were perhaps joined by the Susians.

** The _Cylinder of Nabonichs_, the only original document
in which allusion is made to the destruction of Nineveh,
speaks of the Umman-Manda and their king, whom it does not
name, and it has been agreed to recognise Cyaxares in this
sovereign. On the other hand, the name of Umman-Manda
certainly designates in the Assyrian texts the wandering
Iranian tribes to whom the Greeks gave the name of Sakse or
Scythians; the result, in the opinions of several
Assyriologists of the present day, is that neither Astyages
nor Cyaxares were Medes in the sense in which we have
hitherto accepted them as such on the evidence of Herodotus,
but that they were Scythians, the Scythians of the great
invasion. This conclusion does not seem to me at present
justified. The Babylonians, who up till then had not had any
direct intercourse either with the Madai or the Umman-Manda,
did as the Egyptians had done whether in Saite or Ptolemaic
times, continuing to designate as Khari, Kafiti, Lotanu, and
Khati the nations subject to the Persians or Macedonians;
they applied a traditional name of olden days to present
circumstances, and I see, at present, no decisive reason to
change, on the mere authority of this one word, all that the
classical writers have handed down concerning the history of
the epoch according to the tradition current in their days.

*** The name of the princess is written Amuhia, Amyitis. The
classical sources, the only ones which mention her, make her
the daughter of Astyages, and this has given rise to various
hypotheses. According to some, the notice of this princess
has no historical value. According to others, the Astyages
mentioned as her father is not Cyaxares the Mede, but a
Scythian prince who came to the succour of Nabopolassar,
perhaps a predecessor of Cyaxares on the Median throne, and
in this case Phraortes himself under another name. The most
prudent course is still to admit that Abydenus, or one of
the compilers of extracts to whom we owe the information,
has substituted the name of the last king of Media for that
of his predecessor, either by mistake, or by reason of some
chronological combinations. Amyitis, transported into the
harem of the Chaldaean monarch, served, like all princesses