Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/132

 96 Outlines of European History Cyrus of Anshan organizes the Persian tribes into a nation and conquers the Medes The Persian army Cyrus against the west Cyrus master of the west Aryan clays. As they tilled their fields and watched their flocks they told many a tale of the ancient prophet who had died four hundred years before, and whose faith they held. They acknowledged themselves vassals of their kinsmen the Medes, who ruled far to the north and northwest of them. One of their tribes dwelling in the mountains of Elam (see map, p. 56), a tribe known as Anshan, was organized as a little kingdom. About fifty years after the fall of Nineveh, this little kingdom was ruled over by a Persian named Cyrus. He suc- ceeded in uniting the other tribes of his kindred Persians into a nation. Thereupon Cyrus at once rebelled against the rule of the Medes. He gathered his peasant soldiery, and within three years he defeated the Median king and made himself master of the Median territoiy. The extraordinary career of Cyrus was now a spectacle upon which all eyes in the west were fastened with wonder and alarm. The overflowing energies of the new conqueror and his peasant soldieiy, fresh and unspent for cen- turies among their eastern hills, proved irresistible. The Persian peasants seem to have been remarkable archers, and the mass of the Persian army was made up of bowmen (Fig. 51) whose storm of arrows at long range overwhelmed the enemy long before the hand-to-hand fighting began. Bodies of the skillful Persian horsemen, hovering on either wing, then rode in and completed the destruction of the foe. The great states Babylonia (Chaldea), Egypt, Lydia under King Croesus in western Asia Minor, and even Sparta in Greece formed a powerful combination against this sudden menace, which had risen like the flash of a meteor in the eastern sky. Without an instant's delay Cyrus struck at Croesus of Lydia, the chief author of the hostile combination. One Persian victory fol- lowed after another. By 546 B.C. Sardis, the Lydian capital, had fallen and Croesus, the Lydian king, was a prisoner in the hands of Cyrus. Cyrus at once gained also the southern coasts of Asia Minor. Within five years the power of the little Persian kingdom in the mountains of Elam had swept across Asia Minor to the