dragged him a prisoner to Babylon, 676, as Hoshea king of Israel, forty-five years before, had been led to Nineveh. After a captivity of one year (or of seven years, according to some critics), he was restored to his throne, to become the perfect model of a penitent king; for he purified the temple, destroyed all idols, and re-established the worship of the true God. In 656, Nebuchadnezzar I. gave Holofernes the command of a numerous army, destined to punish the Jews for refusing their assistance against the Medes. But his conquests were arrested by the hand of a woman; for while blockading the small hill-fortress of Bethulia, he was slain by the enthusiastic Judith. Amon, the wicked son of Manasseh, perished by assassination, 641, after a reign of two years, and was succeeded by Josiah at the age of eight. Even in childhood this monarch was an example of piety; and he had scarcely completed his sixteenth year, when he assumed the government, which had been administered by his mother Idida. In his time the highpriest Hilkiah discovered the original manuscript of the Law, written by the hand of the great legislator himself. To fulfil the engagements he made with his people at the public reading of this book, he destroyed every vestige of idolatry both in Israel and Judah; and when he had thus purified his land, he celebrated the Passover with great solemnity, 623 B. c. The misfortunes of the country recommenced with the death of Josiah, who was killed in battle at Megiddo while opposing Necho king of Egypt, who being at war with the Assyrians, resolved to pass through Palestine. The prophet Jeremiah composed a funeral elegy on his death, which continued long afterwards to be sung by the choir in certain religious ceremonies. With this prince terminated the glory and happiness of the Jewish nation. The people raised Jehoahaz, one of his younger sons, to the throne; but he was deposed by the victorious Necho, and led prisoner into Egypt. Eliakim, who was appointed in his stead, under the name of Jehoiakim, 610, was a weak and irreligious ruler; his only virtue being the fidelity with which he paid a heavy tribute to the sovereign from whom he had received the crown. Deaf to the warnings of Jeremiah and Habakkuk, who announced to Judæa the coming danger, he threw the prophecy of the former into the fire, and condemned both to die. They escaped his fury by taking refuge in a cavern. In 606, Nebuchadnezzar II. took Jerusalem for the first time, and imprisoned, but afterwards released, its monarch. He plundered the temple

of great part of its sacred vessels, and among his captives we read the names of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. This year, 606, is the first of the Seventy Years' Captivity announced by Jeremiah.

ASSYRIA.

SECOND EMPIRE OF NINEVEH.-Esarhaddon, the third son of Sennacherib, ascended the throne on the murder of his father, 707 B. c.; and he restored to the Assyrian monarchy the strength and glory which it had lost during the misfortunes of the previous reigns. Taking advantage of the civil troubles which divided the Babylonians, he reunited them to his empire in 680, and until 647 they were governed by Ninevite viceroys. He reduced Judæa, and led Manasseh into captivity; but, as already mentioned, after twelve months he restored him to liberty and to a kingdom now nearly depopulated. After a reign of forty-two years, marked by glorious conquests over Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia, he left the sceptre to his son Saosduchin, the Nebuchadnezzar or Nabuchodonosor of the book of Judith. In the twelfth year of his reign he was attacked by Phraortes, king of the Medes, whom he defeated and slew with his own hand, 655. He sent an army of 130,000 men into Judæa, under the command of Holofernes, who, we have seen, perished by the hand of Judith. From this time Saosduchin experienced nothing but reverses, and the year preceding his death, he was besieged in Nineveh by Cyaxares. He died in the twenty-second year of his reign, leaving a tottering throne to his son and successor.

The vices and cowardice of Saracus (Chynaladanus) produced great trouble and confusion in his dominions. Nabopolassar made himself independent at Babylon, where he reigned twenty-one years, and to preserve his power he formed an alliance with the Medes. The united armies besieged Nineveh, and completely destroyed it, upon which Babylon became the sole capital of the Assyrian empire, 625 B. c.

SECOND EMPIRE of Babylon.—On the death of Mesessi Mordacus, the last of the five obscure successors of Merodach Baladan, the metropolis was, for eight years, a prey to all the evils of anarchy. This opportunity was not neglected by the victorious Esarhaddon, and in 680 he reunited the Babylonian monarchy to that of Nineveh, which had now become the most formidable in all Asia. But this preponderance, founded on the humiliation of Babylon, was not of long duration; for

thirty-three years after, Nabopolassar the Chaldean, aided by Cyaxares the Mede, vindicated the honour of his country on the smoking ruins of Nineveh, and his empire became in its turn the queen of the east. The conqueror (625), after the death of Saracus, reunited under his government all the provinces with most of the satrapies that had been dependent on Nineveh. Such prosperity excited the jealousy of Necho, who marched toward the Euphrates with the design of wresting from the Assyrian monarch all the country situated on the western bank of that river. He was particularly successful, and took the important city of Carchemish, with several other strong places. This encouraged the Syrians and the Jews in their attempts to throw off the Babylonian yoke; when Nabopolassar, too far advanced in years to take the field in person against the rebels, committed the important charge to his son Nebuchadnezzar the Great, whom he had already associated with him in the government. This young prince, who had received from nature all the qualities of a conqueror, justified the confidence of his father. Proceeding against the Egyptian king, he gained a complete victory, and recovered all that the other had reduced in the preceding years. While laying siege to Jerusalem, which he was destined to capture thrice in the course of his reign, he was informed of his parent's death. He returned to Babylon to assume the crown, carrying with him a numerous train of Jewish captives.

