Jehoiakim, and of the princes of Ammon, Moab, and the Philistines;** he was nearing Pelusium on his way into Egypt, when a messenger brought him the news of his father’s death.

* Jer. xlvi. 3-6, 11, 12.

** The submission of all these peoples is implied by the passage already cited in 2 Kings xxiv. 7; Berosus speaks of the Phoenician, Jewish, and Syrian prisoners whom Nebuchadrezzar left to his generals, when he resolved to return to Babylon by the shortest route.

He feared lest a competitor should dispute his throne--perhaps his younger brother, that Nabu-shum-lishir who had figured at his side at the dedication of a temple to Marduk. He therefore concluded an armistice with Necho, by the terms of which he remained master of the whole of Syria between the Euphrates and the Wady el-Arish, and then hastily turned homewards. But his impatience could not brook the delay occasioned by the slow march of a large force, nor the ordinary circuitous route by Carchemish and through Mesopotamia. He hurried across the Arabian desert, accompanied by a small escort of light troops, and presented himself unexpectedly at the gates of Babylon. He found all in order. His Chaldæan ministers had assumed the direction of affairs, and had reserved the throne for the rightful heir; he had only to appear to be acclaimed and obeyed (B.C. 605).

His reign was long, prosperous, and on the whole peaceful. The recent changes in Asiatic politics had shut out the Chaldæans from the majority of the battle-fields on which the Assyrians had been wont to wage warfare with the tribes on their eastern and northern frontiers. We no longer see stirring on the border-land those confused masses of tribes and communities of whose tumultuous life the Ninevite annals make such frequent record: Elam as an independent state no longer existed, neither did Philipi and Namri, nor the Cossæans, nor Parsua, nor the Medes with their perpetual divisions, nor the Urartians and the Mannai in a constant state of ferment within their mountain territory; all that remained of that turbulent world now constituted a single empire, united under the hegemony of the Medes, and the rule of a successful conqueror. The greater part of Blam was already subject to those Achæmenides who called themselves sovereigns of Anshân as well as of Persia, and whose fief was dependent on the kingdom of Ecbatana:* it is probable that Chaldasa received as her share of the ancient Susian territory the low countries of the Uknu and the Ulai, occupied by the Aramæan tribes of the Puqudu, the Eutu, and the Grambulu;** but Susa fell outside her portion, and was soon transformed into a flourishing Iranian town.

* “The king and the princes of Elam” mentioned in Jer. xxv. 25, xlix.35-39, and in Ezele. xxxii. 24, 25, in the time of Nebuchadrezzar, are probably the Persian kings of Anshân and their Elamite vassals--not only, as is usually believed, the kings and native princes conquered by Assur-bani-pal; the same probably holds good of the Elam which an anonymous prophet associates with the Medes under Nabonidus, in the destruction of Babylon (Isa. xxi. 2). The princes of Malamîr appear to me to belong to an anterior epoch.

** The enumeration given in Ezelc. xxiii. 23, “the Babylonians and all the Chaldæans, Pelted, and Shoa, and Koa,” shows us probably that the Aramæans of the Lower Tigris represented by Pekôd, as those of the Lower Euphrates are by the Chaldæans, belonged to the Babylonian empire in the time of the prophet. They are also considered as belonging to Babylon in the passage of an anonymous prophet (Jer. I. 21), who wrote in the last days of the Chaldæn empire: “Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against it and the inhabitants of Pekod.” Translators and commentators have until quite recently mistaken the import of the name Pekôd.

The plains bordering the right bank of the Tigris, from the Uknu to the Turnat or the Eadanu, which had belonged to Babylon from the very earliest times, were no doubt still retained by her;* but the mountain district which commanded them certainly remained in the hands of Cyaxares, as well as the greater part of Assyria proper, and there is every reason to believe that from the Eadanu northwards the Tigris formed the boundary between the two allies, as far as the confluence of the Zab.

* This is what appears to me to follow from the account of the conquest o£ Babylon by Cyrus, as related by Herodotus.

The entire basin of the Upper Tigris and its Assyrian colonies, Amidi and Tushkân were now comprised in the sphere of Medic influence, and the settlement of the Scythians at Harrân, around one of the most venerated of the Semitic sanctuaries, shows to what restrictions the new authority of Chaldasa was subjected, even in the districts of Mesopotamia, which were formerly among the most faithful possessions of Nineveh. If these barbarians had been isolated, they would not long have defied the King of Babylon, but being akin to the peoples who were subject to Cyaxares, they probably claimed his protection, and regarded themselves as his liege men; it was necessary to treat them with consideration, and tolerate the arrogance of their presence upon the only convenient road which connected the eastern with the western provinces of the kingdom. It is therefore evident that there was no opening on this side for those ever-recurring struggles in which Assyria had exhausted her best powers; one war was alone possible, that with Media, but it was fraught with such danger that the dictates of prudence demanded that it should be avoided at all costs, even should the alliance between the two courts cease to be cemented by a royal marriage. However great the confidence which he justly placed in the valour of his Chaldæans, Nebuchadrezzar could not hide from himself the fact that for two centuries they had always been beaten by the Assyrians, and that therefore he would run too great a risk in provoking hostilities with an army which had got the better of the conquerors of his people. Besides this, Cyaxares was fully engaged in subjecting the region which he had allotted to himself, and had no special desire to break with his ally. Nothing is known of his history during the years which followed the downfall of Nineveh, but it is not difficult to guess what were the obstacles he had to surmount, and the result of the efforts which he made to overcome them. The country which extends between the Caspian and the Black Sea--the mountain block of Armenia, the basins of the Araxes and the Kur, the valleys of the Halys, the Iris, and the Thermodon, and the forests of the Anti-Taurus and the Taurus itself--had been thrown into utter confusion by the Cimmerians and the Scythians. Nothing remained of the previous order of things which had so long prevailed there, and the barbarians who for a century and a half had destroyed everything in the country seemed incapable of organising anything in its place. Urartu had shrunk within its ancient limits around Ararat, and it is not known who ruled her; the civilisation of Argistis and Menuas had almost disappeared with the dynasty which had opposed the power of Assyria, and the people, who had never been much impregnated by it, soon fell back into their native rude habits of life. Confused masses of European barbarians were stirring in Etiaus and the regions of the Araxes, seeking a country in which to settle themselves, and did not succeed in establishing themselves firmly till a much later period in the district of Sakasênê, to which was attached the name of one of their tribes.*

* Strabo states that Armenia and the maritime regions of Cappadocia suffered greatly from the invasion of the Scythians.

Such of the Mushku and the Tabal as had not perished had taken refuge in the north, among the mountains bordering the Black Sea, where they were ere long known to the Greeks as the Moschi and the Tibarenians. The remains of the Cimmerian hordes had taken their place in Cappadocia, and the Phrygian population which had followed in their wake had spread themselves over the basin of the Upper Halys and over the ancient Milidu, which before long took from them the name of Armenia.* All these elements constituted a seething, struggling, restless mass of people, actuated by no plan or method, and subject merely to the caprice of its chiefs; it was, indeed, the “seething cauldron” of which the Hebrew prophets had had a vision, which at times overflowed over the neighbouring nations, and at others was consumed within and wasted itself in fruitless ebullition.**

* The Phrygian origin of the Armenians is pointed out by Herodotus and by Eudoxius.

** Jer. i. 13.

It took Cyaxares years to achieve his conquests; he finally succeeded, however, in reducing the various elements to subjection--Urartians, Scythians, Cimmerians, Chaldæ, and the industrious tribes of the Chalybes and the White Syrians--and, always victorious, appeared at last on the right hank of the Halys; but having reached it, he found himself face to face with foes of quite a different calibre from those with whom he had hitherto to deal. Lydia had increased both in wealth and in vigour since the days when her king Ardys informed his ally Assur-bani-pal that he had avenged the death of his father and driven the Cimmerians from the valley of the Msoander.

He had by so doing averted all immediate danger; but as long as the principal horde remained unexterminated, another invasion was always to be feared; besides which, the barbarian inroad, although of short duration, had wrought such havoc in the country that no native power in Asia Minor appeared, nor in reality was, able to make the effort needful to destroy them. Their king Dugdamis, it will be remembered, met his death in Cilicia at the hands of the Assyrians about the year 640, and Kôbos, his successor, was defeated and killed by the Scythians under Madyes about 633. The repeated repulses they had suffered had the effect of quickly relieving Lydia, Phrygia, and the remaining states of the Ægean and the Black Sea from their inroads; the Milesians wrested Sinope from them about 630, and the few bands left behind when the main body set out for the countries of the Euphrates were so harried and decimated by the people over whom they had terrorised for nearly a century, that they had soon no refuge except round the fortress of Antandros, in the mountains of the Troad. Most of the kingdoms whose downfall they had caused never recovered from their reverses; but Lydia, which had not laid down its arms since the death of Gyges, became possessed by degrees of the whole of their territory; Phrygia proper came back to her in the general redistribution, and with it most of the countries which had been under the rule of the dynasty of Midas, from the mountains of Lycia to the shores of the Black Sea. The transfer was effected, apparently, with very slight opposition and with little loss of time, since in the four or five years which followed the death of Kôbos, Ardys had risen in the estimation of the Greeks to the position enjoyed by Gyges; and when, in 628, Aristomenes, the hero of the Messenian wars, arrived at Rhodes, it is said that he contemplated proceeding from thence, first to Sardes and then to Ecbatana, for the purpose of gaining the adherence of Lydia and Media to his cause.

Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.

Death put an end to his projects, but he would not for a moment have entertained them had not Ardys been at that time at the head of a renowned and flourishing kingdom. The renewal of international commerce followed closely on the re-establishment of peace, and even if the long period of Scythian invasion, followed by the destruction of Nineveh, rendered the overland route less available for regular traffic than before, at all events relations between the inhabitants of the Euphrates valley and those of the iEgean littoral were resumed to such good purpose that before long several fresh marts were opened in Lydia.

Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.

Kymê and Ephesus put the region of the Messogis and the Tmolus into communication with the sea, but the lower valleys of the Hermos and the Masander were closed by the existence of Greek colonies at Smyrna, Clazomenas, Colophon, Priênê, and Miletus--all hostile to the Mermnadæ--which it would be necessary to overcome if these countries were to enjoy the prosperity shared by other parts of the kingdom; hence the principal effort made by the Lydians was either directly to annex these towns, or to impose such treaties on them as would make them their dependencies. Ardys seized Priênê towards 620, and after having thus established himself on the northern shore of the Latrnio Gulf,* he proceeded to besiege Miletus in 616, at the very close of his career. Hostilities were wearily prolonged all through the reign of Sadyattes (615-610), and down to the sixth year of Alyattes.**

* The well-known story that Priênê was saved under Alyattes by a stratagem of the philosopher Bias is merely a fable, of which several other examples are found. It would not be possible to conclude from it, as Grote did, that Ardys’ rule over the town was but ephemeral.

** The periods of duration assigned here to the reigns of these princes are those of Euschius--that is to say, 15 years for Crosus, 37 for Alyattes, 5 for Sadyattes, 37 for Ardys; Julius Africanus gives 15 for Sadyattes and 38 for Ardys, while Herodotus suggests 14 for Crosus, 57 for Alyattes, 12 for Sadyattes, and 59 for Ardys.

