The first Scythian invasion of Assyria took place in the reign of Asshurbanapal's successor, Asshur-etil-ili. The Manda burned Calah, and swept on as far as the border of Egypt, when they were turned back only by Psamthek's gold. The next visit was at the invitation of Nabopolassar, and it is not necessary to repeat here how the Scythian king of Ecbatana, the Cyaxares of the Greeks, came to the help of the king of Babylon, nor indeed how, in the division of the Assyrian empire, the Manda found themselves lords of the land north from the Babylonian frontier. Suffice it to say that the thirst for empire-making was now strong upon them, and we will quote Professor Rogers' brief account of the short-lived Scythian empire: "To them [the Manda] had fallen in the partition of the Assyrian empire the whole of the old land of Assyria with northern Babylonia. The very ownership of such territory as this was itself a call to the making of an empire. To this the Manda set themselves with extraordinary and rapid success. As early as 560 B.C. their border had been extended as far west as the river Halys, which served as a boundary between them and the kingdom of Lydia, over which Croesus, of proverbial memory, was now king (560546 B.C.). If no violent end came to a victorious people, such as the Manda now were, it could not be long before the rich plains, the wealthy cities, and the great waterways of Babylonia would tempt them southward and the great clash would come. If to such brute force of conquest as they had already abundantly shown they should add gifts for organisation and administration, there was no reason why all their possessions should not be welded again into a great empire. Their king was now Astyages, or, as the Babylonian inscriptions name him, Ishtuvegu. Our knowledge of him is too scant to admit of a judgment as to his character. A man of war of extraordinary capacity he certainly was, but perhaps little else. However that may be, he was not to accomplish the ruin of Nabonidus."

Thus we get an idea of the ambitions and achievements of the Manda after the fall of Nineveh. The petty kingdoms in the north- Media, Man, Urartu, and others were all theirs. The next logical step was "the ruin

of Nabonidus."

To accomplish this, as we know, was the destiny of Cyrus, since in the year 550 B.C., as is told elsewhere, the Scythian empire, called the Median by the Greeks, after less than a century of existence came to an end.

It is, perhaps, worthy of note how this extraordinary confusion of names came about. Professor Sayce thus explains it: "When in the generations which succeeded Darius Hystaspes, Cyrus became the founder of the Persian empire, the Medes and the Manda were confounded one with the other. Astyages, the suzerain of Cyrus, was transformed into a Mede, and the city of Ecbatana into the capital of a Median empire. The illusion has lasted down to our own age. There was no reason for doubting the traditional story; neither in the pages of the writers of Greece and Rome, nor in those of the Old Testament, nor even in the great inscription of Darius at Behistun, did there seem to be anything to cast suspicion upon it. It was not until the discovery of the monuments of Nabonidus and Cyrus that the truth at last came to light, and it was found that the history we had so long believed was founded upon a philological mistake.”a

WHEN we speak of the political history of Persia, our thoughts turn naturally enough to Greece also. Yet there was a period of Persian history, which was brilliant, even though brief, in which Greece had no share even as a participant or objective point. And indeed the interest which Greece had for the Persian monarchs during the something more than two hundred years of Persian supremacy has no doubt been exaggerated in the minds of subsequent generations, because the whole picture has been seen through the eyes of Greek and not of Persian historians. The first great profane history that was ever written the history, namely, of Herodotushad for its main subject the Græco-Persian war.

The earliest pages of this history gave expression to the then current notion that almost from time immemorial there had existed a deadly feud between Greece and Persia, and the realm even of mythology is invaded in the effort to explain the origin of this feud, and to fix the responsibility for it upon an Asiatic nation. Yet, in point of fact, it is probable that no such widely prevalent feeling of antagonism between the representative nations of Asia and Europe had existed for any very great length of time, before the period at which Herodotus wrote. Indeed it is clear that a feud between the Persians, as such, and the Greeks could not have dated earlier than from about the year 550 B.C., since it was only then that the Persian empire came into existence. Nor is there anything to show that the first two rulers of the empire, namely, Cyrus and Cambyses, had turned their attention particularly to the region beyond the Hellespont. Cyrus indeed invaded Asia Minor, and in so doing necessarily came closely into contact with a Greek civilisation; but the express object of this invasion was the conquest of Lydia, which was accomplished through the overthrow of Croesus, and Cyrus himself then turned back to conquer Babylonia, and whatever plans he may have had looking to the extension of his power in Asia Minor or beyond the Egean Sea, he did not live to execute them. The short reign of Cambyses was occupied almost exclusively with the Egyptian conquest. Still it was inevitable that a conquering Asiatic power that had extended its bounds to the very walls of the Greek cities of Asia Minor must go farther in the same direction. It was equally certain that

Greece must resent the infringement of its territories and thus the feud between the East and West was at once as inevitable and as bitter as if it had been much more ancient in origin than it really was.

