But his impatience could not brook the delay occasioned by the slow march of a large force, nor the ordinary circuitous route by Carchemish and through Mesopotamia.  He hurried across the Arabian desert, accompanied by a small escort of light troops, and presented himself unexpectedly at the gates of Babylon.  He found all in order.  His Chaldaean ministers had assumed the direction of affairs, and had reserved the throne for the rightful heir; he had only to appear to be acclaimed and obeyed (B.C. 605).

His reign was long, prosperous, and on the whole peaceful.  The recent changes in Asiatic politics had shut out the Chaldaeans from the majority of the battle-fields on which the Assyrians had been wont to wage warfare with the tribes on their eastern and northern frontiers.  We no longer see stirring on the border-land those confused masses of tribes and communities of whose tumultuous life the Ninevite annals make such frequent record:  Elam as an independent state no longer existed, neither did Philipi and Namri, nor the Cossaeans, nor Parsua, nor the Medes with their perpetual divisions, nor the Urartians and the Mannai in a constant state of ferment within their mountain territory; all that remained of that turbulent world now constituted a single empire, united under the hegemony of the Medes, and the rule of a successful conqueror.  The greater part of Blam was already subject to those Achaemenides who called themselves sovereigns of Anshan as well as of Persia, and whose fief was dependent on the kingdom of Ecbatana:* it is probable that Chaldasa received as her share of the ancient Susian territory the low countries of the Uknu and the Ulai, occupied by the Aramaean tribes of the Puqudu, the Eutu, and the Grambulu;** but Susa fell outside her portion, and was soon transformed into a flourishing Iranian town.

* “The king and the princes of Elam” mentioned in Jer. xxv. 25, xlix.35-39, and in Ezele. xxxii. 24, 25, in the time of Nebuchadrezzar, are probably the Persian kings of Anshan and their Elamite vassals—­not only, as is usually believed, the kings and native princes conquered by Assur-bani-pal; the same probably holds good of the Elam which an anonymous prophet associates with the Medes under Nabonidus, in the destruction of Babylon (Isa. xxi. 2).  The princes of Malamir appear to me to belong to an anterior epoch.

** The enumeration given in Ezelc. xxiii. 23, “the Babylonians and all the Chaldaeans, Pelted, and Shoa, and Koa,” shows us probably that the Aramaeans of the Lower Tigris represented by Pekod, as those of the Lower Euphrates are by the Chaldaeans, belonged to the Babylonian empire in the time of the prophet.  They are also considered as belonging to Babylon in the passage of an anonymous prophet (Jer.  I. 21), who wrote in the last days of the Chaldaen empire:  “Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against it and the inhabitants of Pekod.”  Translators and commentators