The position of Miletus was too strong to permit of its being carried by a _coup de main_; besides which, the Lydians were unwilling to destroy at one blow a town whose colonies, skilfully planted at the seaports from the coasts of the Black Sea to those of Egypt, would one day furnish them with so many outlets for their industrial products. Their method of attacking it resolved itself into a series of exhausting raids. “Every year, as soon as the fruit crops and the harvests began to ripen, Alyattes set out at the head of his troops, whom he caused to march and encamp to the sound of instruments. Having arrived in the Milesian territory, he completely destroyed the crops and the orchards, and then again withdrew.” In these expeditions he was careful to avoid any excesses which would have made the injury inflicted appear irretrievable; his troops were forbidden to destroy dwelling-houses or buildings dedicated to the gods; indeed, on one occasion, when the conflagration which consumed the lands accidentally spread to the temple of Athena near Assêsos, he rebuilt two temples for the goddess at his own expense. The Milesians sustained the struggle courageously, until two reverses at Limeneion and in the plain of the Maeander at length induced them to make terms. Their tyrant, Thrasybulus, acting on the advice of the Delphic Apollo and by the mediation of Periander of Corinth, concluded a treaty with Alyattes in which the two princes, declaring themselves the guest and the ally one of the other, very probably conceded extensive commercial privileges to one another both by land and sea (604).*

* Thrasybulus’ stratagem is said to have taken place at Priênê by Diogenes Laertes and by Polysenus. The war begins under Ardys, lasts for five years under Sadyattes, instead of the six years which Herodotus attributes to it, and five years under Alyattes.

Alyattes rewarded the oracle by the gift of a magnificent bowl, the work of Glaucus of Chios, which continued to be shown to travellers of the Roman period as one of the most remarkable curiosities of Delphi. Alyattes continued his expeditions against the other Greek colonies, but directed them prudently and leisurely, so as not to alarm his European friends, and provoke the formation against himself of a coalition of the Hellenic communities shattered over the isles or along the littoral of the Ægean. We know that towards the end of his reign he recovered Colophon, which had been previously acquired by Gyges, but had regained its independence during the Cimmerian crisis;* he razed Smyrna to the ground, and forced its inhabitants to occupy unfortified towns, where his suzerainty could not be disputed;** he half devastated Clazomense, whose citizens saved it by a despairing effort, and he renewed the ancient alliances with Ephesus, Kymê, and the cities of the region of the Caicus and the Hellespont,*** though it is impossible to attribute an accurate date to each of these particular events.

* Polysenus tells the story of the trick by which Alyattes, after he had treated with the people of Colophon, destroyed their cavalry and seized on their town. The fact that a treaty was made seems to be confirmed by a fragment of Phylarchus, and the surrender of the town to the Lydians by a fragment of Xenophanes, quoted in Athenseus. Schubert does not seem to believe that the town was taken by Alyattes; I have adopted the opinion of Ladet on this point.

** Herodotus and Nicolas of Damascus confine themselves to relating the capture of the city; adds that the Lydians compelled the inhabitants to dwell in unfortified towns. Schubert thinks that the passage in Strabo refers, not to the time of Alyattes, but to a subsequent event in the fifth century; he relies for this opinion on a fragment of Pindar, which represents Smyrna as still flourishing in his time. But, as Busolt has pointed out, the intention of the text of Pindar is to represent the state of the city at about the time of Homer’s birth, and not in the fifth century.

*** The peace between Ephesus and Lydia must have been troubled for a little while in the reign of Sadyattes, but it was confirmed under Alyattes by the marriage of Melas II. with one of the king’s daughters.

Most of them had already taken place or were still proceeding when the irruption of the Medes across the Halys obliged him to concentrate all his energies on the eastern portion of his kingdom.

The current tradition in Lydia of a century later attributed the conflict of the two peoples to a romantic cause. It related that Cyaxares had bestowed his favour on the bands of Scythians who had become his mercenaries on the death of Madyes, and that he had entrusted to them the children of some of the noblest Medic families, that they might train them to hunt and also teach them the use of the bow. One day, on their returning from the chase without any game, Cyaxares reproached them for their want of skill in such angry and insulting terms, that they resolved on immediate revenge. They cut one of the children in pieces, which they dressed after the same manner as that in which they were accustomed to prepare the game they had killed, and served up the dish to the king; then, while he was feasting upon it with his courtiers, they lied in haste and took refuge with Alyattes. The latter welcomed them, and refused to send them back to Cyaxares; hence the outbreak of hostilities. It is, of course, possible that the emigration of a nomad horde may have been the cause of the war,* but graver reasons than this had set the two nations at variance.

* Grote has collected a certain number of examples in later times to show that the journeying of a nomad horde from one state to another may provoke wars, and he concludes therefrom that at least the basis of Herodotus’ account may be considered as true.

The hardworking inhabitants of the valleys of the Iris and the Halys were still possessed of considerable riches, in spite of the losses they had suffered from the avaricious Cimmerians, and their chief towns, Comana, Pteria and Teiria, continued to enjoy prosperity under the rule of their priest-kings. Pteria particularly had developed in the course of the century, thanks to her favourable situation, which had enabled her to offer a secure refuge to the neighbouring population during the late disasters.

[Illustation: 396.jpg THE RUINS OF PTERIA]

Drawn by Boudier, from Charles Texier.

The town itself was crowded into a confined plain, on the left bank of a torrent which flowed into the Halys, and the city walls may still be clearly traced upon the soil; the outline of the houses, the silos, cisterns, and rock-cut staircases are still visible in places, besides the remains of a palace built of enormous blocks of almost rough-hewn limestone. The town was defended by wide ramparts, and also by two fortresses perched upon enormous masses of rock, while a few thousand yards to the east of the city, on the right bank of the torrent, three converging ravines concealed the sanctuary of one of those mysterious oracles whose fame attracted worshippers from far and wide during the annual fairs.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Chantre.

The bas-reliefs which decorate them belong to that semi-barbarous art which we have already met with in the monuments attributed to the Khâfci, near the Orontes and Euphrates, on both slopes of the Amanus, in Cilioia, and in the ravines of the Taurus.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Chantre.

Long processions of priests and votaries defile before figures of the gods and goddesses standing erect upon their sacred animals; in one scene, a tall goddess, a Cybele or an Anaitis, leans affectionately upon her chosen lover, and seems to draw him with her towards an image with a lion’s body and the head of a youth.*

* These bas-reliefs seem to me to have been executed at about the time with which we are dealing, or perhaps a few years later--in any case, before the Persian conquest.

Pteria and its surrounding hills formed a kind of natural fortress which overlooked the whole bend of the Halys; it constituted, in the land of the Lydians, an outpost which effectually protected their possessions in Phrygia and Papnlagonia against an attack from the East; in the hands of the Medes it would be a dominant position which would counteract the defensive features of the Halys, and from it they might penetrate into the heart of Asia Minor without encountering any serious obstacles. The struggle between the two sovereigns was not so unequal as might at first appear. No doubt the army of Alyattes was inferior in numbers, but the bravery of its component forces and the ability of its leaders compensated for its numerical inferiority, and Cyaxares had no troop to be compared with the Carian lancers, with the hoplites of Ionia, or with the heavy Mæonian cavalry. During six years the two armies met again and again--fate sometimes favouring one and sometimes the other--and were about to try their fortune once more, after several indecisive engagements, when an eclipse of the sun suspended operations (585). The Iranian peoples would fight only in full daylight, and their adversaries, although warned, so it is said, by the Milesian philosopher Thaïes of the phenomenon about to take place in the heavens, were perhaps not completely reassured as to its significance, and the two hosts accordingly separated without coming to blows.*

* This eclipse was identified at one time with that of Sept. 30, 610, at another with that of May 28, 585. The latter of these two dates appears to me to be the correct one, and is the only one which agrees with what we know of the general history of the sixth century.

Nebuchadrezzar had followed, not without some misgivings, the vicissitudes of the campaign, and his anxiety was shared by the independent princes of Asia Minor, who were allies of the Lydians; he and they alike awaited with dread a decisive action, which, by crushing one of the belligerents beyond hope of recovery, would leave the onlookers at the mercy of the victor in the full flush of his success. Tradition relates that Syennesis of Cilicia and the Babylonian Nabonidus had taken advantage of the alarm produced by the eclipse to negotiate an armistice, and that they were soon successful in bringing the rival powers to an agreement.* The Halys remained the recognised frontier of the two kingdoms, but the Lydians probably obtained advantages for their commerce, which they regarded as compensatory for the abandonment of their claim to the district of Pteria. To strengthen the alliance, it was agreed that Alyattes should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Ishtuvigu, or, as the Greeks called him, Astyages, the son of Cyaxares.** According to the custom of the times, the two contracting parties, after taking the vow of fidelity, sealed the compact by pricking each other’s arms and sucking the few drops of blood which oozed from the puncture.***

* The name Labynetos given by Herodotus is a transcript of Nabonidus, but cannot here designate the Babylonian king of that name, for the latter reigned more than thirty years after the peace was concluded between the Lydians and the Medes. If Herodotus has not made the mistake of putting Labynetos for Nebuchadrezzar, we may admit that this Labynetos was a prince of the royal family, or simply a general who was commanding the Chaldoan auxiliaries of Cyaxares.

** The form Ishtuvigu is given us by the Chaldoan documents. Its exact transcript was Astuigas, Astyigas, according to Ctosias; in fact, this coincides so remarkably with the Babylonian mode of spelling, that we may believe that it faithfully reproduces the original pronunciation.

*** Many ancient authors have spoken of this war, or at least of the eclipse which brought it to an end. Several of them place the conclusion of peace not in the reign of Cyaxares, but in that of Astyages--Cicero, Solinus, and the Armenian Eusebius--and their view has been adopted by some modern historians. The two versions of the account can be reconciled by saying that Astyages was commanding the Median army instead of his father, who was too old to do so, but such an explanation is unnecessary, and Cyaxares, though over seventy, might still have had sufficient vigour to wage war. The substitution of Astyages for Cyaxares by the authors of Roman times was probably effected with the object of making the date of the eclipse agree with a different system of chronology from that followed by Herodotus.

Cyaxares died in the following year (584), full of days and renown, and was at once succeeded by Astyages. Few princes could boast of having had such a successful career as his, even in that century of unprecedented fortunes and boundless ambitions. Inheriting a disorganised army, proclaimed king in the midst of mourning, on the morrow of a defeat in which the fate of his kingdom had hung in the balance, he succeeded within a quarter of a century in overthrowing his enemies and substituting his supremacy for theirs throughout the whole of Western Asia. At his accession Media had occupied only a small portion of the Iranian table-land; at his death, the Median empire extended to the banks of the Halys. It is now not difficult to understand why Nebuchadrezzar abstained from all expeditions in the regions of the Taurus, as well as in those of the Upper Tigris. He would inevitably have come into contact with the allies of the Lydians, perchance with the Lydians themselves, or with the Medes, as the case might be; and he would have been drawn on to take an active part in their dangerous quarrels, from which, after all, he could not hope to reap any personal advantage. In reality, there was one field of action only open to him, and that was Southern Syria, with Egypt in her rear. He found himself, at this extreme limit of his dominions, in a political situation almost identical with that of his Assyrian predecessors, and consequently more or less under the obligation of repeating their policy. The Saites, like the Ethiopians before them, could enjoy no assured sense of security in the Delta, when they knew that they had a great military state as their nearest neighbour on the other side of the isthmus; they felt with reason that the thirty leagues of desert which separated Pelusium from Gaza was an insufficient protection from invasion, and they desired to have between themselves and their adversary a tract of country sufficiently extensive to ward off the first blows in the case of hostilities. If such a buffer territory could be composed of feudal provinces or tributary states, Egyptian pride would be flattered, while at the same time the security of the kingdom would be increased, and indeed the victorious progress of Necho had for the moment changed their most ambitious dreams into realities. Driven back into the Nile valley after the battle of Carchemish, their pretensions had immediately shrunk within more modest limits; their aspirations were now confined to gaining the confidence of the few surviving states which had preserved some sort of independence in spite of the Assyrian conquest, to detaching them from Chaldoan interests and making them into a protecting zone against the ambition of a new Esarhaddon. To this work Necho applied himself as soon as Nebuchadrezzar had left him in order to hasten back to Babylon. The Egyptian monarch belonged to a persevering race, who were never kept, down by reverses, and had not once allowed themselves to be discouraged during the whole of the century in which they had laboured to secure the crown for themselves; his defeat had not lessened his tenacity, nor, it would seem, his certainty of final success. Besides organising his Egyptian and Libyan troops, he enrolled a still larger number of Hellenic mercenaries, correctly anticipating that the restless spirits of the Phoenicians and Jews would soon furnish him with an opportunity of distinguishing himself upon the scene of action.

