n monarch, "Arioch, king of Ellasar." There is
nothing perhaps in these scattered traces of Arian influence in in Lower
Mesopotamia at a remote era that points very particularly to the Medes;
but at any rate they harmonize with the historical account that has
reached us of early Arian power in these parts, and it is important that
they should not be ignored when we are engaged in considering the degree
of credence that is to be awarded to the account in question.

Again, there are traces of a vast expansion, apparently at a very early
date, of the Median race, such as seems to imply that they must have
been a great nation in Western Asia long previously to the time of the
Iranic movements in Bactria and the adjoining regions. In the Matieni
of Zagros and Cappadocia, in the Sauro-matae (or Northern Medes) of the
country between the Palus Maeotis and the Caspian, in the Maetae or
Maeotae of the tract about the mouth of the Don, and in the Maedi of
Thrace, we have seemingly remnants of a great migratory host which,
starting from the mountains that overhang Mesopotamia, spread itself
into the regions of the north and the north-west at a time which
does not admit of being definitely stated, but which is clearly
anti-historic. Whether these races generally retained any tradition of
their origin, we do not know; but a tribe which in the time of Herodotus
dwelt still further to the west than even the Maedi--to wit, the
Sigynnae, who occupied the tract between the Adriatic and the
Danube--had a very distinct belief in their Median descent, a belief
confirmed by the resemblance which their national dress bore to that of
the Medes. Herodotus, who relates these facts concerning them, appends
an expression of his astonishment at the circumstance that emigrants
from Media should have proceeded to such a distance from their original
home; how it had been brought about he could not conceive. "Still," he
sagaciously remarks, "nothing is impossible in the long lapse of ages."

A further argument in favor of the early development of Median power,
and the great importance of the nation in Western Asia at a period
anterior to the ninth century, is derivable from the ancient legends
of the Greeks, which seem to have designated the Medes under the two
eponyms of Medea and Andromeda. These legends indeed do not admit of
being dated with any accuracy; but as they are of a primitive type, and
probably older than Homer, we cannot well assign them