central Asia whence
their descendants were again, some six centuries later, to menace the
existence of civilization; and they left Assyria and Chaldaea half stripped
of their inhabitants behind them.

The work begun by the Scythians was finished by the Medes. These were Aryan
tribes, long subject to the Assyrians, who had begun to constitute
themselves a nation in the first half of the seventh century, and, under
the leadership of CYAXARES, the real founder of their power, had already
attacked Nineveh after the death of Assurbanipal. This invasion brought on
a kind of forced truce, but when the Medes had compelled the Scythians to
retreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires so
much, they quickly resumed the offensive[76]. We cannot follow all the
fluctuations of the conflict; the information left by the early historians
is vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to help
us out. After the fall of Nineveh cylinders of clay and alabaster slabs
were no longer covered with wedges by the Assyrian scribes. They had
recounted their victories and conquests at length, but not one among them,
so far as we know, cared to retrace the dismal history of final defeat.

All that we can guess is that the last sovereign of Nineveh fell before a
coalition in which Media and Chaldaea played the chief parts[77].
NABOPOLASSAR, the general to whom he confided the defence of Babylon,
entered into an alliance with Cyaxares. ASSUREDILANI shut himself up in his
capital, where he resisted as long as he could, and finally set fire to his
palace and allowed himself to be burned alive rather than fall living into
the hands of his enemies (625 B.C.). Nineveh, "the dwelling of the lions,"
"the bloody city," saw its last day; "Nineveh is laid waste," says the
prophet Nahum, "who will bemoan her?"[78]

The modern historian will feel more pity for Assyria than the Jewish poet,
the sincere interpreter of a national hatred which was fostered by frequent
and cruel wounds to the national pride. We can forgive Nineveh much,
because she wrote so much and built so much, because she covered so much
clay with her arrow-heads, and so many walls with her carved reliefs. We
forgive her because to the ruins of her palaces and the broken fragments of
her sculpture we owe most of our present knowledge of the great
civilization which once filled the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. The
kings of Assyria went on building pa