It was perhaps at this juncture that he decided to strengthen his position by the co-operation of a fleet. The superiority of the Chaldoan battalions had been so clearly manifested, that he could scarcely hope for a decisive victory if he persisted in seeking it on land; but if he could succeed in securing the command of the sea, his galleys, by continually cruising along the Syrian coast, and conveying troops, provisions, arms, and money to the Phoenician towns, would so successfully foster and maintain a spirit of rebellion, that the Chaldæans would not dare to venture into Egypt until they had dealt with this source of danger in their rear. He therefore set to work to increase the number of his war-vessels on the Bed Sea, but more especially on the Mediterranean, and as he had drawn upon Greece for his troops, he now applied to her for shipbuilders.*

* Herodotus tells us that in his time the ruins of the docks which Necho had made for the building of his triremes could still be seen on the shore of the Red Sea as well as on that of the Mediterranean. He seems also to say that the building of the fleet was anterior to the first Syrian expedition.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph sent by G. Benédite.

The trireme, which had been invented by either the Samian or Corinthian naval constructors, had as yet been little used, and possibly Herodotus is attributing an event of his own time to this earlier period when he affirms that Necho filled a dockyard with a whole fleet of these vessels; he possessed, at any rate, a considerable number of them, and along with them other vessels of various build, in which the blunt stem and curved poop of the Greeks were combined with the square-cabined barque of the Egyptians. At the same time, in order to transport the squadron from one sea to another when occasion demanded, he endeavoured to reopen the ancient canal.

He improved its course and widened it so as to permit of two triremes sailing abreast or easily clearing each other in passing. The canal started from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, not far from Patumos, and skirted the foot of the Arabian hills from west to east; it then plunged into the Wady Tumilat, and finally entered the head of the bay which now forms the Lake of Ismaïlia. The narrow channel by which this sheet of water was anciently connected with the Gulf of Suez was probably obstructed in places, and required clearing out at several points, if not along its entire extent. A later tradition states that after having lost 100,000 men in attempting this task, the king abandoned the project on the advice of an oracle, a god having been supposed to have predicted to him that he was working for the barbarians.*

* The figures, 100,000 men, are evidently exaggerated, for in a similar undertaking, the digging of the Mahmudiyeh canal, Mehemet-Ali lost only 10,000 men, though the work was greater.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken from the railway between Ismaïlia and Suez, on the eastern shore of the lake.

Another of Necho’s enterprises excited the admiration of his contemporaries, and remained for ever in the memory of the people. The Carthaginians had discovered on the ocean coast of Libya, a country rich in gold, ivory, precious woods, pepper, and spices, but their political jealousy prevented other nations from following in their wake in the interests of trade. The Egyptians possibly may have undertaken to dispute their monopoly, or the Phoenicians may have desired to reach their colony by a less frequented highway than the Mediterranean. The merchants of the Said and the Delta had never entirely lost touch with the people dwelling on the shores of the Red Sea, and though the royal fleets no longer pursued their course down it on their way to Punt as in the days of Hâtshopsîtu and Ramses III., private individuals ventured from time to time to open trade communications with the ancient “Ladders of Incense.” Necho despatched the Phoenician captains of his fleet in search of new lands, and they started from the neighbourhood of Suez, probably accompanied by native pilots accustomed to navigate in those waters. The undertaking, fraught with difficulty even in the last century, was, indeed, a formidable one for the small vessels of the Saite period. They sailed south for months with the east to the left of them, and on their right the continent which seemed to extend indefinitely before them. Towards the autumn they disembarked on some convenient shore, sowed the wheat with which they were provided, and waited till the crop was ripe; having reaped the harvest, they again took to the sea. Any accurate remembrance of what they saw was soon effaced; they could merely recollect that, having reached a certain point, they observed with astonishment that the sun appeared to have reversed its course, and now rose on their right hand. This meant that they had turned the southern extremity of Africa and were unconsciously sailing northwards. In the third year they passed through the pillars of Hercules and reached Egypt in safety. The very limited knowledge of navigation possessed by the mariners of that day rendered this voyage fruitless; the dangerous route thus opened up to commerce remained unused, and its discovery was remembered only as a curious feat devoid of any practical use.*

* The Greek writers after Herodotus denied the possibility of such a voyage, and they thought that it could not be decided whether Africa was entirely surrounded by water, and that certainly no traveller had ever journeyed above 5000 stadia beyond the entrance to the Red Sea. Modern writers are divided on the point, some denying and others maintaining the authenticity of the account. The observation made by the navigators of the apparent change in the course of the sun, which Herodotus has recorded, and which neither he nor his authorities understood, seems to me to be so weighty an argument for its authenticity, that it is impossible to reject the tradition until we have more decided grounds for so doing.

In order to obtain any practical results from the arduous voyage, it would have been necessary for Egypt to devote a considerable part of its resources to the making of such expeditions, whereas the country preferred to concentrate all its energies on its Tyrian policy. Necho certainly possessed the sympathies of the Tyrians, who had transferred their traditional hatred of the Assyrians to the Chaldæans. He could also count with equal certainty on the support of a considerable party in Moab, Ammon, and Edom, as well as among the Nabatæans and the Arabs of Kedar; but the key of the whole position lay with Judah--that ally without whom none of Necho’s other partisans would venture to declare openly against their master. The death of Josiah had dealt a fatal blow to the hopes of the prophets, and even long after the event they could not recall it without lamenting the fate of this king after their own heart. “And like unto him,” exclaims their chronicler, “was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him.” *

* 2 Kings xxiii. 25.

The events which followed his violent death--the deposition of Jehoahaz, the establishment and fall of the Egyptian supremacy, the proclamation of the Chaldæan suzerainty, the degradation of the king and the misery of the people brought about by the tribute exacted from them by their foreign masters,--all these revolutions which had succeeded each other without break or respite had all but ruined the belief in the efficacy of the reform due to Hilkiah’s discovery, and preached by Jeremiah and his followers. The people saw in these calamities the vengeance of Jahveh against the presumptuous faction which had overthrown His various sanctuaries and had attempted to confine His worship to a single temple; they therefore restored the banished attractions, and set themselves to sacrifice to strange gods with greater zest than ever.

A like crisis occurred and like party divisions had broken out around Jehoiakim similar to those at the court of Ahaz and Hezekiah a century earlier. The populace, the soldiery, and most of the court officials, in short, all who adhered to the old popular form of religion or were attracted to strange devotions, hoped to rid themselves of the Chaldæans by earthly means, and since Necho declared himself an implacable enemy of their foe, their principal aim was to come to terms with Egypt. Jeremiah, on the contrary, and those who remained faithful to the teaching of the prophets, saw in all that was passing around them cogent reasons for rejecting worldly wisdom and advice, and for yielding themselves unreservedly to the Divine will in bowing before the Chaldæan of whom Jahveh made use, as of the Assyrian of old, to chastise the sins of Judah. The struggle between the two factions constantly disturbed the public peace, and it needed little to cause the preaching of the prophets to degenerate into an incitement to revolt. On a feast-day which occurred in the early months of Jehoiakim’s reign, Jeremiah took up his station on the pavement of the temple and loudly apostrophised the crowd of worshippers. “Thus saith the Lord: If ye will not hearken unto Me, to walk in My law, which I have set before you, to hearken to the words of My servants the prophets, whom I send unto you, even rising up early and sending them, but ye have not hearkened; then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.” Such a speech, boldly addressed to an audience the majority of whom were already moved by hostile feelings, brought their animosity to a climax; the officiating priests, the prophets, and the pilgrims gathered round Jeremiah, crying, “Thou shalt surely die.” The people thronged into the temple, the princes of Judah went up to the king’s house and to the house of the Lord, and sat in council in the entry of the new gate. They decreed that Jeremiah, having spoken in the name of the Lord, did not merit death, and some of their number, recalling the precedent of Micaiah the Morasthite, who in his time had predicted the ruin of Jerusalem, added, “Did Hezekiah King of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death?” Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, one of those who had helped in restoring the law, took the prophet under his protection and prevented the crowd from injuring him, but some others were not able to escape the popular fury. The prophet Uriah of Kirjath-jearim, who unweariedly prophesied against the city and country after the manner of Jeremiah, fled to Egypt, but in vain; Jehoiakim despatched Elnathan, the son of Achbor, “and certain men with him,” who brought him back to Judah, “slew him with the sword, and cast his dead body into the graves of the common people.” * If popular feeling had reached such a pitch before the battle of Carchemish, to what height must it have risen when the news of Nebuchadrezzar’s victory had given the death-blow to the hopes of the Egyptian faction! Jeremiah believed the moment ripe for forcibly arresting the popular imagination while it was swayed by the panic of anticipated invasion. He dictated to his disciple Baruch the prophecies he had pronounced since the appearance of the Scythians under Josiah, and on the day of the solemn fast proclaimed throughout Judah during the winter of the fifth year of the reign, a few months after the defeat of the Egyptians, he caused the writing to be read to the assembled people at the entry of the new gate.**

* Jer. xxvi., where the scene takes place at the beginning of Jehoiakim’s reign, i.e. under the Egyptian domination.

** The date given in Jer. xxxvi. 9 makes the year begin in spring, since the ninth month occurs in winter; this date belongs, therefore, to the later recensions of the text. It is nevertheless probably authentic, representing the exact equivalent of the original date according to the old calendar.

Micaiah, the son of Gremariah, was among those who listened, and noting that the audience were moved by the denunciations which revived the memory of their recent misfortunes, he hastened to inform the ministers sitting in council within the palace of what was passing. They at once sent for Baruch, and begged him to repeat to them what he had read. They were so much alarmed at its recital, that they advised him to hide himself in company with Jeremiah, while they informed the king of the matter. Jehoiakim was sitting in a chamber with a brazier burning before him on account of the severe cold: scarcely had they read three or four pages before him when his anger broke forth; he seized the roll, slashed it with the scribe’s penknife, and threw the fragments into the fire. Jeremiah recomposed the text from memory, and inserted in it a malediction against the king. “Thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim, King of Judah: He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost. And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity: and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the men of Judah, all the evil that I have pronounced against them; but they hearkened not.” *

* Jer. xxxvi. Attempts have been made to reconstruct the contents of Jeremiah’s roll, and most of the authors who have dealt with this subject think that the roll contained the greater part of the fragments which, in the book of the prophet, occupy chaps, i. 4-11, ii., iii. 1-5, 19-25, iv.- vi., vii., viii., ix. 1-21, x. 17-25, xi., xii. 1-6, xvii. 19-27, xviii., xix. 1-13, which it must be admitted have not in every case been preserved in their original form, but have been abridged or rearranged after the exile. Other chapters evidently belong to the years previous to the fifth year of Jehoiakim, as well as part of the prophecies against the barbarians, but they could not have been included in the original roll, as the latter would then have been too long to have been read three times in one day.

