Page:Herodotus and the Empires of the East.djvu/60

54 the conquest of Samaria, made the kingdom of Israel an Assyrian province. He conquered the king of Hamath and his allied towns, Arpad, Simyra, and Damascus. He took the king of Gaza prisoner, conquered the king of the old Hittite town Carchemish, overpowered the Philistine towns Ashdod and Gath, subdued the Elamite borders, and finally, by the expulsion of the Babylonian king Merodach-Baladaii II., reached the zenith of his power. In the Northeast and East he not only protected but extended the boundaries of the empire. It is historically certain that at the end of the eighth century B. C. the Assyrian power reached its greatest extent.

How, then, can we explain the statement of Herodotus that toward the end of the eighth century the Medes, and afterwards the other nations, threw off the Assyrian yoke? Our historian, as we have shown, obtained his information from Persian and Median sources. Moreover, it is quite probable that the Medes, who in the course of the seventh century gained their independence, and in 606 destroyed Nineveh, date the beginning of their freedom from that period in which they fought theirfirst battles to recover political independence. This period is not clearly indicated in Assyrian sources, for the cuneiform inscriptions emphasize rather the positive results of Assyrian expeditions, while the Medes carefully handed down the tradition of the more or less successful course of their own battles. The records of such contests, though carefully preserved by the Medes, appear in the Assyrian documents only when an Assyrian king took the field against the rebels and considered his own achievements worth mentioning.