MEDIA.

DEIOCES, 733 B. C.-Media is fertile though mountainous country, lying between Persia, the Caspian Sea, Assyria, Parthia, and Armenia. Its capital was Ecbatana (now Hamadan). Powerful monarchies appear to have existed in those parts, but, owing to an inconsistent and arbitrary chronology, they can scarcely enter into general history. Bactria, by its geographical position, appears marked out for the great emporium of south-eastern Asia, and in proportion as we penetrate into ancient times, we become convinced that, like Babylon, it was one of the earliest seats of international commerce, and one of the cradles of civilisation. The term Media comprehended this country, as it was applied generally to the nations between the Tigris and the Indus.

From the earliest period the Medes had been subject to Assyria, when, in 759, under the command of Arbaces, they

revolted against Sardanapalus, and recovered their independence. But their liberty degenerated into anarchy, until a sense of the necessity of public order induced them, in the year 733, to place Deioces on the throne. During his glorious reign of fifty-three years, he united the six tribes, of which the Magi were the chief, and founded an independent sovereignty. Phraortes (probably the Arphaxad of the book of Judith), who succeeded him in 680, reduced Persia, and conquered all the country north of the Taurus as far as the river Halys. He was defeated and killed by Nebuchadnezzar I. (Saosduchin) in his war against Assyria, 655. Cyaxares I. undertook to avenge his father's death, and was on the point of capturing Nineveh, when he was obliged to turn his arms against a more terrible enemy, the Scythians, who, having overrun Asia, had reached the borders of Egypt, 648. It took twenty-eight years to expel them, after which he declared war against the Lydian Alyattes, for having received and protected some of the chiefs who had escaped from the general massacre of their comrades. A battle fought on the banks of the Halys was terminated by an eclipse of the sun, 601 B. c.* The Medes had now regained their importance, for, united with the Babylonian Nabopolassar, they had destroyed Nineveh, 625, and reduced the Persians to subjection. Cyaxares I. died in 595, in the sixty-first year of his reign, leaving to his son Astyages the greatest and most powerful monarchy in Asia. In his time the history of Media becomes confused with that of Persia and of Cyrus.

We may here observe that the frequent revolutions in Asia, both of ancient and modern times, were never beneficial to the people. Governments often changed hands, but the form was always the same; and all except that effected by Alexander were the work of powerful nomad tribes. Impelled by fortuitous circumstances or by necessity, they quitted their wild abodes to subjugate the fertile plains of Southern Asia, until, enervated by the luxury and effeminacy of their new subjects, they were themselves conquered in the same manner. This consideration on the common origin of the great empires of the East, accounts for their vast extent, their rapid increase, and brief duration. The internal constitution of these states was every where the same; an unlimited despotism, which, springing from the rights of conquest, was perpetuated, because the very extent of the empire required, for the interests of the prince at least, a similar government to preserve the unity of the state.

*The period of this eclipse is by no means a settled point, and the compiler had to select from six different dates: 607; 603; 601, th date assigned by Usher; 597, very often given; 585, total over the whole Hellespont, and not improbably that mentioned by Herodotus; and 581, B. C.

PERSIA.

Persia, called Elam in the Scriptures, received its name from the eldest son of Shem. Its history is a blank down to the reign of Chedorlaomer, who about a century before the presumed time in which Ninus laid the foundations of Assyrian greatness, had already carried his victorious arms towards the Mediterranean, in the western provinces of Asia. The power of the Elamites yielded to that of Ninus and Semiramis, and the country became a province of the vast empire of Assyria. They aided the Medians and Babylonians in their attempts to overthrow the government of Sardanapalus, but were still dependent on the two newly formed monarchies. The ten tribes of Israel were distributed among the Persians and Medes; and although the extensive dominion of Nebuchadnezzar II. embraced the former people within its limits, the bonds of subjection do not appear to have been very oppressive. Under the rule of the Medes the condition of Persia was very little changed. Eastern writers have endeavoured to fill up the void in its early history; but their works, composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A. D., are little more than a web of fabulous traditions. Their testimony can have no weight in the balance of historical criticism, and in all their annals the only personage who appears to be really historical is Jemsheed or Giamschid, probably the Achæmenes whom the Greeks counted among the ancestors of Cyrus.

At the epoch of their subjection to the Medes, the Persians were a mountain race, divided into ten castes or tribes. The most considerable were the Pasargadæ, the Maraphians and Maspians, all composed of nobles and warriors; and the first, of whom the Achæmenida were a branch, were always in possession of the government. Of the other tribes, three were composed of labourers and four of shepherds.

Being descended from Shem, the Elamites preserved longer their ancient religion. They built no temples, but worshipped, in the open air and on the tops of mountains, the sun (Mithras) or fire, as an emblem of the Supreme Being. They also venerated the stars and planets. The adoration of the heavenly bodies (Sabaism) is supposed to have been a corruption of the Magian doctrines: both however appear to have been known to Job. The former is perpetuated in Asia by the Parsees and Ghebers.