The Egyptian tendencies evinced at court, at first discreetly veiled, were now accentuated to such a degree that Nebuchadrezzar became alarmed, and came in person to Jerusalem in the year 601. His presence frustrated the intrigues of Pharaoh. Jehoiakim was reduced to order for a time, but three years later he revolted afresh at the instigation of Necho, and this time the Chaldæan satraps opened hostilities in earnest. They assembled their troops, which were reinforced by Syrian, Moabite, and Ammonite contingents, and laid siege to Jerusalem.*

* 2 Kings xxiv. 1-4. The passage is not easy to be understood as it stands, and it has been differently interpreted by historians. Some have supposed that it refers to events immediately following the battle of Carchemish, and that Jehoiakim defended Jerusalem against Nebuchadrezzar in 605. Others think that, after the battle of Carchemish, Jehoiakim took advantage of Nebuchadrezzar’s being obliged to return at once to Babylon, and would not recognise the authority of the Chaldæans; that Nebuchadrezzar returned later, towards 601, and took Jerusalem, and that it is to this second war that allusion is made in the Book of Kings. It is more simple to consider that which occurred about 600 as a first attempt at rebellion which was punished lightly by the Chaldæans.

Jehoiakim, left to himself, resisted with such determination that Nebuchadrezzar was obliged to bring up his Chaldæan forces to assist in the attack. Judah trembled with fear at the mere description which her prophet Habakkuk gave of this fierce and sturdy people, “which march through the breadth of the earth to possess dwelling-places which are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves. Their horses also are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves; and their horsemen spread themselves; yea, their horsemen come from far; they fly as an eagle that hasteneth to devour. They come all of them for violence; their faces are set eagerly as the east wind, and they gather captives as the sand. Yea, he scoffeth at kings, and princes are a derision unto him: he derideth every stronghold: for he heapeth up dust and taketh it. Then shall he sweep by as a wind, and shall pass over the guilty, even he whose might is his god.” Nebuchadrezzar’s army must have presented a spectacle as strange as did that of Necho. It contained, besides its nucleus of Chaldæn and Babylonian infantry, squadrons of Scythian and Median cavalry, whose cruelty it was, no doubt, that had alarmed the prophet, and certainly bands of Greek hoplites, for the poet Alcasus had had a brother, Antimenidas by name, in the Chaldæan monarch’s service. Jehoiakim died before the enemy appeared beneath the walls of Jerusalem, and was at once succeeded by his son Jeconiah,* a youth of eighteen years, who assumed the name of Jehoiachin.**

* [Jehoiachin is called Coniah in Jer. xxii. 24 and xxiv. 1, and Jeconiah in 1 Chron. iii. 16.--Tr.]

** 2 Kings xxiv. 5-10; cf. 2 Chron. xxxvi. 6-9, where the writer says that Nebuchadrezzar bound Jehoiakim “in fetters, to carry him to Babylon.”

The new king continued the struggle at first courageously, but the advent of Nebuchadrezzar so clearly convinced him of the futility of the defence, that he suddenly decided to lay down his arms. He came forth from the city with his mother Nehushta, the officers of his house, his ministers, and his eunuchs, and prostrated himself at the feet of his suzerain. The Chaldæn monarch was not inclined to proceed to extremities; he therefore exiled to Babylon Jehoiachin and the whole of his seditious court who had so ill-advised the young king, the best of his officers, and the most skilful artisans, in all 3023 persons, but the priests and the bulk of the people remained at Jerusalem. The conqueror appointed Mattaniah, the youngest son of Josiah, to be their ruler, who, on succeeding to the crown, changed his name, after the example of his predecessors, adopting that of Zedekiah. Jehoiachin had reigned exactly three months over his besieged city (596).*

The Egyptians made no attempt to save their ally, but if they felt themselves not in a condition to defy the Chaldasans on Syrian territory, the Chaldaeans on their side feared to carry hostilities into the heart of the Delta. Necho died two years after the disaster at Jerusalem, without having been called to account by, or having found an opportunity of further annoying, his rival, and his son Psammetichus II. succeeded peacefully to the throne.** He was a youth at this time,*** and his father’s ministers conducted the affairs of State on his behalf, and it was they who directed one of his early campaigns, if not the very first, against Ethiopia.****

* 2 Kings xxiv. 11-17; cf. 2 Chron. xxxvi. 10.

** The length of Necho’s reign is fixed at sixteen years by Herodotus, and at six or at nine years by the various abbreviators of Manetho. The contemporaneous monuments have confirmed the testimony of Herodotus on this point as against that of Manetho, and the stelse of the Florentine Museum, of the Leyden Museum, and of the Louvre have furnished certain proof that Necho died in the sixteenth year, after fifteen and a half years’ reign.

*** His sarcophagus, discovered in 1883, and now preserved in the Gizeh Museum, is of such small dimensions that it can have been used only for a youth.

**** The graffiti of Abu-Simbel have been most frequently attributed to Psammetichus I., and until recently I had thought it possible to maintain this opinion. A. von Gutsehmid was the first to restore them to Psammetichus IL, and his opinion has gained ground since Wiedemann’s vigorous defence of it. The Alysian mercenary’s graffito contains the Greek translation of the current Egyptian phrase “when his Majesty came on his first military expedition into this country,” which seems to point to no very early date in a reign for a first campaign. Moreover, one of the generals in command of the expedition is a Psammetichus, son of Theocles, that is, a Greek with an Egyptian name. A considerable lapse of time must have taken place since Psammetichus’ first dealings with the Greeks, for otherwise the person named after the king would not have been of sufficiently mature age to be put at the head of a body of troops.

They organised a small army for him composed of Egyptians, Greeks, and Asiatic mercenaries, which, while the king was taking up his residence at Elephantine, was borne up the Nile in a fleet of large vessels.* It probably went as far south as the northern point of the second cataract, and not having encountered any Ethiopian force,** it retraced its course and came to anchor at Abu-Simbel.

* The chief graffito at Abu-Simbel says, in fact, that the king came to Elephantine, and that only the troops accompanying the General Psammetichus, the son of Theocles, went beyond Kerkis. It was probably during his stay at Elephantine, while awaiting the return of the expedition, that Psammetichus II. had the inscriptions containing his cartouches engraved upon the rocks of Bigga, Abaton, Philo, and Konosso, or among the ruins of Elephantine and of Phila?.

** The Greek inscription says _above Kerlcis_. Wiedemann has corrected _Kerkis_ into _Kortis_, the Korte of the first cataract, but the reading Kerkis is too well established for there to be any reason for change. The simplest explanation is to acknowledge that the inscription refers to a place situated a few miles above Abu-Simbel, towards Wady-Halfa.

The officers in command, after having admired the rock-cut chapel of Ramses II., left in it a memento of their visit in a fine inscription cut on the right leg of one of the colossi. This inscription informs us that “King Psammatikhos having come to Elephantine, the people who were with Psammatikhos, son of Theocles, wrote this. They ascended above Kerkis, to where the river ceases; Potasimto commanded the foreigners, Amasis the Egyptians. At the same time also wrote Arkhôn, son of Amoibikhos, and Peleqos, son of Ulamos.” Following the example of their officers, the soldiers also wrote their names here and there, each in his own language--Ionians, Rhodians, Carians, Phoenicians, and perhaps even Jews; e.g. Elesibios of Teos, Pabis of Colophon, Telephos of Ialysos, Abdsakon son of Petiehvê, Gerhekal son of Hallum. The whole of this part of the country, brought to ruin in the gradual dismemberment of Greater Egypt, could not have differed much from the Nubia of to-day; there were the same narrow strips of cultivation along the river banks, gigantic temples half buried by their own ruins, scattered towns and villages, and everywhere the yellow sand creeping insensibly down towards the Nile. The northern part of this province remained in the hands of the Saite Pharaohs, and the districts situated further south just beyond Abu-Simbel formed at that period a sort of neutral ground between their domain and that of the Pharaohs of Napata. While all this was going on, Syria continued to plot in secret, and the faction which sought security in a foreign alliance was endeavouring to shake off the depression caused by the reverses of Jehoiakim and his son; and the tide of popular feeling setting in the direction of Egypt became so strong, that even Zedekiah, the creature of Nebuchadrezzar, was unable to stem it. The prophets who were inimical to religious reform, persisted in their belief that the humiliation of the country was merely temporary.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Daniel Héron.

Those of them who still remained in Jerusalem repeated at every turn, “Ye shall not serve the King of Babylon... the vessels of the Lord’s house shall now shortly be brought again from Babylon.” Jeremiah endeavoured to counteract the effect of their words, but in vain; the people, instead of listening to the prophet, waxed wroth with him, and gave themselves more and more recklessly up to their former sins. Incense was burnt every morning on the roofs of the houses and at the corners of the streets in honour of Baal, lamentations for Tammuz again rent the air at the season of his festival; the temple was invaded by uncircumcised priests and their idols, and the king permitted the priests of Moloch to raise their pyres in the valley of Hinnom. The exiled Jews, surrounded on all sides by heathen peoples, presented a no less grievous spectacle than their brethren at Jerusalem; some openly renounced the God of their fathers, others worshipped their chosen idols in secret, while those who did not actually become traitors to their faith, would only listen to such prophets as promised them a speedy revenge--Ahab, Zedekiah, son of Maaseiah, and Shemaiah. There was one man, however, who appeared in their midst, a priest, brought up from his youth in the temple and imbued with the ideas of reform--Ezekiel, son of Buzi, whose words might have brought them to a more just appreciation of their position, had they not drowned his voice by their clamour; alarmed at their threats, he refrained from speech in public, but gathered round him a few faithful adherents at his house in Tel-AMb, where the spirit of the Lord first came upon him in their presence about the year 592.*

* Ezelc. i. 1, 2. We see him receiving the elders in his house in chaps, viii. 1, xiv. 1, xx. 1, et. seq.

This little band of exiles was in constant communication with the mother-country, and the echo of the religious quarrels and of the controversies provoked between the various factions by the events of the political world, was promptly borne to them by merchants, travelling scribes, or the king’s legates who were sent regularly to Babylon with the tribute.* They learnt, about the year 590, that grave events were at hand, and that the moment had come when Judah, recovering at length from her trials, should once more occupy, in the sight of the sun, that place for which Jahveh had destined her. The kings of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Tyre, and Sidon had sent envoys to Jerusalem, and there, probably at the dictation of Egypt, they had agreed on what measures to take to stir up a general insurrection against Chaldæa.** The report of their resolutions had revived the courage of the national party, and of its prophets; Hananiah, son of Azzur, had gone through the city announcing the good news to all.***

* Jer. xxix. 3 gives the names of two of these transmitters of the tribute--Elasah the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, to whom Jeremiah had entrusted a message for those of the captivity.

** Jer. xxvii. 1-3. The statement at the beginning of this chapter: _In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim_, contains a copyist’s error; the reading should be: _In the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah_ (see ver. 12).

*** Jer. xxvii., xxviii.

“Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying, I have broken the yoke of the King of Babylon. Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house .. . and Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, with all the captives of Judah that went to Babylon!” But Jeremiah had made wooden yokes and had sent them to the confederate princes, threatening them with divine punishment if they did not bow their necks to Nebuchadrezzar; the prophet himself bore one on his own neck, and showed himself in the streets on all occasions thus accoutred, as a living emblem of the slavery in which Jahveh permitted His people to remain for their spiritual good. Hananiah, meeting the prophet by chance, wrested the yoke from him and broke it, exclaiming, “Thus saith the Lord: Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon, within two full years from off the neck of all the nations.” The mirth of the bystanders was roused, but on the morrow Jeremiah appeared with a yoke of iron, which Jahveh had put “upon the neck of all the nations, that they may serve Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon.” Moreover, to destroy in the minds of the exiled Jews any hope of speedy deliverance, he wrote to them: “Let not your prophets that be in the midst of you, and your diviners, deceive you, neither hearken ye to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord.” The prophet exhorted them to resign themselves to their fate, at all events for the time, that the unity of their nation might be preserved until the time when it might indeed please Jahveh to restore it: “Build ye houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them: take ye wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply ye there and be not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” Psammetichus II. died in 589,* and his reign, though short, was distinguished by the activity shown in rebuilding and embellishing the temples.

