about them.  It was against the grain to flatter or submit themselves; constant voyages over wild seas in fragile vessels kept up their manhood; constant encounters with pirates, cannibals, and the rudest possible savages made them brave and daring; exposure to storm, and cold, and heat braced their frames; the nautical life developed and intensified in them a love of freedom.  The Phoenician of Assyrian times was not to be coaxed into accepting patiently the lot of a slave.  Suffer as he might by his revolts, they won him a certain respect; it is likely that they warded off many an indignity, many an outrage.  The Assyrians knew that his endurance could not be reckoned on beyond a certain point, and they knew that in his death-throes he was dangerous.  The Phoenicians probably suffered considerably less than the other subject nations under Assyrian rule; and the maritime population, which was the salt of the people, suffered least of all, since it was scarcely ever brought into contact with its nominal rulers.

4.  Phoenicia during its struggles with Babylon and Egypt (about B.C. 635-527)

Decline of Assyria—­Scythic troubles—­Fall of Nineveh—­Union of the Phoenician cities under Tyre—­Invasion of Syria by Neco—­Battle of Megiddo—­Submission of Phoenicia to Neco—­ Tyrian colony at Memphis—­Conquest of Phoenicia by Nebuchadnezzar—­Reign of Ithobal II. at Tyre—­He revolts from Nebuchadnezzar but is reduced to subjection—­Decline of Tyre—­General weakness of Phoenicia under Babylon.

It is impossible to fix the year in which Phoenicia became independent of Assyria.  The last trace of Assyrian interference, in the way of compulsion, with any of the towns belongs to B.C. 645, when she severely punished Hosah and Accho.  The latest sign of her continued domination is found in B.C. 636, when the Assyrian governor of a Phoenician town, Zimirra, appears in the list of Eponyms.[14180] It must have been very soon after this that the empire became involved in those troubles and difficulties which led on to its dissolution.  According to Herodotus,[14181] Cyaxares, king of Media, laid siege to Nineveh in B.C. 633, or very soon afterwards.  His attack did not at once succeed; but it was almost immediately followed by the irruption into South-western Asia of Scythic hordes from beyond the Caucasus, which overran country after country, destroying and ravaging at their pleasure.[14182] The reality of this invasion is now generally admitted.  “It was the earliest recorded,” says a modern historian, “of those movements of the northern populations, hid behind the long mountain barrier, which, under the name of Himalaya, Caucasus, Taurus, Haemus, and the Alps, has been reared by nature between the civilised and uncivilised races of the old world.  Suddenly, above this boundary, appeared those strange, uncouth, fur-clad forms, hardly to be distinguished from their horses and their waggons, fierce as their own wolves or bears,