SECTION 5. THE BABYLONIANS AND THE MEDES
Six years later, - in 600 B.C. - this was the position of that part of the East which had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldaean king of Babylon, who had succeeded his father about 605, held the greater share of it to obedience and tribute, but not, apparently, by means of any such centralized bureaucratic organization as the Assyrians had established. Just before his father's death he had beaten the Egyptians in a pitched battle under the walls of Carchemish, and subsequently had pursued them south through Syria, and perhaps across the frontier, before being recalled to take up his succession. He had now, therefore, no rival or active competitor in Syria, and this part of the lost empire of Assyria seems to have enjoyed a rare interval of peace under native client princes who ruled more or less on Assyrian lines. The only fenced places which made any show of defiance were Tyre and Jerusalem, which both relied on Egypt. The first would outlast an intermittent siege of thirteen years; but the other, with far less resources, was soon to pay full price for having leaned too long on the "staff of a broken reed."
About the east and north a different story would certainly have to be told, if we could tell it in full. But though Greek traditions come to our aid, they have much less to say about these remote regions than the inscribed annals of that empire, which had just come to its end, have had hitherto: and unfortunately the Median inheritors of Assyria have left no epigraphic records of their own - at least none have been found. If, as seems probable, the main element of Kyaxares' war strength was Scythian, we can hardly expect to find records either of his conquest or the subsequent career of the Medes, even though Ecbatana should be laid bare below the site of modern Hamadan; for the predatory Scyth, like the mediaeval Mongol, halted too short a time to desire to carve stones, and probably lacked skill to inscribe them. To complete our discomfiture, the only other possible source of light, the Babylonian annals, sheds none henceforward on the north country and very little on any country. Nebuchadnezzar - so far as his records have been found and read - did not adopt the Assyrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures, we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have constituted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.
We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service. First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides overrunning all Assyria and the northern part of Babylonia after the fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552 B.C.
Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained, under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in the widest sense of this vague term.
Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar - for he it must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown - was not a wholly independent ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their achievements.
In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be), and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power westward to Asia Minor, the Medes followed routes north of Taurus, not the old Assyrian war-road through Cilicia. Of so much we can be fairly sure. Much else that we are told of Media by Herodotus - his marvellous account of Ecbatana and scarcely less wonderful account of the reigning house - must be passed by till some confirmation of it comes to light; and that, perhaps, will never be.