at his death, the Median empire extended to the banks of the Halys.  It is now not difficult to understand why Nebuchadrezzar abstained from all expeditions in the regions of the Taurus, as well as in those of the Upper Tigris.  He would inevitably have come into contact with the allies of the Lydians, perchance with the Lydians themselves, or with the Medes, as the case might be; and he would have been drawn on to take an active part in their dangerous quarrels, from which, after all, he could not hope to reap any personal advantage.  In reality, there was one field of action only open to him, and that was Southern Syria, with Egypt in her rear.  He found himself, at this extreme limit of his dominions, in a political situation almost identical with that of his Assyrian predecessors, and consequently more or less under the obligation of repeating their policy.  The Saites, like the Ethiopians before them, could enjoy no assured sense of security in the Delta, when they knew that they had a great military state as their nearest neighbour on the other side of the isthmus; they felt with reason that the thirty leagues of desert which separated Pelusium from Gaza was an insufficient protection from invasion, and they desired to have between themselves and their adversary a tract of country sufficiently extensive to ward off the first blows in the case of hostilities.  If such a buffer territory could be composed of feudal provinces or tributary states, Egyptian pride would be flattered, while at the same time the security of the kingdom would be increased, and indeed the victorious progress of Necho had for the moment changed their most ambitious dreams into realities.  Driven back into the Nile valley after the battle of Carchemish, their pretensions had immediately shrunk within more modest limits; their aspirations were now confined to gaining the confidence of the few surviving states which had preserved some sort of independence in spite of the Assyrian conquest, to detaching them from Chaldoan interests and making them into a protecting zone against the ambition of a new Esarhaddon.  To this work Necho applied himself as soon as Nebuchadrezzar had left him in order to hasten back to Babylon.  The Egyptian monarch belonged to a persevering race, who were never kept, down by reverses, and had not once allowed themselves to be discouraged during the whole of the century in which they had laboured to secure the crown for themselves; his defeat had not lessened his tenacity, nor, it would seem, his certainty of final success.  Besides organising his Egyptian and Libyan troops, he enrolled a still larger number of Hellenic mercenaries, correctly anticipating that the restless spirits of the Phoenicians and Jews would soon furnish him with an opportunity of distinguishing himself upon the scene of action.