* Herodotus reckoned the length of the reign of Psammetichus II. at six years, in which he agrees with the Syncellus, while the abbreviators of Manetho fix it at seventeen years. The results given by the reading of a stele of the Louvre enable us to settle that the figure 6 is to be preferred to the other, and to reckon the length of the reign at five years and a half.

His name is met with everywhere on the banks of the Nile--at Karnak, where he completed the decoration of the great columns of Taharqa, at Abydos, at Heliopolis, and on the monuments that have come from that town, such as the obelisk set up in the Campus Martius at Borne. The personal influence of the young sovereign did not count for much in the zeal thus displayed; but the impulse that had been growing during three or four generations, since the time of the expulsion of the Assyrians, now began to have its full effect. Egypt, well armed, well governed by able ministers, and more and more closely bound to Greece by both mercantile and friendly ties, had risen to a very high position in the estimation of its contemporaries; the inhabitants of Elis had deferred to her decision in the question whether they should take part in the Olympic games in which they were the judges, and following the advice she had given on the matter, they had excluded their own citizens from the sports so as to avoid the least suspicion of partiality in the distribution of the prizes.* The new king, probably the brother of the late Pharaoh, had his prenomen of Uahibn from his grandfather Psammetichus I., and it was this sovereign that the Greeks called indifferently Uaphres and Apries.**

* Diodorus Siculus has transferred the anecdote to Amasis, and the decision given is elsewhere attributed to one of the seven sages. The story is a popular romance, of which Herodotus gives the version current among the Greeks in Egypt.

** According to Herodotus, Apries was the son of Psammis. The size of the sarcophagus of Psammetichus II., suitable only for a youth, makes this filiation improbable. Psammetichus, who came to the throne when he was hardly more than a child, could have left behind him only children of tender age, and Apries appears from the outset as a prince of full mental and physical development.

Drawn by Boudier, from the bronze statuette in the Louvre Museum.

He was young, ambitious, greedy of fame and military glory, and longed to use the weapon that his predecessors had for some fifteen years past been carefully whetting; his emissaries, arriving at Jerusalem at the moment when the popular excitement was at its height, had little difficulty in overcoming Zede-kiah’s scruples. Edoni, Moab, and the Philistines, who had all taken their share in the conferences of the rebel party, hesitated at the last moment, and refused to sever their relations with Babylon. Tyre and the Ammonites alone persisted in their determination, and allied themselves with Egypt on the same terms as Judah.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Pognon. The figures have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes the rampant lion by the right paw, and while it raises its left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of the beast.

Nebuchadrezzar, thus defied by three enemies, was at a loss to decide upon which to make his first attack. Ezekiel, whose place of exile put him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to us as he “stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver.” Judah formed as it were the bridge by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar could succeed in occupying it before their arrival, he could at once break up the coalition into three separate parts incapable of rejoining one another--Ammon in the desert to the east, Tyre and Sidon on the seaboard, and Pharaoh beyond his isthmus to the south-west. He therefore established himself in a central position at Eiblah on the Orontes, from whence he could observe the progress of the operations, and hasten with his reserve force to a threatened point in the case of unforeseen difficulties; having done this, he despatched the two divisions of his army against his two principal adversaries. One of these divisions crossed the Lebanon, seized its fortresses, and, leaving a record of its victories on the rocks of the Wady Brissa, made its way southwards along the coast to blockade Tyre.*

* The account of this Phoenician campaign is contained in one of the inscriptions discovered and commented on by Pognon. Winckler, the only one to my knowledge who has tried to give a precise chronological position to the events recorded in the inscription, places them at the very beginning of the reign, after the victory of Carchemish, about the time when Nebuchadrezzar heard that his father had just died. I think that this date is not justified by the study of the inscription, for the king speaks therein of the great works that he had accomplished, the restoration of the temples, the rebuilding of the walls of Babylon, and the digging of canals, all of which take us to the middle or the end of his reign. We are therefore left to choose between one of two dates, namely, that of 590-587, during the Jewish war, and that from the King’s thirty-seventh year to 568 B.C., during the war against Amasis which will be treated below. I have chosen the first, because of Nebuchadrezzar’s long sojourn at Riblah, which gave him sufficient time for the engraving of the stelse on Lebanon: the bas-reliefs of Wady. Brissa could have been cut before the taking of Jerusalem, for no allusion to the war against the Jews is found in them. The enemy mentioned in the opening lines is perhaps Apries, whose fleet was scouring the Phoenician coasts.

The other force bore down upon Zedekiah, and made war upon him ruthlessly. It burnt the villages and unwalled towns, gave the rural districts over as a prey to the Philistines and the Edomites, surrounded the two fortresses of Lachish and Azekah, and only after completely exhausting the provinces, appeared before the walls of the capital. Jerusalem was closely beset when the news reached the Chaldæans that Apries was approaching Gaza; Zedekiah, in his distress, appealed to him for help, and the promised succour at length came upon the scene. The Chaldæans at once raised the siege with the object of arresting the advancing enemy, and the popular party, reckoning already on a Chaldean defeat, gave way to insolent rejoicing over the prophets of evil. Jeremiah, however, had no hope of final success. “Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldæans shall surely depart from us; for they shall not depart. For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Chaldeans that fight against you, and there remained but wounded men among them, yet should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city with fire.” What actually took place is not known; according to one account, Apries accepted battle and was defeated; according to another, he refused to be drawn into an engagement, and returned haughtily to Egypt.*

* That, at least, is what Jeremiah seems to say (xxxvii. 7): “Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt into their own land.” There is no hint here of defeat or even of a battle.

His fleet probably made some effective raiding on the Phoenician coast. It is easy to believe that the sight of the Chaldoan camp inspired him with prudence, and that he thought twice before compromising the effects of his naval campaign and risking the loss of his fine army--the only one which Egypt possessed--in a conflict in which his own safety was not directly concerned. Nebuchadrezzar, on his side, was not anxious to pursue so strongly equipped an adversary too hotly, and deeming himself fortunate in having escaped the ordeal of a trial of strength with him, he returned to his position before the walls of Jerusalem.

The city receiving no further succour, its fall was merely a question of time, and resistance served merely to irritate the besiegers. The Jews nevertheless continued to defend it with the heroic obstinacy and, at the same time, with the frenzied discord of which they have so often shown themselves capable. During the respite which the diversion caused by Apries afforded them, Jeremiah had attempted to flee from Jerusalem and seek refuge in Benjamin, to which tribe he belonged. Arrested at the city gate on the pretext of treason, he was unmercifully beaten, thrown into prison, and the king, who had begun to believe in him, did not venture to deliver him. He was confined in the court of the palace, which served as a gaol, and allowed a ration of a loaf of bread for his daily food.1 The courtyard was a public place, to which all comers had access who desired to speak to the prisoners, and even here the prophet did not cease to preach and exhort the people to repentance: “He that abideth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence; but he that goeth forth to the Chaldæans shall live, and his life shall be unto him for a prey, and he shall live. Thus saith the Lord, This city shall surely be given into the hand of the army of the King of Babylon, and he shall take it.”

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the original in the British Museum.

The princes and officers of the king, however, complained to Zedekiah of him: “Let this man, we pray thee, be put to death; forasmuch as he weakeneth the hands of the men of war, and the hands of all the people in speaking such words.” Given up to his accusers and plunged in a muddy cistern, he escaped by the connivance of a eunuch of the royal household, only to renew his denunciations with greater force than ever.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from several engravings in Botta. The mutilated remains of several bas-reliefs have been combined so as to form a tolerably correct scene; the prisoners have a ring passed through their lips, and the king holds them by a cord attached to it.

The king sent for him secretly and asked his advice, but could draw from him nothing but threats: “If thou wilt go forth unto the King of Babylon’s princes, then thy soul shall live, and this city shall not be burned with fire, and thou shalt live and thine house: but if thou wilt not go forth to the King of Babylon’s princes, then shall this city be given into the hand of the Chal-dseans, and they shall burn it with fire, and thou shalt not escape out of their hand.” Zedekiah would have asked no better than to follow his advice, but he had gone too far to draw back now. To the miseries of war and sickness the horrors of famine were added, but the determination of the besieged was unshaken; bread was failing, and yet they would not hear of surrender. At length, after a year and a half of sufferings heroically borne, in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the eleventh month, and the fourth day of the month, a portion of the city wall fell before the attacks of the battering-rams, and the Chaldæan army entered by the breach. Zedekiah assembled his remaining soldiers, and took counsel as to the possibility of cutting his way through the enemy to beyond the Jordan; escaping by night through the gateway opposite the Pool of Siloam, he was taken prisoner near Jericho, and carried off to Eiblah, where Nebuchadrezzar was awaiting with impatience the result of the operations. The Chaldæans were accustomed to torture their prisoners in the fashion we frequently see represented on the monuments of Nineveh, and whenever an unexpected stroke of good fortune brings to light any decorative bas-relief from their palaces, we shall see represented on it the impaling stake, rebels being flayed alive, and chiefs having their tongues torn out. Nebuchadrezzar, whose patience was exhausted, caused the sons of Zedekiah to be slain in the presence of their father, together with all the prisoners of noble birth, and then, having put out his eyes, sent the king of Babylon loaded with chains. As for the city which had so long defied his wrath, he gave it over to Nebuzaradan, one of the great officers of the crown, with orders to demolish it and give it up systematically to the flames. The temple was despoiled of its precious wall-coverings, the pillars and brazen ornaments of the time of Solomon which still remained were broken up, and the pieces carried off to Chaldoa in sacks, the masonry was overthrown and the blocks of stone rolled down the hill into the ravine of the Kedron. The survivors among the garrison, the priests, scribes, and members of the upper classes, were sent off into exile, but the mortality during the siege had been so great that the convoy barely numbered eight hundred and thirty-two persons.

Some of the poorer population were allowed to remain in the environs, and the fields and vineyards of the exiles were divided among them.1 Having accomplished the work of destruction, the Chal-dseans retired, leaving the government in the hands of Gedaliah, son of Ahikam,* a friend of Jeremiah. Gedaliah established himself at Mizpah, where he endeavoured to gather around him the remnant of the nation, and fugitives poured in from Moab, Ammon, and Edom.

*Chron. xxxvi. 17-20. The following is the table of the kings of Judah from the death of Solomon to the destruction of Jerusalem:--

It seemed that a Jewish principality was about to rise again from the ruins of the kingdom. Jeremiah was its accredited counsellor, but his influence could not establish harmony among these turbulent spirits, still smarting from their recent misfortunes.* The captains of the bands which had been roaming over the country after the fall of Jerusalem refused, moreover, to act in concert with Gedaliah, and one of them, Ishmael by name, who was of the royal blood, assassinated him, but, being attacked in Gibeon by Johanan, the son of Kareah, was forced to escape almost alone and take refuge with the Ammonites.** These acts of violence aroused the vigilance of the Chaldasans; Johanan feared reprisals, and retired into Egypt, taking with him Jeremiah, Baruch, and the bulk of the people.*** Apries gave the refugees a welcome, and assigned them certain villages near to his military colony at Daphnae, whence they soon spread into the neighbouring nomes as far as Migdol, Memphis, and even as far as the Thebaid.****

* For the manner in which Jeremiah was separated from the rest of the captives, set at liberty and sent back to Gedaliah, see Jer. xxxix. 11-18, xl. 1-6.

