ls
concerning the close of his career, we find that there is a complete
absence of any record of national movement on the part of either Elam,
Urartu, or Egypt.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after Layard. The vignette, also by
Faucher-Gudin, represents Taharqa in a kneeling attitude,
and is taken from a bronze statuette in the Macgregor
collection.

The only event of which any definite mention is made is a raid across
the north of Arabia, in the course of which Hazael, King of Adumu, and
chief among the princes of Kedar, was despoiled of the images of his
gods. The older states of the Oriental world had, as we have pointed
out, grown weary of warfare which brought them nothing but loss of men
and treasure; but behind these states, on the distant horizon to the
east and north-west, were rising up new nations whose growth and
erratic movements assumed an importance that became daily more and more
alarming. On the east, the Medes, till lately undistinguishable from the
other tribes occupying the western corner of the Iranian table-land, had
recently broken away from the main body, and, rallying round a single
leader, already gave promise of establishing an empire formidable alike
by the energy of its people and the extent of its domain. A tradition
afterwards accepted by them attributed their earlier successes to a
certain Deiokes, son of Phraortes, a man wiser than his fellows, who
first set himself to deal out justice in his own household. The men of
his village, observing his merits, chose him to be the arbiter of all
their disputes, and, being secretly ambitious of sovereign power, he did
his best to settle their differences on lines of the strictest
equity and justice. By these means he gained such credit with his
fellow-citizens as to attract the attention of those who lived in the
neighbouring villages, who had suffered from unjust judgments, so that
when they heard of the singular uprightness of Deiokes and of the equity
of his decisions they joyfully had recourse to him until at last they
came to put confidence in no one else. The number of complaints brought
before him continually increasing as people learnt more and more the
justice of his judgments, Deiokes, finding himself now all-important,
announced that he did not intend any longer to hear causes, and
appeared no more in the seat in which he had been accustomed to sit and
administer justice. "'It was not to his advantage,' he said, 'to spen