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CHAPTER III—­THE MEDES AND THE SECOND CHALDAEAN EMPIRE

The fall of Nineveh and the rise of the Chaldaean and Median empires—­The XXVIth Egyptian dynasty:  Cyaxares, Alyattes, and Nebuchadrezzar.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the silver vase of Tchertomlitsk, now in the museum of the Hermitage.  The vignette is also drawn by Faucher-Gudin, and represents an Egyptian torso in the Turin museum; the cartouche which is seen upon the arm is that of Psammetichus I.

The East was ever a land of kaleidoscopic changes and startling dramatic incidents.  An Oriental empire, even when built up by strong hands and watched over with constant vigilance, scarcely ever falls to pieces in the slow and gradual process of decay arising from the ties that bind it together becoming relaxed or its constituent elements growing antiquated.  It perishes, as a rule, in a cataclysm; its ruin comes like a bolt from the blue, and is consummated before the commencement of it is realised.  One day it stands proud and stately in the splendour of its glory; there is no report abroad but that which tells of its riches, its industry, its valour, the good government of its princes and the irresistible might of its gods, and the world, filled with envy or with fear, deeming its good fortune immutable, never once applies to it, even in thought, the usual commonplaces on the instability of human things.  Suddenly an ill wind, blowing up from the distant horizon, bursts upon it in destructive squalls, and it is overthrown in the twinkling of an eye, amid the glare of lightning, the resounding crash of thunder, whirlwinds of dust and rain:  when the storm has passed away as quickly as it came, its mutterings heralding the desolation which it bears to other climes, the brightening sky no longer reveals the old contours and familiar outlines, but the sun of history rises on a new empire, emerging, as if by the touch of a magic wand, from the ruins which the tempest has wrought.  There is nothing apparently lacking of all that, in the eyes of the many, invested its predecessor with glory; it seems in no wise inferior in national vigour, in the number of its soldiers, in the military renown of its chiefs, in the proud prosperity of its people, or in the majesty of its gods; the present fabric is as spacious and magnificent, it would seem, as that which has but just vanished into the limbo of the past.  No kingdom ever shone with brighter splendour, or gave a greater impression of prosperity, than the kingdom of Assyria in the days succeeding its triumphs over Blam and Arabia:  precisely at this point the monuments and other witnesses of its activity fail us, just as if one of the acts of the piece in which it had played a chief part having come to an end, the drop-curtain must be lowered, amid a flourish of trumpets and the illuminations of an