Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/36

 24 EARLY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES mercenary armies instead of on what may be called national or feudal levies. Still, Sargon's military prowess was rather encouraged, because his mercenaries required to be satisfied by chances of plunder; and he extended his boundaries on every side beyond the limits which Tiglath-pileser had reached. He was succeeded in 705 by Sennacherib, who was of the other party. By this time, the Israelite kingdom had dis- appeared altogether, but Judah remained, and strove with the support of Egypt to make head against the merciless Assyrian power, which had adopted the practice of deporting and transplanting conquered populations wholesale. Both Tyre and Jerusalem successfully defied the armies of Sennacherib, who attempted to invade Egypt where the Ethiopian Tirhakah was Pharaoh. The Angel of the Lord smote his hosts, according to the Biblical account : field-mice nibbled their bow- strings, according to the Egyptian version. An outbreak of plague, heralded as is often the case by the appearance of an army of rats, affords a plausible reconciliation of the two stories. That there was a terrific catastrophe attributed generally to a divine visitation seems certain. Sennacherib was assassinated, and his son Esarhaddon favoured Babylonia and the priests as against the Assyrian nationalists and military nobility. We are now well within the seventh century B.C. ; and the Semitic empires begin to feel the pressure of new Barbarian peoples — now for the first time of the Aryan stock. Not the highly civilised Aryans of Europe and Western Asia Minor, with whom the Semites had not yet come in contact, but migrating races which had not organised states. These are Cimmerians the Cimmerians, descending apparently on Armenia and Medes. or Urartu by way of the Caucasus, the Ashkuza, Scythians, and Medes from the north-east and east. As yet, however, these are still threatening rather than actually invading the Assyrian empire. Esarhaddon thought more about con- quering Egypt, where he effected a -temporary occupation, drove the Ethiopian Pharaoh back to Ethiopia, and set up Assyrian governors. A revolt of Esarhaddon's son Ashurbanipal very soon gave Tirhakah the chance of recovering Egypt. Ashurbanipal in his turn was chosen by the military party, as