intentions to the Assyrian monarch, who immediately made such a disposition of the forces at his command as seemed best calculated to meet the double danger which threatened him.  Selecting from among his generals the one in whom he placed most confidence—­a man named Nabopolassar, most probably an Assyrian—­he put him at the head of a portion of his troops, and sent him to Babylon to resist the enemy who was advancing from the sea.  The command of his main army he reserved for himself, intending to undertake in person the defence of his territory against the Medes.  This plan of campaign was not badly conceived; but it was frustrated by an unexpected calamity, Nabopolassar, seeing his sovereign’s danger, and calculating astutely that he might gain more by an opportune defection from a falling cause than he could look to receive as the reward of fidelity, resolved to turn traitor and join the enemies of Assyria.  Accordingly he sent an embassy to Cyaxares, with proposals for a close alliance to be cemented by a marriage.  If the Median monarch would give his daughter Amuhia (or Amyitis) to be the wife of his son Nebuchadnezzar, the forces under his command should march against Nineveh and assist Cyaxares to capture it.  Such a proposition arriving at such a time was not likely to meet with a refusal.  Cyaxares gladly came into the terms; the marriage took place; and Nabopolassar, who had now practically assumed the sovereignty of Babylon, either led or sent a Babylonian contingent to the aid of the Medes.

The siege of Nineveh by the combined Medes and Babylonians was narrated by Ctesias at some length.  He called the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, the Median commander Arbaces, the Babylonian Belesis.  Though he thus disguised the real names, and threw back the event to a period a century and a half earlier than its true date, there can be no doubt that he intended to relate the last siege of the city, that which immediately preceded its complete destruction.  He told how the combined army, consisting of Persians and Arabs as well as of Medes and Babylonians, and amounting to four hundred thousand men, was twice defeated with great loss by the Assyrian monarch, and compelled to take refuge in the Zagros chain—­how after losing a third battle it retreated to Babylonia—­how it was there joined by strong reinforcements from Bactria, surprised the Assyrian camp by night, and drove the whole host in confusion to Nineveh—­how then, after two more victories, it advanced and invested the city, which was well provisioned for a siege and strongly fortified.  The siege, Ctesias said, had lasted two full years, and the third year had commenced—­success seemed still far off—­when an unusually rainy season so swelled the waters of the Tigris that they burst into the city, sweeping away more than two miles of the wall.  This vast breach it was impossible to repair; and the Assyrian monarch, seeing that further resistance was vain, brought the struggle to an end by burning himself, with his concubines and eunuchs and all his chief wealth, in his palace.