** 2 Kings xxv. 23-25, and Jer. xl. 7-16, xli. 1-15, where these events are recorded at length.

*** 2 Kings xxv. 26; Jer. xli. 16-18, xlii., xliii. 1-7.

**** Jer. xliv. 1, where the word of the Lord is spoken to “all the Jews... which dwelt at Migdol, and at Tahpanhes (Daphno), and at Moph (corr. Moph, Memphis), and in the country of Pathros.”

Even after all these catastrophes Judah’s woes were not yet at an end. In 581, the few remaining Jews in Palestine allied themselves with the Moabites and made a last wild effort for independence; a final defeat, followed by a final exile, brought them to irretrievable ruin.* The earlier captives had entertained no hope of advantage from these despairing efforts, and Ezekiel from afar condemned them without pity: “They that inherit those waste places in the land of Israel speak, saying, Abraham was one, and he inherited the land: but we are many; the land is given us for inheritance.... Ye lift up your eyes unto your idols and shed blood: and shall ye possess the land? Ye stand upon your sword, ye work abomination, and ye defile every one his neighbour’s wife: and shall ye possess the land?... Thus saith the Lord God: As I live, surely they that are in the waste places shall fall by the sword, and him that is in the open field will I give to the beasts to be devoured, and they that be in the strongholds and in the caves shall die of the pestilence.” **

* Josephus, following Berosus, speaks of a war against the Moabites and the Ammonites, followed by the conquest of Egypt in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar. To this must be added a Jewish revolt if we are to connect with these events the mention of the third captivity, carried out in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar by Nebuzaradan.

** Ezek. xxxiii. 23-27.

The first act of the revolution foreseen by the prophets was over; the day of the Lord, so persistently announced by them, had at length come, and it had seen not only the sack of Jerusalem, but the destruction of the earthly kingdom of Judah. Many of the survivors, refusing still to acknowledge the justice of the chastisement, persisted in throwing the blame of the disaster on the reformers of the old worship, and saw no hope of salvation except in their idolatrous practices. “As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forth out of our mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well and saw no evil. But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.”

There still remained to these misguided Jews one consolation which they shared in common with the prophets--the certainty of seeing the hereditary foes of Israel involved in the common overthrow: Ammon had been already severely chastised; Tyre, cut off from the neighbouring mainland, seemed on the point of succumbing, and the turn of Egypt must surely soon arrive in which she would have to expiate in bitter sufferings the wrongs her evil counsels had brought upon Jerusalem. Their anticipated joy, however, of witnessing such chastisements was not realised. Tyre defied for thirteen years the blockade of Nebuchadrezzar, and when the city at length decided to capitulate, it was on condition that its king, Ethbaal III., should continue to reign under the almost nominal suzerainty of the Chaldeans (574 B.C.).*

* The majority of Christian writers have imagined, contrary to the testimony of the Phoenician annals, that the island of Tyre was taken by Nebuchadrezzar; they say that the Chaldæans united the island to the mainland by a causeway similar to that constructed subsequently by Alexander. It is worthy of notice that a local tradition, still existing in the eleventh century of our era, asserted that the besiegers were not successful in their enterprise.

Egypt continued not only to preserve her independence, but seemed to increase in prosperity in proportion to the intensity of the hatred which she had stirred up against her.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an engraving in Mariette.

Apries set about repairing the monuments and embellishing the temples: he erected throughout the country stelæ, tables of offerings, statues and obelisks, some of which, though of small size, like that which adorns the Piazza della Minerva at Borne,* erected so incongruously on the back of a modern elephant, are unequalled for purity of form and delicacy of cutting. The high pitch of artistic excellence to which the schools of the reign of Psam-metichus II. had attained was maintained at the same exalted level. If the granite sphinxes** and bronze lions of this period lack somewhat in grace of form, it must be acknowledged that they display greater refinement and elegance in the technique of carving or moulding than had yet been attained.

* [One of the two obelisks of the Campus Martius, on which site the Church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva was built.--Tr.]

** Above the summary of the contents of the present chapter, will be found one of these sphinxes which was discovered in Rome.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.

While engaged in these works at home, Apries was not unobservant of the revolutions occurring in Asia, upon which he maintained a constant watch, and in the years which followed the capitulation of Tyre, he found the opportunity, so long looked for, of entering once more upon the scene. The Phoenician navy had suffered much during the lengthy blockade of their country, and had become inferior to the Egyptian, now well organised by Thelonians: Apries therefore took the offensive by sea, and made a direct descent on the Phoenician coasts. Nebuchadrezzar opposed him with the forces of the recently subjugated Tyrians, and the latter, having cooled in their attachment to Egypt owing to the special favour shown by the Pharaoh to their rivals the Hellenes, summoned their Cypriote vassals to assist them in repelling the attack. The Egyptians dispersed the combined fleets, and taking possession of Sidon, gave it up to pillage. The other maritime cities surrendered of their own accord,* including Gebal, which received an Egyptian garrison, and where the officers of Pharaoh founded a temple to the goddess whom they identified with the Egyptian Hâthor.

* The war of Apries against the Phoenicians cannot have taken place before the capitulation of Tyre in 574 B.C., because the Tyrians took part in it by order of Nebuchadrezzar, and on the other hand it cannot be put later than 569 B.C., the date of the revolt of Amasis; it must therefore be assigned to about 571 B.C.

The object at which Necho and Psammetichus II. had aimed for fifteen years was thus attained by Apries at one fortunate blow, and he could legitimately entitle himself “more fortunate than all the kings his predecessors,” and imagine, in his pride, that “the gods themselves were unable to injure him.” The gods, however, did not allow him long to enjoy the fruits of his victory. Greeks had often visited Libya since the time when Egypt had been thrown open to the trade of the iEgean. Their sailors had discovered that the most convenient course thither was to sail straight to Crete, and then to traverse the sea between this island and the headlands of the Libyan plateau; here they fell in with a strong current setting towards the east, which carried them quickly and easily as far as Eakotis and Canopus, along the Marmarican shore. In these voyages they learned to appreciate the value of the country; and about 631 B.C. some Dorians of Thera, who had set out to seek for a new home at the bidding of the Delphic oracle, landed in the small desert island of Platsea, where they built a strongly fortified settlement. Their leader, Battos,* soon crossed over to the mainland, where, having reached the high plateau, he built the city of Cyrene on the borders of an extremely fertile region, watered by abundant springs. The tribes of the Labu, who had fought so valiantly against the Pharaohs of old, still formed a kind of loose confederation, and their territory stretched across the deserts from the Egyptian frontier to the shores of the Syrtes. The chief of this confederation assumed the title of king, as in the days of Mînephtah or of Ramses III.**

* Herodotus seems to have been ignorant of the real name of the founder of Cyrene, which has been preserved for us by Pindar, by Callimachus, by the spurious Heraclides of Pontus, and by the chronologists of the Christian epoch. Herodotus says that _Battos_ signifies _king_ in the language of Libya.

** The description given by Herodotus of these Libyan tribes agrees with the slight amount of information furnished by the Egyptian monuments for the thirteenth century B.C.

The most civilised of these tribes were those which now dwelt nearest to the coast: first the Adyrmakhides, who were settled beyond Marea, and had been semi-Egyptianised by constant intercourse with the inhabitants of the Delta; then the Giligammes, who dwelt between the port of Plynus and the island of Aphrodisias; and beyond these, again, the Asbystes, famed for their skill in chariot-driving, the Cabales, and the Auschises. The oases of the hinterland were in the hands of the Nasamones and of the Mashauasha, whom the Greeks called Maxyes.

One of the revolutions so frequent among the desert tribes had compelled the latter to remove from their home near the Nile valley, to a district far to the west, on the banks of the river Triton.

Drawn by Boudier, from Minutoli.

There they had settled down in a permanent fashion, dwelling in houses of stone, and giving themselves up to the cultivation of the soil. They continued, however, to preserve in their new life some of their ancient customs, such as that of painting their bodies with vermilion, and of shaving off the hair from their heads, with the exception of one lock which hung over the right ear. The Theban Pharaohs had formerly placed garrisons in the most important oases, and had consecrated temples there to their god Amon.

One of these sanctuaries, built close to an intermittent spring, which gave forth alternately hot and cold water, had risen to great eminence, and the oracle of these Ammonians was a centre of pilgrimage from far and near. The first Libyans who came into contact with the Greeks, the Asbystes and the Giligammes, received the new-comers kindly, giving them their daughters in marriage; from the fusion of the two races thus brought about sprang, first under Battos and then under his son Arkesilas I., an industrious and valiant race.

The main part of their revenues was derived from commerce in silphium and woollen goods, and even the kings themselves did not deem it beneath their dignity to preside in person at the weighing of the crop, and the storing of the trusses in their magazines. The rapid increase in the wealth of the city having shortly brought about a breach in the friendly relations hitherto maintained between it and its neighbours, Battos the Fortunate, the son of Arkesilas I., sent for colonists from Greece: numbers answered to his call, on the faith of a second oracular prediction, and in order to provide them with the necessary land, Battos did not hesitate to dispossess his native allies. The latter appealed to Adikrân, king of the confederacy, and this prince, persuaded that this irregular militia would not be able to withstand the charge of the hoplites, thereupon applied in his turn to Apries for assistance.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the cast of a coin of Cyrene.

There was much tempting spoil to be had in Cyrene, and Apries was fully aware of the fact, from the accounts of the Libyans and the Greeks. His covetousness must have been aroused at the prospect of such rich booty, and perhaps he would have thought of appropriating it sooner, had he not been deterred from the attempt by his knowledge of the superiority of the Greek fleets, and of the dangers attendant on a long and painful march over an almost desert country through disaffected tribes.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph of the original in the Coin Room in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. The king here represented is Arkesilas II. the Bad.

Now that he could rely on the support of the Libyans, he hesitated no longer to run these risks. Deeming it imprudent, with good reason, to employ his mercenary troops against their own compatriots, Apries mobilised for his encounter with Battos an army exclusively recruited from among his native reserves. The troops set out full of confidence in themselves and of disdain for the enemy, delighted moreover at an opportunity for at length convincing their kings of their error in preferring barbarian to native forces. But the engagement brought to nought all their boastings. The Egyptians were defeated in the first encounter near Irasa, hard by the fountain of Thestê, near the spot where the high plateaus of Cyrene proper terminate in the low cliffs of Marmarica: and the troops suffered so severely during the subsequent retreat that only a small remnant of the army regained in safety the frontier of the Delta.*

* The interpretation I have given to the sentiments of the Egyptian army follows clearly enough from the observation of Herodotus, that “the Egyptians, having never experienced themselves the power of the Greeks, had felt for them nothing but contempt.” The site of Irasa and the fountain of Thestê has been fixed with much probability in the fertile district watered still by the fountain of Ersen, Erazem, or Erasân.

