the 28th of May, Anno Nabonass. 163, forty and seven years before the taking of Babylon, and put an end to the battel:  and thereupon the two Kings made peace by the mediation of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, and Syennesis King of Cilicia; and the peace was ratified by a marriage, between Darius the son of Cyaxeres and Ariene the daughter of Alyattes:  Darius was therefore fifteen or sixteen years old at the time of this marriage; for he was 62 years old at the taking of Babylon.

In the eleventh year of Zedekiah’s Reign, the year in which Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, Ezekiel comparing the Kingdoms of the East to trees in the garden of Eden, thus mentions their being conquered by the Kings of the Medes and Chaldaeans:  Behold, saith he, the Assyrian was a Cedar in Lebanon with fair branches,—­his height was exalted above all the trees of the field,—­and under his shadow dwelt all great nations,—­not any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his beauty:—­but I have delivered him into the hand of the mighty one of the heathen,—­I made the nations to shake at the sound of his fall, when I cast him down to the grave with them that descend into the pit:  and all the trees of Eden_, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water, shall be comforted in the nether parts of the earth:  they also went down into the grave with him, unto them that be slain with the sword, and they that were his arm, that dwelt under his shadow in the midst of the heathen,_ Ezek. xxxi.

The next year Ezekiel, in another prophesy, thus enumerates the principal nations who had been subdued and slaughtered by the conquering sword of Cyaxeres and Nebuchadnezzar. __Asthur_ is there and all her company, viz. in Hades_ or the lower parts of the earth, where the dead bodies lay buried_, his graves are about him; all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which caused their terrour in the land of the living.  There is Elam, and all her multitude round about her grave, all of them slain, fallen by the sword, which are gone down uncircumcised into the nether parts of the earth, which caused their terrour in the land of the living:  yet have they born their shame with them that go down into the pit.—­There is Meshech, Tubal, and all her multitude [411]; her graves are round about him:  all of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword, though they caused their terrour in the land of the living.—­There is Edom, her Kings, and all her Princes, which with their might are laid by them that were slain by the sword.—­There be the Princes of the North all of them, and all the Zidonians, which with their terrour are gone down with the slain_, Ezek. xxxii.  Here by the Princes of the North I understand those on the north