of their size, like the pillars of brass and the brazen sea, were broken in pieces. All the people of Jerusalem were carried into captivity, with the exception of the very poorest, who were left behind to be vinedressers and husbandmen. 15. We have already seen that the Hebrew prophets, although deeply versed in the politics of their times, and foretelling with unerring insight the ruin which, in the course of history, was inevitably to overtake the various states, great and small, which formed their political world, were sometimes misled, by their eager impatience to see the wrongs they were powerless to avert avenged on their rivals and enemies by a higher power, into appointing too early a date for their destruction.* Ezekiel especially repeatedly falls into this error. Thus the defeat inflicted on the Pharaoh Hophra did not result in the Chaldean invasion and total destruction which he depicts in his otherwise magnificent dirge over Egypt. (Ezekiel, ch. XXXII. and other passages.) No less premature is his eloquent prophecy of the fall of Tyre (ch. XXVI.-XXVIII.), which Nebuchadrezzar proceeded to blockade as soon as he had done with Judah. The Jews suspected the proud queen of the seas of being at heart rather pleased than grieved at the disaster which struck them from the roll of nations, and their captive prophet accordingly denounces her and calls down destruction on her head: "Because that Tyre hath said against Jerusalem, Aha! she is broken that was the gate of the peoples; I shall be replenished now * See "Story of Assyria," p. 429. I will that she is laid waste; therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, O Tyre, and will cause many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up. And they shall destroy the walls of Tyre, and break down her towers. also scrape her dust from her, and make her a bare rock. behold, I will bring upon Tyre Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, from the north, with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen. . . ." (Ch. XXVI., 2-14.) Siege of Tyre, rezzar. That the Phoenician capital suffered severely is most probable, since the siege is said to have lasted nigh on thirteen years. On the other by Nebuchad: hand, the very fact that it could last so 585-573 B.C. long and not end in conquest even then, shows that the blockade could not have been very close. How should it, when the sea remained open? It seems to have ended in a capitulation, the people of Tyre acknowledging the king of Babylon's overlordship and accepting a new king from his hands, in place of the "rebel" who was deposed. 16. The prophet Ezekiel, seeing his prediction, for the time being, only half fulfilled, takes a peculiar view of the event. He appears to have considered the sack of Tyre as a reward due to the king of Babylon for the work he did as instrument of the Lord's vengeance against Judah, and speaks in a tone of disappointment of his being deprived of it: Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, caused his army to serve a great service against Tyre; every head was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled* ; yet had he no wages, nor his army, from Tyre." Then the prophet promises the conquest of Egypt as a compensation : By the long friction of the helmet and the shield-strap. Therefore, thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will give the land of Egypt unto Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and he shall carry off her multitude, and take her spoil, and take her prey; and it shall be the wages for his army. I have given him the land of Egypt as his recompense for which he served, because they wrought for me." Egypt. But Nebuchadrezzar never invaded Though a good general, he was not a conqueror after the pattern of the Assyrian kings. He was a statesman as well, inclined by preference to works of peace, and gave the most unslackening attention to the establishment of his home-rule at Babylon on broad and solid bases—an object which could be best achieved by a continuous personal residence in his own native state, Chaldea, and its capital—Babylon. War, therefore, was always with him a matter of necessity, not of choice, and he strove to ensure general peace even by acting as peacemaker between his neighbors. 1. A GLANCE at the map shows that the doom of Judah and the other Syrian states was inevitable. Their position made it a necessity for whoever ruled in Mesopotamia to take and to hold them. They really were part and parcel of the Assyrian inheritance, and when the founders of a Chaldean monarchy at Babylon entered into that inheritance, it was but natural that they should reach out for the seashore and keep a heavy master's hand on all that lay between. The case was different with such countries as were separated by natural barriers from what may be called the Semitic and Canaanitic region-such as lay in and beyond the highlands of Taurus and Naïri, i.e., in Asia Minor and the mountain land between the Black and Caspian seas. 2. Of these countries some had been only partly subject to Assyria, like the kingdom of Van and the other principalities of Urartu on one hand, Cilicia and Cappadocia on the other, while some had never been subject to it at all, but only endangered by its nearness; these were the countries of that advanced part of Asia Minor, of which the course of the river HALYS (the modern KIZIL-IRMÂK), according to Herodotus' just remark, almost makes an island. For, it is very certain that the Assyrians never saw the Ægean Sea-(that part of the Mediterranean which flows amidst the Greek islands and along the Ionian shores)-any more than the Black Sea. And if Lydia, at a moment of sore distress, exchanged her independence against Assyrian protection, the submission was only temporary and almost immediately repented of.* 3. We saw that soon after that passing triumph, Asshurbanipal became too much engrossed with. vital struggles nearer home-against Chaldean Babylon and Elam and the advancing Medes-to repress the risings of his outlying subjects and vassals. Much less were his feeble successors able to attend to any thing but their most immediate interests, and while the Scythian invasion was acting on the tottering empire as an earthquake on an already ruinous building, changes were taking place in and beyond its northern boundaries, which it is impossible to trace in those unrecorded years, but which we find accomplished when the darkness is lifted and some degree of order restored. Thus we hear no more of Urartu. It is certain that, in the course of the seventh century B.C., the Hittite Alarodians were supplanted by that Thraco-Phrygian branch of the Aryan race, which is represented in the enumeration of the Japhetic family given in Chapter X. of Genesis, as Tôgarmah, son of Gômer,t and has been familiar under the name of Armenians ever since * See "Story of Assyria," pp. 378-382. ↑ Ibid., pp. 367, 368. |