This unexpected reverse was the occasion of the outbreak of a revolution which had been in preparation for years. The emigration to Ethiopia of some contingents of the military class had temporarily weakened the factions hostile to foreign influence; these factions had felt themselves powerless under the rule of Psammetichus I., and had bowed to his will, prepared all the while to reassert themselves when they felt strong enough to do so successfully. The reorganisation of the native army furnished them at once with the means of insurrection, of which they had temporarily been deprived. Although Pharaoh had lavished privileges on the Hermotybies and Calasiries, she had not removed the causes for discontent which had little by little alienated the good will of the Mashauasha: to do so would have rendered necessary the disbanding of the Ionian guard, the object of their jealousy, and to take this step neither he nor his successors could submit themselves. The hatred of these mercenaries, and the irritation against the sovereigns who employed them, grew fiercer from reign to reign, and now wanted nothing but a pretext to break forth openly: such a pretext was furnished by the defeat at Irasa. When the fugitives arrived at the entrenched camp of Marea, exasperated by their defeat, and alleging doubtless that it was due to treachery, they found others who affected to share their belief that Pharaoh had despatched his Egyptian troops against Cyrene with the view of consigning to certain death those whose loyalty to him was suspected, and it was not difficult to stir up the disaffected soldiers to open revolt. It was not the first time that a military tumult had threatened the sovereignty of Apries. Some time previous to this, in an opposite quarter of the Nile valley, the troops stationed at Elephantine, composed partly of Egyptians, partly of Asiatic and Greek mercenaries--possibly the same who had fought in the Ethiopian campaign under Psammetichus II.--had risen in rebellion owing to some neglect in the payment of their wages: having devastated the Thebaid, they had marched straight across the desert to the port of Shashirît, in the hope of there seizing ships to enable them to reach the havens of Idumæa or Nabatoa. The governor of Elephantine, Nsihor, had at first held them back with specious promises; but on learning that Apries was approaching with reinforcements, he attacked them boldly, and driving them before him, hemmed them in between his own force and that of the king and massacred them all. Apries thought that the revolt at Marea would have a similar issue, and that he might succeed in baffling the rebels by fair words; he sent to them as his representative Amasis, one of his generals, distantly connected probably with the royal house. What took place in the camp is not clearly known, for the actual events have been transformed in the course of popular transmission into romantic legends. The story soon took shape that Amasis was born of humble parentage in the village of Siuph, not far from Sais; he was fond, it was narrated, of wine, the pleasures of the table, and women, and replenished his empty purse by stealing what he could lay his hands on from his neighbours or comrades--a gay boon-companion all the while, with an easy disposition and sarcastic tongue. According to some accounts, he conciliated the favour of Apries by his invariable affability and good humour; according to others, he won the king’s confidence by presenting him with a crown of flowers on his birthday.*

* The king to whom Amasis made this offering is called Patarmis, and the similarity of this name with the Patarbemis of Herodotus seems to indicate a variant of the legend, in which Patarmis or Patarbemis took the place of Apries.

The story goes on to say that while he was haranguing the rebels, one of them, slipping behind him, suddenly placed on his head the rounded helmet of the Pharaohs: the bystanders immediately proclaimed him king, and after a slight show of resistance he accepted the dignity. As soon as the rumour of these events had reached Sais, Apries despatched Patarbemis, one of his chief officers, with orders to bring back the rebel chief alive. The latter was seated on his horse, on the point of breaking up his camp and marching against his former patron, when the envoy arrived. On learning the nature of his mission, Amasis charged him to carry back a reply to the effect that he had already been making preparation to submit, and besought the sovereign to grant him patiently a few days longer, so that he might bring with him the Egyptian subjects of Pharaoh. Tradition adds that, on receiving this insolent defiance, Apries fell into a violent passion, and without listening to remonstrance, ordered the nose and ears of Patarbemis to be cut off, whereupon the indignant people, it is alleged, deserted his cause and ranged themselves on the side of Amasis. The mercenaries, however, did not betray the confidence reposed in them by their Egyptian lords. Although only thirty thousand against a whole people, they unflinchingly awaited the attack at Momemphis (569 B.C.); but, being overwhelmed by the numbers of their assailants, disbanded and fled, after a conflict lasting one day. Apries, taken prisoner in the rout, was at first well treated by the conqueror, and seems even to have retained for a time the external pomp of royalty; but the populace of Sais demanding his execution with vehemence, Amasis was at length constrained to deliver him up to their vengeance, and Apries was strangled by the mob. He was honourably interred between the royal palace and the temple of Nit, not far from the spot where his predecessors reposed in their glory,* and the usurper made himself sole master of the country. It was equivalent to a change of dynasty, and Amasis had recourse to the methods usual in such cases to consolidate his power. He entered into a marriage alliance with princesses of the Saite line, and thus legitimatised his usurpation as far as the north was concerned.**

* It was probably from this necropolis that the coffin of Psammetichus II. came.

** The wife of Amasis, who was mother of Psammetichus III., the queen Tintkhiti, daughter of Petenit, prophet of Phtah, was probably connected with the royal family of Sais.

In the south, the “divine worshippers” had continued to administer the extensive heritage of Amon, and Nitocris, heiress of Shapenuapît, had adopted in her old age a daughter of her great-nephew, Psammetichus IL, named Ankhnasnofiribrî: this princess was at this time in possession of Thebes, and Amasis appears to have entered into a fictitious marriage with her in order to assume to himself her rights to the crown. He had hardly succeeded in establishing his authority on a firm basis when he was called upon to repel the Chaldaean invasion. The Hebrew prophets had been threatening Egypt with this invasion for a long time, and Ezekiel, discounting the future, had already described the entrance of Pharaoh into Hades, to dwell among the chiefs of the nations--Assur, Elam, Meshech, Tubal, Edom, and Philistia--who, having incurred the vengeance of Jahveh, had descended into the grave one after the other: “Pharaoh and all his army shall be slain by the sword, saith the Lord God! For I have put this terror in the land of the living: and he shall be laid in the midst of the uncircumcised, with them that are slain by the sword, even Pharaoh and all his multitude, saith the Lord God!” Nebuchadrezzar had some hesitation in hazarding his fortune in a campaign on the banks of the Nile: he realised tolerably clearly that Babylon was not in command of such resources as had been at the disposal of Nineveh under Esarhaddon or Assur-bani-pal, and that Egypt in the hands of a Saite dynasty was a more formidable foe than when ruled by the Ethiopians. The report of the revolution of which Apries had become a victim at length determined him to act; the annihilation of the Hellenic troops, and the dismay which the defeat at Irasa had occasioned in the hearts of the Egyptians, seemed to offer an opportunity too favourable to be neglected. The campaign was opened by Nebuchadrezzar about 568, in the thirty-seventh year of his reign,* but we have no certain information as to the issue of his enterprise.

* A fragment of his Annals, discovered by Pinches, mentions in the thirty-seventh year of his reign a campaign against [Ah]masu, King of Egypt; and Wiedemann, from the evidence of this document combined with the information derived from one of the monuments in the Louvre, thought that the fact of a conquest of Egypt as far as Syenô might be admitted; at that point the Egyptian general Nsihor would have defeated the Chaldæans and repelled the invasion, and this event would have taken place during the joint reign of Apries and Amasis. A more attentive examination of the Egyptian monument shows that it refers not to a Chaldæan war, but to a rebellion of the garrisons in the south of Egypt, including the Greek and Semitic auxiliaries.

According to Chaldæan tradition, Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded the valley of the Nile and converted Egypt into a Babylonian province, with Amasis as its satrap.* We may well believe that Amasis lost the conquests won by his predecessor in Phoenicia, if, indeed, they still belonged to Egypt at his accession: but there is nothing to indicate that the Chaldæans ever entered Egypt itself and repeated the Assyrian exploit of a century before.

* These events would have taken place in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar; the reigning king (Apries) being killed and his place taken by one of his generals (Amasis), who remained a satrap of the Babylonian empire.

This was Nebuchadrezzar’s last war, the last at least of which history makes any mention. As a fact, the kings of the second Babylonian empire do not seem to have been the impetuous conquerors which we have fancied them to be. We see them as they are depicted to us in the visions of the Hebrew prophets, who, regarding them and their nation as a scourge in the hands of God, had no colours vivid enough or images sufficiently terrible to portray them. They had blotted out Nineveh from the list of cities, humiliated Pharaoh, and subjugated Syria, and they had done all this almost at their first appearance in the field--such a feat as Assyria and Egypt in the plenitude of their strength had been unable to accomplish: they had, moreover, destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah into captivity. There is nothing astonishing in the fact that this Nebuchadrezzar, whose history is known to us almost entirely from Jewish sources, should appear as a fated force let loose upon the world. “O thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into the scabbard; rest and be still! How canst thou be quiet, seeing the Lord hath given thee a charge?” But his campaigns in Syria and Africa, of which the echoes transmitted to us still seem so formidable, were not nearly so terrible in reality as those in which Blam had perished a century previously; they were, moreover, the only conflicts which troubled the peace of his reign. The Arabian chroniclers affirm, indeed, that the fabulous wealth of Yemen had incited him to invade that region. Nebuchadrezzar, they relate, routed, not far from the town of Dhât-îrk, the Joctanides of Jorhom, who had barred his road to the Kaabah, and after seizing Mecca, reached the borders of the children of Himyrâ: the exhausted condition of his soldiers having prevented him from pressing further forward in his career of conquest, he retraced his steps and returned to Babylon with a great number of prisoners, including two entire tribes, those of Hadhurâ and Uabar, whom he established as colonists in Chaldæa.* He never passed in this direction beyond the limits reached by Assur-bani-pal, and his exploits were restricted to some successful raids against the tribes of Kedar and Nabatsea.**

* Most of the Arabic legends relating to these conquests of Nebuchadrezzar are indirectly derived from the biblical story; but it is possible that the history of the expeditions against Central Arabia is founded on fact.

** This seems to follow from Jeremiah’s imprecations upon Kedar

The same reasons which at the commencement of his reign had restrained his ambition to extend his dominions towards the east and north, were operative up to the end of his life. Astyages had not inherited the martial spirit of his father Cyaxares, and only one warlike expedition, that against the Cadusians, is ascribed to him.*

* Moses of Chorene attributes to him long wars against an Armenian king named Tigranes; but this is a fiction of a later age.

Naturally indolent, lacking in decision, superstitious and cruel, he passed a life of idleness amid the luxury of a corrupt court, surrounded by pages, women, and eunuchs, with no more serious pastime than the chase, pursued within the limits of his own parks or on the confines of the desert. But if the king was weak, his empire was vigorous, and Nebuchadrezzar, brought up from his youth to dread the armies of Media, retained his respect for them up to the end of his life, even when there was no longer any occasion to do so. Nebuchadrezzar was, after all, not so much a warrior as a man of peace, whether so constituted by nature or rendered so by political necessity in its proper sense, and he took advantage of the long intervals of quiet between his campaigns to complete the extensive works which more than anything else have won for him his renown. During the century which had preceded the fall of Nineveh, Babylonia had had several bitter experiences; it had suffered almost entire destruction at the hands of Sennacherib; it had been given up to pillage by Assur-bani-pal, not to mention the sieges and ravages it had sustained in the course of continual revolts. The other cities of Babylonia, Sippara, Borsippa, Kutha, Nipur, Uruk, and Uru, had been subjected to capture and recapture, while the surrounding districts, abandoned in turn to Elamites, Assyrians, and the Kaldâ, had lain uncultivated for many years. The canals at the same time had become choked with mud, the banks had fallen in, and the waters, no longer kept under control, had overflowed the land, and the plains long since reclaimed for cultivation had returned to their original condition of morasses and reed-beds; at Babylon itself the Arakhtu, still encumbered with the _debris_ cast into it by Sennacherib, was no longer navigable, and was productive of more injury than profit to the city: in some parts the aspect of the country must have been desolate and neglected as at the present day, and the work accomplished by twenty generations had to be begun entirely afresh. Nabopolassar had already applied himself to the task in spite of the anxieties of his Assyrian campaigns, and had raised many earthworks in both the capital and the provinces. But a great deal more still remained to be done, and Nebuchadrezzar pushed forward the work planned by his father, and carried it to completion undeterred and undismayed by any difficulties.* The combined system of irrigation and navigation introduced by the kings of the first Babylonian empire twenty centuries previously, was ingeniously repaired; the beds of the principal canals, the Royal river and the Arakhtu, were straightened and deepened; the drainage of the country between the Tigris and the Euphrates was regulated by means of subsidiary canals and a network of dykes; the canals surrounding Babylon or intersecting in the middle of the city were cleaned out, and a waterway was secured for navigation from one river to the other, and from the plateau of Mesopotamia to the Nar-Marratum.**

* The only long inscriptions of Nebuchadrezzar which we possess, are those commemorating the great works he designed and executed.

