they were repulsed by Sargon's
generals; the check thus administered forced them to fall back speedily
upon other countries less vigorously defended. The Scythians, therefore,
settled themselves in the eastern basin of the Araxes, on the frontiers
of Urartu and the Mannai, where they formed themselves into a kind of
marauding community, perpetually quarrelling with their neighbours.**
The Cimmerians took their way westwards, and established themselves
upon the upper waters of the Araxes, the Euphrates, the Halys, and the
Thermodon,*** greatly to the vexation of the rulers of Urartu.

* The version of Aristaeas of Proconnesus, as given by
Herodotus and by Damastes of Sigsea, attributes a more
complex origin to this migration, i.e. that the Arimaspes
had driven the Issedonians before them, and that the latter
had in turn driven the Scythians back on the Cimmerians.

** The Scythians of the tradition preserved by Herodotus
must have been the Ashguzai or Ishkuzai of the cuneiform
documents. The original name must have been Skuza, Shkuza,
with a sound in the second syllable that the Greeks have
rendered by _th_, and the Assyrians by _z_: the initial
vowel has been added, according to a well-known rule, to
facilitate the pronunciation of the combination sk, sine. An
oracle of the time of Esarhaddon shows that they occupied
one of the districts really belonging to the Mannai: and it
is probably they who are mentioned in a passage of Jer. li.
27, where the traditional reading _Aschenaz_ should be
replaced by that of Ashkuz.

*** It is doubtless to these events that the tradition
preserved by Pompeius Trogus, which is known to us through
his abbreviator Justin, or through the compilers of a later
period, refers, concerning the two Scythian princes Ylinus
and Scolopitus: they seem to have settled along the coast,
on the banks of the Thermodon and in the district of
Themiscyra.

They subsequently felt their way along the valleys of the Anti-Taurus,
but finding them held by Assyrian troops, they turned their steps
towards the country of the White Syrians, seized Sinope, where the
Greeks had recently founded a colony, and bore down upon Phrygia. It
would appear that they were joined in these regions by other hordes from
Thrace which had crossed the Bosphorus a few years earlier, and among
whom the ancient his