The fullest details of the wars which grew out of this feud we shall have occasion to examine when we turn to Grecian history; nor can we quite disregard them here. Our chief concern for the moment, however, is with the history of the Medo-Persian empire in its Asiatic and African aspects. It is interesting to reflect that this empire was the greatest in mere geographical extent that the world had ever seen, far greater than Egypt, greater than the Assyrian empire at its widest reach, and greater than any empire that was to succeed it until modern times, except for the brief decade when Alexander the Great held the destinies of the East and the West subject to his master will.

It should be remembered, too, that this empire of the Medes and Persians held sway for a much longer period than is sometimes assumed. Cyrus, the founder of the Medo-Persian empire, came into power in the year 550 B.C., and the battle of Platæa, in which the army of Xerxes was completely overthrown and the last Persian force that ever attempted to invade Europe completely shattered, took place less than three-quarters of a century later. One is prone at first thought to date the fall of the Persian empire from this latter event; but to do so is to take a very narrow or European view of history. The Persians did not again invade Greece, it is true, but Persian money became a disturbing influence in Greek political life and continued such for a century and a half, or as long as Greece maintained independent national existence.

So powerful has been the influence of Greece in an intellectual way that one is prone to forget how insignificant a people the Hellenes were in regard to those matters which are usually made the test of national supremacy. Once, and once only, a united Greece became a mighty factor in international warfare; that exceptional time was the all-essential one, when Greece drove back the Persian invaders. But the territory of Greece remained unchanged after this momentous factor, and neither then nor at any subsequent period had the Greeks any thought of making wide conquests until the day of Agesilaus; and the aspirations of that Spartan chief, who at one time seemed likely to anticipate Alexander in a Persian conquest, were cut short by those suicidal internal dissensions which were the bane of the political life of Greece at all periods of her history. Meantime, while Rome was waxing strong in the West, she had not yet reached the horizon of a worldinfluence, Persia remained, notwithstanding her defeat on Grecian territory, the undisputed mistress of Asia and therefore the most powerful nation in the world, for more than two centuries after the death of Cyrus. And then it was no Greek, but the conqueror of Greece, the Macedonian Alexander, who wrested the sceptre from the Persian hand.

Two centuries and a half of supremacy! That does not seem a long period when one has the thousands of years of Egyptian history in mind or the other thousands when the plain of Mesopotamia was the centre of the Asiatic world. Yet after all in the narrow view it will be apparent that very few times in the world's history has a single nation maintained supremacy for a much longer period than two or three centuries. Egyptian history is very far from being a record of unbroken power, and the centre of Mesopotamia shifted from south to north and back again at intervals of a few centuries at longest. When, therefore, one considers the two and a half centuries of unbroken Persian power, and reflects how enormously wide was the

[ca. 836-546 B.C.]

extent of that dominant influence, it is clear that he has to do with one of the greatest nations of which history has any record.

Of the very early history of Persia there is almost nothing known. From the obelisk of Shalmaneser II we learn how after successfully invading the land of Namri, the Assyrian king marched into the territory of Parsua (Persia) and received tribute. This was in the year 836 B.C. Again tribute was collected in 830, and in the following year the country was plundered and ravaged by the Assyrian army. About 813 Shamshi-Adad IV paid an unwelcome visit to his province. From these and other references we may conclude that from the time the Indo-Europeans were fairly settled in the land, Parsua was a dependency of the Assyrian empire, regaining its liberties whenever the fortunes of Assyria were at low ebb, and losing them in a corresponding degree when a strong brain and hand held the reins in the capitals on the Upper Tigris. Then, as we have seen, Persia fell into the hands of the Scythian or Median emperor that ruled at Ecbatana, from whom it was delivered by Cyrus the Great.

