*** This, doubtless, means that the Mushku and Tabal had been so utterly defeated that they could not procure honourable burial for their dead, i.e. with their swords beneath their heads and their weapons on their bodies.

     **** 1 Ezek. xxxii. 26, 27.

The Cimmerians, who, since their reverses in Lydia and on Mount Taurus, had concentrated practically the whole of their tribes in Cappadocia and in the regions watered by the Halys and Thermodon, shared the good fortune of their former adversaries.  At that time they lived under the rule of a certain Kobos, who seems to have left a terrible reputation behind him; tradition gives him a place beside Sesostris among the conquerors of the heroic age, and no doubt, like his predecessor Dugdamis, he owed this distinction to some expedition or other against the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the AEgean Sea, but our knowledge of his career is confined to the final catastrophe which overtook him.  After some partial successes, such as that near Zela, for instance, he was defeated and made prisoner by Madyes.  His subjects, as vassals of the Scythians, joined them in their acts of brigandage,* and together they marched from province to province, plundering as they went; they overran the western regions of the Assyrian kingdom from Melitene and Mesopotamia to Northern Syria, from Northern Syria to Phoenicia, Damascus, and Palestine,** and at length made their appearance on the Judaean frontier.

* It seems probable that this was so, when we consider the confusion between the Scythians or Sakse, and the Cimmerians in the Babylonian and Persian inscriptions of the Achsemenian epoch.

     ** Their migration from Media into Syria and Palestine is
     expressly mentioned by Herodotus.

Since the day when Sennacherib had been compelled to return to Assyria without having succeeded in destroying Jerusalem, or even carrying it by storm, Judah had taken little or no part in external politics.  Divided at first by a conflict between the party of prudence, who advised submission to Nineveh, and the more warlike spirits who advocated an alliance with Egypt, it had ended by accepting its secondary position, and had on the whole remained fairly loyal to the dynasty of Sargon.

[Illustration:  311.jpg IRANIAN SOLDIER FIGHTING AGAINST THE SCYTHIANS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the cast of a cylinder given by Cunningham.  The cylinder is usually described as Persian, but the dress is that of the Medes as well as of the Persians.

On the death of Hezekiah, his successor, Manasseh, had, as we know, been tempted to intervene in the revolutions of the hour, but the prompt punishment which followed his first attempt put an end for ever to his desire for independence.  His successor, Amon, during his brief reign of two years,* had no time to desert the ways of his father, and Josiah,** who came to the throne in 638 B.C., at the age of eight, had so far manifested no hostility towards Assyria.