This monarch, who was engaged in the siege of Ashdod, no sooner heard of the approach of a great Scythian host, which threatened to overrun Egypt, and had advanced as far as Ascalon, than he sent ambassadors to their leader and prevailed on him by rich gifts to abstain from his enterprise.  From this time the power of the invaders seems to have declined.  Their strength could not but suffer by the long series of battles, sieges, and skirmishes in which they were engaged year after year against enemies in nowise contemptible; it would likewise deteriorate through their excesses; and it may even have received some injury from intestine quarrels.  After awhile, the nations whom they had overrun, whose armies they had defeated, and whose cities they had given to the flames, began to recover themselves.  Cyaxares, it is probable, commenced an aggressive war against such of the invaders as had remained within the limits of his dominions, and soon drove them beyond his borders.  Other kings may have followed his example.  In a little while long, probably, before the twenty-eight years of Herodotus had expired—­the Scythian power was completely broken.  Many bands may have returned across the Caucasus into the Steppe country.  Others submitted, and took service under the native rulers of Asia.  Great numbers were slain and except in a province of Armenia which henceforward became known as Sacasene, and perhaps in one Syrian town, which we find called Scythopolis, the invaders left no trace of their brief but terrible inroad.

If we have been right in supposing that the Scythian attack fell with as much severity on the Assyrians as on any other Asiatic people, we can scarcely be in error if we ascribe to this cause the rapid and sudden decline of the empire at this period.  The country had been ravaged and depopulated, the provinces had been plundered, many of the great towns had been taken and sacked, the palaces of the old kings had been burnt, and all the gold and silver that was not hid away had been carried off.  Assyria, when the Scythians quitted her, was but the shadow of her former self.  Weak and exhausted, she seemed to invite a permanent conqueror.  If her limits had not much shrunk, if the provinces still acknowledged her authority, it was from habit rather than from fear, or because they too had suffered greatly from the northern barbarians.  We find Babylon subject to Assyria to the very last; and we seem to see that Judaea passed from the rule of the Assyrians under that of the Babylonians, without any interval of independence or any need of re-conquest.  But if these two powers at the south-eastern and the south-western extremities of the empire continued faithful, the less distant nations could scarcely have thrown off the yoke.