CHAPTER III. THE EAST IN 600 B.C.
When we look at the East again in 600 B.C. after two centuries of war and tumultuous movements we perceive that almost all its lands have found fresh masters. The political changes are tremendous. Cataclysm has followed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygian dynasty has gone down in massacre and rapine, and from another seat of power its former client rules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholds of the lesser Semitic peoples have almost all succumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone snatched by one foreign dog from another. The Assyrian colossus which bestrid the west Asiatic world has failed and collapsed, and the Medes and the Chaldaeans - these two clouds no bigger than a man's hand which had lain on Assyria's horizon - fill her seat and her room. As we look back on it now, the political revolution is complete; but had we lived in the year 600 at Asshur or Damascus or Tyre or Tarsus, it might have impressed us less. A new master in the East did not and does not always mean either a new earth or a new heaven.
Let us see to how much the change really amounted. The Assyrian Empire was no more. This is a momentous fact, not to be esteemed lightly. The final catastrophe has happened only six years before our date; but the power of Assyria had been going downhill for nearly half a century, and it is clear, from the freedom with which other powers were able to move about the area of her empire some time before the end, that the East had been free of her interference for years. Indeed, so near and vital a centre of Assyrian nationality as Calah, the old capital of the Middle Empire, had been taken and sacked, ere he who was to be the last "Great King" of the northern Semites ascended his throne.