Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/70

 50 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. could resist, they spread themselves over the country lying between the shores of the Caspian and the Persian Gulf; they even menaced the frontiers of Egypt. The open towns were pillaged and destroyed, the fields and agricultural villages ruth- lessly laid waste. Thanks to the height and thickness of their defending walls Nineveh, Babylon, and a few other cities escaped a sack, but Mesopotamia as a whole suffered cruelly. The dwellers in its vast plains had no inaccessible summits or hidden valleys to which they could retreat until the wave of destruc- tion had passed on. At the end of a few years the loot-laden Scythians withdrew into those steppes of central Asia whence their descendants were ao-ain, some six centuries later, to menace 5 the existence of civilization ; and they left Assyria and Chaldsea half stripped of their inhabitants behind them. The work begun by the Scythians was finished by the Medes. These were Aryan tribes, long subject to the Assyrians, who had begun to constitute themselves a nation in the first half of the seventh century, and, under the leadership of CYAXARES, the real founder of their power, had already attacked Nineveh after the death of Assurbanipal. This invasion brought on a kind of forced truce, but when the Medes had compelled the Scythians to retreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires so much, they quickly resumed the offensive. 1 We cannot follow all the fluctuations of the conflict ; the information left by the early historians is vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to help us out. After the fall of Nineveh cylinders of clay and alabaster slabs were no longer covered with wedges by the Assyrian scribes. They had recounted their victories and conquests at length, but not one among them, so far as we know, cared to retrace the dismal history of final defeat. All that we can ooiess is that the last sovereign of Nineveh o o fell before a coalition in which Media and Chaldaea played the chief parts.' 2 NABOPOLASSAR, the general to whom he confided 1 HERODOTUS, i. 106. 2 HERODOTUS (i. 106) alludes to this capital event only in a word or two, in which he promises to give a more complete account of the whole matter in another work iv erepouTi Aoyotcrc -doubtless in that History of Assyria (" Ao-o-uptot Ao'yot " i. 184) which was either never written or soon lost. Diodorus, who gives circumstantial details both of the coalition and the siege, dates it a century too early, changes all the names, and mixes up many fables with his recital (ii. 23-28). In forming a just idea of the catastrophe and of its date we have to depend chiefly upon the lost