Page:Herodotus and the Empires of the East.djvu/79

Rh broken their power he reëstablished the sovereignty of. the Medes, and finally destroyed Ninos. The twenty-eight years of Scythian power do not refer exclusively to the time in which the Medes were under the yoke of the Scythians, for Nineveh fell eighteen years after the accession of Cyaxares to the throne (624–18=606). The Medes must have made strong resistance to the Scythians more than once. Cyaxares attacked the Assyrian empire when it was shaken by the inroad of these Scythians. The Medes appeared before the gates of Nineveh and conquered the town. It may be true that the Babylonians, whose king, Nabopolassar, had procured for his son the hand of the daughter of the Median king, aided the Medes in this siege. Berossus mentions this, but Herodotus does not. Herodotus correctly states that Cyaxares conquered Nineveh, while Berossus and his excerptists refer this conquest to Astyages. Astyages ascended the throne of Media in the year 584, but Nineveh was destroyed about 606. The Assyrian king in whose reign the capital of Assyria fell is called in the inscriptions Sin-šar-iškun, the Sarakos of Alexander Polyhistor.

After the fall of Nineveh the Lydians, Medes, and Babylonians became the most powerful nations in Western Asia. These three kingdoms were destroyed by the Persian, Cyrus, the king of Anshan, who founded the Persian power.