But before taking up the history of Persia, it is necessary to say something about the kingdom of Elam, for as we shall presently see, that was the land from which Cyrus came. Elam lay to the east and across a mountain range from Babylonia. Of the early fortunes of the country- the time of Chedorlaomer and other Elamite invaders of Babylonia we have now nothing to do; what concerns us is that in the eighth century B.C., Teispes, the king of Persia obtained possession of the Elamite province of Anshan. In all probability the Persian conqueror gave the new territory to his son Cyrus I; for according to Professor Sayce, "While Cyrus I, the great-grandfather of Cyrus the Great, reigned in Anshan, it is probable that Ariaramnes, the great-grandfather of Darius, succeeded his father, Teispes, in Persia. Both Ariaramnes and Cyrus I were sons of Teispes, and since Darius in his inscription at Behistun declares that 'eight' of his predecessors had been kings before him in two lines,' it is clear that both Ariaramnes and his son Arsames must have enjoyed royal power. We must assume, therefore, with Sir Henry Rawlinson, that Teispes was the conqueror of Anshan and that upon his death his kingdom was divided, the newly acquired conquest being assigned to Cyrus I, and his ancestral dominion to Ariaramnes.' (Higher Criticism and the Monuments, p. 519.)

99

Thus we see that a piece of the oldest history has become the newest. It must be clearly understood that Cyrus was not originally a king of Persia, but of the Elamite province of Anshan-a district that by his time included Shushan, the old Elamite capital, as well. Three years after the conquest of Astyages, that is in 546 B.C., he first calls himself king of the Parsu (Persians), but not before. How he came to be lord of Persia, we do not know, since this land was a totally different country from Elam, but it is extremely probable that his new title had some connection with the overthrow of the Scythian emperor. It is on the statement of Darius I that Cyrus has gone down in history as a Persian prince. Why this is so seems clear enough. Darius had to reconquer the disintegrated empire of Cyrus and Cambyses, and in doing so he wished to make himself appear the legitimate successor of his two great predecessors; therefore he makes Cyrus, like himself, a Persian prince, and we have seen how far this is true. But from Cyrus to Darius, ought we not to speak of the Elamite empire?

With the reader in possession of these facts, we now turn to an account of the origins of the Achæmenian dynasty and the reign of Cyrus the Great.a

[ca. 730-550 B.C.] Cyrus' father was, just as Herodotus tells us, Cambyses (Kambujiya), his grandfather Cyrus, his great-grandfather Sispis (i.e., the Persian Chaispi, Greek Teispes). We can combine the contents of a cylinder of his, on the one hand with the list of Darius' ancestors in Herodotus (VII, 11), and on the other hand with Darius' own statement in the great Behistun inscription. The last list is shorter by three than that of Herodotus; but, as Darius says that eight of his family were kings, and that they reigned in two lines, while neither he nor his successors in their inscriptions give the title of King to his immediate predecessor, we must assume that the Behistun list of ancestors is somewhat curtailed; and we can with some probability draw out the complete list in exact harmony with Herodotus. We shall indicate the kings by figure and give the names in the ordinary Greek form.

Achæmenes (Persian Hakhamani), ancestor of the whole family, is perhaps not an historical personage, but a heros eponymus. According to our calculation Teispes, the first king, flourished about the year 730, therefore somewhat earlier than the foundation of the Median empire, but somewhere about the time which Herodotus assigns for the beginning of the independence of Media. Perhaps the rise of the provincial dynasty is connected with the weakening of the Assyrian power in Iran. Now on the cylinder Cyrus calls himself and his forefathers up to Teispes not kings of Persia but kings "of the city of Anshan." Similarly on a lately discovered monument of still greater importance, a Babylonian tablet, he is called "king of Anshan," but also "king of Persia." It may be that the Achæmenians ruled in a part only of Persis; but we have just as good a right to assume that, as Herodotus and Ctesias assert, Cyrus' father at least was governor of the whole province. His mother, according to Herodotus, was the daughter of Astyages. This may very well be historical, though the confirmation by the oracle which describes him as a "mule" (Herod., I, 55) does not go for much, since these oracles are tolerably recent forgeries, and it is conceivable that we have here nothing more than an example of the well-known tendency of lords of new empires in the East to claim descent, at least in the female line, from the legitimate dynasty. Ctesias, indeed, tells us that Cyrus afterwards married a daughter of the dethroned Astyages, Amytis (which was also the name of Astyages' sister, wife of Nebuchadrezzar). Of course this does not absolutely exclude the possibility of Cyrus being the son of another daughter of the king.