It might have been expected that Cyrus, after his conquest of Babylon, would have immediately proceeded towards the south-west.  The reduction of Egypt had, according to Herodotus, been embraced in the designs which he formed fifteen years earlier.  The non-submission of Phoenicia must have been regarded as an act of defiance which deserved signal chastisement.  It has been suspected that the restoration of the Jews was prompted, at least in part, by political motives, and that Cyrus, when he re-established them in their country, looked to finding them of use to him in the attack which he was meditating upon Egypt.  At any rate it is evident that their presence would have facilitated his march through Palestine, and given him a point d’appui, which could not but have been of value.  These considerations make it probable that an Egyptian expedition would have been determined on, had not circumstances occurred to prevent it.

What the exact circumstances were, it is impossible to determine.  According to Herodotus, a sudden desire seized Cyrus to attack the Massagetae, who bordered his Empire to the north-east.  He led his troops across the Araxes (Jaxartes?), defeated the Massagetae by stratagem in a great battle, but was afterwards himself defeated and slain, his body falling into the enemy’s hands, who treated it with gross indignity.  According to Ctesias, the people against whom he made his expedition were the Derbices, a nation bordering upon India, Assisted by Indian allies, who lent them a number of elephants, this people engaged Cyrus, and defeated him in a battle, wherein he received a mortal wound.  Reinforced, however, by a body of Sacae, the Persians renewed the struggle, and gained a complete victory, which was followed by the submission of the nation.  Cyrus, however, died of his wound on the third day after the first battle.

This conflict of testimony clouds with uncertainty the entire closing scene of the life of Cyrus.  All that we can lay down as tolerably well established is, that instead of carrying out his designs against Egypt, he engaged in hostilities with one of the nations on his north-eastern frontier, that he conducted the war with less than his usual success, and in the course of it received a wound of which he died (B.C. 529), after he had reigned nine-and-twenty years.  That his body did not fall into the enemy’s hands appears, however, to be certain from the fact that it was conveyed into Persia Proper, and buried at Pasargadae.

It may be suspected that this expedition, which proved so disastrous to the Persian monarch, was not the mere wanton act which it appears to be in the pages of our authorities.  The nations of the north-east were at all times turbulent and irritable, with difficulty held in check by the civilized power that bore rule in the south and west.  The expedition of Cyrus, whether directed against the Massagetae or the Derbices, was probably intended to strike terror into the barbarians