onfront the invader. A great battle
was fought, probably somewhere in Adiabene, in which the Medes were
completely defeated: their whole army was cut to pieces; and the father
of Cyaxares was among the slain. Such was the result of the first Median
expedition against Nineveh. The assailants had miscalculated their
strength. In their own mountain country, and so long as they should
be called upon to act only on the defensive, they might be right
in regarding themselves as a match for the Assyrians; but when they
descended into the plain, and allowed their enemy the opportunity
of manoeuvering and of using his war chariots, their inferiority was
marked. Cyaxares, now, if not previously, actual king, withdrew awhile
from the war, and, convinced that all the valor of his Medes would be
unavailing without discipline, set himself to organize the army on a
new system, taking a pattern from the enemy, who had long possessed some
knowledge of tactics. Hitherto, it would seem, each Median chief had
brought into the field his band of followers, some mounted, some on
foot, foot and horse alike armed variously as their means allowed them,
some with bows and arrows, some with spears, some perhaps with slings or
darts; and the army had been composed of a number of such bodies, each
chief keeping his band close about him. Cyaxares broke up these bands,
and formed the soldiers who composed them into distinct corps, according
as they were horsemen or footmen, archers, slingers, or lancers. He
then, having completed his arrangements at his ease, without disturbance
(so far as appears) from the Assyrians, felt himself strong enough to
renew the war with a good prospect of success. Collecting as large
an army as he could, both from his Arian and his Scythic subjects, he
marched into Assyria, met the troops of Asshur-bani-pal in the field,
defeated them signally, and forced them to take refuge behind the strong
works which defended their capital. He even ventured to follow up the
flying foe and commence the siege of the capital itself; but at this
point he was suddenly checked in his career of victory, and forced to
assume a defensive attitude, by a danger of a novel kind, which recalled
him from Nineveh to his own country.

The vast tracts, chiefly consisting of grassy plains, which lie north of
the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian, and the Jaxartes Syhun river,
were inhabited in ancient times by a race or races known to the Asiatics
as