Cyaxares to his
treacherous murder of their chiefs was a period of exactly twenty-eight
years. During the whole of this space he regarded them as the undisputed
lords of Asia. It was not till the twenty-eight years were over that
the Medes were able, according to him, to renew their attacks on the
Assyrians, and once more to besiege Nineveh. But this chronology is open
to great objections. There is strong reason for believing that Nineveh
fell about B.C. 625 or 624; but according to the numbers of Herodotus
the fall would, at the earliest, have taken place in B.C. 602. There is
great unlikelihood that the Scyths, if they had maintained their rule
for a generation, should not have attracted some distinct notice from
the Jewish writers. Again, if twenty-eight out of the forty years
assigned to Cyaxares are to be regarded as years of inaction, all his
great exploits, his two sieges of Nineveh, his capture of that capital,
his conquest of the countries north and west of Media as far as the
Halys, his six years' war in Asia Minor beyond that river, and his joint
expedition with Nebuchadnezzar into Syria, will have to be crowded most
improbably into the space of twelve years, two or three preceding and
ten or nine following the Scythian domination. These and other reasons
lead to the conclusion, which has the support of Eusebius, that
the Scythian domination was of much shorter duration than Herodotus
imagined. It may have been twenty-eight years from the original attack
on Media to the final expulsion of the last of the invaders from
Asia--and this may have been what the informants of Herodotus really
intended--but it cannot have been very long after the first attack
before the Medes began to recover themselves, to shake off the fear
which had possessed them and clear their territories of the invaders. If
the invasion really took place in the reign of Cyaxares, and not in the
lifetime of his father, where Eusebius places it, we must suppose that
within eight years of its occurrence Cyaxares found himself sufficiently
strong, and his hands sufficiently free, to resume his old projects, and
for the second time to march an army into Assyria.

The weakness of Assyria was such as to offer strong temptations to an
invader. As the famous inroad of the Gauls into Italy in the year of
Rome 365 paved the way for the Roman conquests in the peninsula by
breaking the power of the Etruscans, the Umbrians, and various other
races, so the S