** The irrigation works of Nebuchadrezzar are described at length, and perhaps exaggerated, by Abydenus, who merely quotes Berosus more or less inaccurately. The completion of the quays along the Arakhtu, begun by Nabopolassar, is noticed in the _East India Company’s Inscription_. A special inscription, publ. by H. Rawlinson, gives an account of the repairing of the canal Libil-khigallu, which crossed Babylon.

We may well believe that all Nebuchadrezzar’s undertakings were carried out in accordance with a carefully prepared scheme for perfecting the defences of the kingdom while completing the system of internal communication. The riches of Karduniash, now restored to vigour by continued peace, and become the centre of a considerable empire, could not fail to excite the jealousy of its neighbours, and particularly that of the most powerful among them, the Medes of Ecbatana. It is true that the relations between Nebuchadrezzar and Astyages continued to be cordial, and as yet there were no indications of a rupture; but it was always possible that under their successors the good understanding between the two courts might come to an end, and it was needful to provide against the possibility of the barbarous tribes of Iran being let loose upon Babylon, and attempting to inflict on her the fate they had brought upon Nineveh. Nebuchadrezzar, therefore, was anxious to interpose, between himself and these possible foes, such a series of fortifications that the most persevering enemy would be worn out by the prolonged task of forcing them one after another, provided that they were efficiently garrisoned. He erected across the northern side of the isthmus between the two rivers a great embankment, faced with bricks cemented together with bitumen, called the _Wall of Media_; this wall, starting from Sippara, stretched from the confluence of the Saklauiyeh with the Euphrates to the site of the modern village of Jibbara on the Tigris; on both sides of it four or five deep trenches were excavated, which were passable on raised causeways or by bridges of boats, so arranged as to be easily broken up in case of invasion.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of the time of Sargon, in the Museum of the Louvre.

The eastern frontier was furnished with a rampart protected by a wide moat, following, between Jibbara and Nipur, the contours of a low-lying district which could be readily flooded. The western boundary was already protected by the Pallakottas, and the lakes or marshes of Bahr-î-Nejîf: Nebuchadrezzar multiplied the number of the dikes, and so arranged them that the whole country between the suburbs of Borsippa and Babylon could be inundated at will. Babylon itself formed as it were the citadel in the midst of these enormous outlying fortifications, and the engineers both of Nabopo-lassar and of his son expended all the resources of their art on rendering it impregnable. A triple rampart surrounded it and united it to Borsippa, built on the model of those whose outline is so frequently found on the lowest tier of an Assyrian bas-relief.

Reproduced by Faucher-Gudin, from the restoration by Dieulafoy.

A moat of great width, with banks of masonry, communicating with the Euphrates, washed the foot of the outer wall, which retained the traditional name of Imgur-bel: behind this wall rose Nimitti-bel, the true city wall, to a height of more than ninety feet above the level of the plain, appearing from a distance, with its battlements and towers, more like a mountain chain than a rampart built by the hand of man; finally, behind Nimitti-bel ran a platform on the same level as the curtain of Imgur-bel, forming a last barrier behind which the garrison could rally before finally owning itself defeated and surrendering the city. Large square towers rose at intervals along the face of the walls, to the height of some eighteen feet above the battlements: a hundred gates fitted with bronze-plated doors, which could be securely shut at need, gave access to the city.*

* The description of the fortifications of the city is furnished by Herodotus, who himself saw them still partially standing; the account of their construction has been given by Nebuchadrezzar himself, in the _East India Company’s Inscription_.

The space within the walls was by no means completely covered by houses, but contained gardens, farms, fields, and, here and there, the ruins of deserted buildings. As in older Babylon, the city proper clustered round the temple of Merodach, with its narrow winding streets, its crowded bazaars, its noisy and dirty squares, its hostelries and warehouses of foreign merchandise.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch in Layard.

The pyramid of Esarhad-don and Assur-bani-pal, too hastily built, had fallen into ruins: Nebuchadrezzar reconstructed its seven stages, and erected on the topmost platform a shrine furnished with a table of massive gold, and a couch on which the priestess chosen to be the spouse of the god might sleep at night. Other small temples were erected here and there on both banks of the river, and the royal palace, built in the marvellously short space of fifteen days, was celebrated for its hanging gardens, where the ladies of the harem might walk unveiled, secure from vulgar observation. No trace of all these extensive works remains at the present day.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch in Layard.

Some scattered fragments of crumbling walls alone betray the site of the great ziggurât, a few bas-reliefs are strewn over the surface of the ground, and a lion of timeworn stone, lying on its back in a depression of the soil, is perhaps the last survivor of those which kept watch, according to custom, at the gates of the palace. But the whole of this vast work of reconstruction and ornamentation must not be attributed to Nebuchadrezzar alone. The plans had been designed by Nabopolassar under the influence of one of his wives, who by a strange chance bears in classic tradition the very Egyptian name of Nitocris; but his work was insignificant compared with that accomplished by his son, and the name of Nebuchadrezzar was justly connected with the marvels of Babylon by all ancient writers. But even his reign of fifty-five years did not suffice for the completion of all his undertakings, and many details still remained imperfect at his death in the beginning of 562 B.C. Though of Kaldu origin, and consequently exposed to the suspicions and secret enmity of the native Babylonians, as all of his race, even Mero-dach-Baladan himself, had been before him, he had yet succeeded throughout the whole of his reign in making himself respected by the turbulent inhabitants of his capital, and in curbing the ambitious pretensions of the priests of Merodach. As soon as his master-hand was withdrawn, the passions so long repressed broke forth, and proved utterly beyond the control of his less able or less fortunate successors.*

* The sequel of this history is known from the narrative of Berosus. Its authenticity is proved by passages on the _Cylinder of Nabonidus_. Messer-schmidt considers that Amil- marduk and Labashi-marduk were overthrown by the priestly faction, but a passage on the _Cylinder_, in which Nabonidus represents himself as inheriting the political views of Nebuchadrezzar and Nergal-sharuzur, leads me to take the opposite view. We know what hatred Nabonidus roused in the minds of the priests of Merodach because his principles of government were opposed to theirs: the severe judgment he passed on the rule of Amil-marduk and Labashi-marduk seems to prove that he considered them as belonging to the rival party in the state, that is, to the priestly faction. The forms of the names and the lengths of the several reigns have been confirmed by contemporary monuments, especially by the numerous contract tablets. The principal inscriptions belonging to the reign of Nergal-sharuzur deal only with public works and the restoration of monuments.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph furnished by Father Scheil.

As far as we are able to judge by the documents which have come down to us, two factions had arisen in the city since the fall of Nineveh, both of which aspired to power and strove to gain a controlling influence with the sovereign. The one comprised the descendants of the Kaldâ who had delivered the city from the Assyrian yoke, together with those of the ancient military nobility. The other was composed of the great priestly families and their adherents, who claimed for the gods or their representatives the right to control the affairs of the state, and to impose the will of heaven on the rulers of the kingdom. The latter faction seems to have prevailed at first at the court of Amil-marduk, the sole surviving son and successor of Nebuchadrezzar. This prince on his accession embraced a policy contrary to that pursued by his father: and one of his first acts was to release Jehoiachin, King of Judah, who had been languishing in chains for twenty-seven years, and to ameliorate the condition of the other expatriated Jews. The official history of a later date represented him as having been an unjust sovereign, but we have no information as to his misdeeds, and know only that after two years a conspiracy broke out against him, led by his own brother-in-law, Nergal-sharuzur, who assassinated him and seized the vacant throne (560 B.C.). Nergal-sharuzur endeavoured to revive the policy of Nebuchadrezzar, and was probably supported by the military party, but his reign was a short one; he died in 556 B.C., leaving as sole heir a youth of dissipated character named Labashi-marduk, whose name is stigmatised by the chroniclers as that of a prince who knew not how to rule. He was murdered at the end of nine months, and his place taken by a native Babylonian, a certain Nabonâîd (Nabonidus), son of Nabo-balatsu-ikbi, who was not connected by birth with his immediate predecessors on the throne (556-555 B.C.).

No Oriental empire could escape from the effects of frequent and abrupt changes in its rulers: like so many previous dynasties, that of Nabopolassar became enfeebled as if from exhaustion immediately after the death of its most illustrious scion, and foundered in imbecility and decrepitude. Popular imagination, awe-struck by such a sudden downfall from exalted prosperity, recognised the hand of God in the events which brought about the catastrophe. A Chaldæan legend, current not long after, related how Nebuchadrezzar, being seized towards the end of his life with the spirit of prophecy, mounted to the roof of his palace, and was constrained, as a punishment for his pride, to predict to his people, with his own lips, the approaching ruin of their city; thereupon the glory of its monarch suffered an eclipse from which there was no emerging. The Jews, nourishing undying hatred for conqueror who had overthrown Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple of Solomon, were not satisfied with a punishment so inadequate. According to them, Nebuchadrezzar, after his victorious career, was so intoxicated with his own glory that he proclaimed himself the equal of God. “Is not this great Babylon,” he cried, “which I have built for the royal dwelling-place, by the might of my power, and for the glory of my majesty!” and while he thus spake, there came a voice from heaven, decreeing his metamorphosis into the form of a beast. “He was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hair was grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.” For seven years the king remained in this state, to resume his former shape at the end of this period, and recover his kingdom after having magnified the God of Israel.*

* Dan. iv.

The founder of the dynasty which replaced that of Nebuchadrezzar, Nabonidus, was certainly ill fitted to brave the storms already threatening to break over his kingdom. It has not been ascertained whether he had any natural right to the throne, or by what means he attained supreme power, but the way in which he dwells on the names of Nebuchadrezzar and Nergal-sharuzur renders it probable that he was raised to the throne by the military faction. He did not prove, as events turned turned out, a good general, nor even a soldier of moderate ability, and it is even possible that he also lacked that fierce courage of which none of his predecessors was ever destitute. He allowed his army to dwindle away and his fortresses to fall into ruins; the foreign alliances existing at his accession, together with those which he himself had concluded, were not turned to the best advantage; his provinces were badly administered, and his subjects rendered discontented: his most salient characteristic was an insatiable curiosity concerning historical and religious antiquities, which stimulated him to undertake excavations in all the temples, in order to bring to light monuments of ages long gone by. He was a monarch of peaceful disposition, who might have reigned with some measure of success in a century of unbroken peace, or one troubled only by petty wars with surrounding inferior states; but, unfortunately, the times were ill suited to such mild sovereignty. The ancient Eastern world, worn out by an existence reckoned by thousands of years, as well as by its incessant conflicts, would have desired, indeed, no better fate than to enjoy some years of repose in the condition in which recent events had left it; but other nations, the Greeks and the Persians, by no means anxious for tranquillity, were entering the lists. For the moment the efforts of the Greeks were concentrated on Egypt, where Pharaoh manifested for them inexhaustible good will, and on Cyprus, two-thirds of which belonged to them; the danger for Chaldæa lay in the Persians, kinsfolk and vassals of the Medes, whose semi-barbarous chieftains had issued from their mountain homes some eighty years previously to occupy the eastern districts of Elam.

END OF VOL. VIII.