spoileth and flieth away.  Thy crowned are as the locusts and thy marshals as the swarms of grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are.  Thy shepherds slumber, O King of Assyria:  thy worthies are at rest:  thy people are scattered upon the mountains, and there is none to gather them.  There is no assuaging of thy hurt; thy wound is grievous:  all that hear the bruit of thee clap the hands over thee; for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?”

On this occasion Nineveh escaped the fate with which the prophet had threatened it, but its safety was dearly bought.  According to the tradition accepted in Asia Minor two hundred years later, a horde of Scythians under King Madyes, son of Protothyes, setting out from the Bussian steppes in pursuit of the Cimmerians, made their appearance on the scene in the nick of time.  We are told that they flung themselves through the Caspian Gates into the basin of the Kur, and came into contact with the Medes at the foot of Mount Caucasus.  The defeat of the Medes here would necessarily compel them to raise the siege of Nineveh.  This crisis in the history of Asia was certainly not determined by chance.  For eighty years Assyria had been in contact with the Scythians, and the Assyrian kings had never ceased to keep an eye upon their movements, or lose sight of the advantage to which their bellicose temper might be turned in circumstances like the present.  They had pitted them against the Cimmerians, then against the Medes, and probably against the kings of Urartu as well, and the intimacy between the two peoples came to be so close that the Scythian king Bartatua did not hesitate to demand one of the daughters of Bsarhaddon in marriage.  From the very beginning of his reign Assur-bani-pal had shown them the utmost consideration, and when King Madyes, son of his ally Bartatua, intervened thus opportunely in the struggle, he did so, not by mere chance, as tradition would have us believe, but at the urgent request of Assyria.  He attacked Media in the rear, and Cyaxares, compelled to raise the siege of Nineveh, hastened to join battle with him.  The engagement probably took place on the banks of the Lower Araxes or to the north of Lake Urumiah, in the region formerly inhabited by the Mannai; but after defeating his foe and dictating to him the terms of submission, Madyes, carried away by the lust of conquest, did not hesitate to turn his arms against his ally.  Exhausted by her recent struggle, Assyria lay at his mercy, her fortresses alone being able to offer any serious resistance:  he overran the country from end to end, and though the walled cities withstood the fury of his attack, the rural districts were plundered right and left, and laid desolate for many a year to come.  The Scythians of this epoch probably resembled those whom we find represented on the monuments of Greek art two centuries later.