THE MEDES AND PERSIANS

The Medes.- an Aryan tribe, who were allies of the Chaldeans who brought about the downfall of the Assyrians. A kindred people, to the Persians,who had appeared in Asia from the north somewhere about 2000 B.C., only instead of pushing on towards Afghanistan and India they had settled in the uplands and mountain districts to the east of the Mesopotamian plain. In the more fertile valleys they followed agriculture: on the hill-sides they pastured their sheep : and just about the time the Jaws were carried captive to Babylon, their prophet, Zoroaster (o. 660-583 B.C.), founded a religion. utill living to-day, though its adherents are few .

Zoroaster taught the doctrine of the constant struggle of good and evil, ending in the final triumph of Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) 'the Lord of Great Knowledge," over Ahriman, "the Prince of Darkness." Fire and light were to him else symbol of righteousness, and came to play so large a part in later Zoroastrianism that the India Parsees who belong to this faith are often incorrectly described as Fire worshipers .

Cyrus the Persian (d. 528 B.C.).- About fifty years after the fall of Nineveh the Persians, who up till this time had been less important than the Medes, found a great general in Cyrus, one of their princes, and under his leadership not only subdued the Medes but began to make themselves masters of the Mesopotamian plain.

Some years before Cyrus captured Babylon he had fighting in the heart of Asia Minor, Up till this time. though there had been fairly constant warfare in the border district of Asia Minor between such Anatolian tribes as the Mitanni and. Hittites with rulers of Egypt. Nineveh, and Damascus. Yet Egyptians and Semites alike had refraimed, save for the occasional raid, from actually invading the peninsula.
It has been said that their races, desert bred, experienced a natural repugnance for climbing the "snow-streaked wall " of the Taurus range: and certainly most rulers of early empires preferred to turn their chariots south-west or east along the curve of to "Fertile Crescent," - as Breasted has named the semi circle round the desert formed by Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia.

The Medes mountaineers themselves, possessed no fears of northern snows; more-over their position enabled them to avoid the Taurus passes: and thus we find them negotiating " a scientific frontier" on the Halys river with the Lydians, at that time still the dominant power in Asia Minor.

Lydia - So commercially prosperous was the empire of Lydia, to whose talent for finance we owe the invention of stamped coma instead of rings or clumsy bars of metal, that the name of her last king, Croesus (560 - 546 B.C.), has remained a symbol of wealth. A power in the Ægan Sea as well as on the mainland, Croesus had succeeded in conquering the hitherto independent Greek colonies of Ephesus and Miletus, and allied himself with the republic of Sparta in Greece.

According to the historian Herodotus, a native of Helicarnassus, one of the Greek towns of Anatolia, he sent to consult the Delphic Oracle on the wisdom of attacking the Persians; and, having received tire answer that to do so would be to witness the destruction of an empire, chose the interpretation that fitted in with his own hopes, and against the advice of more cautious counsellors, immediately embarked on the invasion of Cappadocia.

The oracle spoke truly if ambiguously. An empire was destroyed; but it was that of Lydia, whose capital of Sardis was stormed by the Persians in 546 B.C. This was the work of Cyrus a military genius beloved also as a man by his mountaineers. When he had also captured Babylon, Cyrus ruled over a kingdom that stretched from Syria to the Ægean, and from the Armenian uplands to the Persian Gulf.

Darius the Great. - Cambyses, son of Cyrus, carried on his father's work of empire-building by adding Egypt (525 B.C..) to the dominions he had inherited - but his reign was a short one, and it was under his successor. Darius (521-485 B.C.), that the Ancient World beheld an empire that exceeded in extent and carefully-planned government anything its rulers had yet imagined.

The old Medean capital had been Ecbatana;- but the Persian city of Susa now became the centre of a network of roads. along which royal messengers rode. Continually carrying the will of the Great King residence to provincial governors or Satrap.

The international language of the world's earliest empire was, we know from clay tablets dug up at Akhnaton's capital of Tel-El Amarna. Babylonian; and partly from the Pertrians evolved a script of their own with thirty-nine cuneiform signs. Like hieroglyphics in Egypt, this script continued use for inscriptions, but proving altogether slow and clumsy for the daily round of official communications Aramaic took its place for ordinary use. This had been first introduced, written in ink on a parchment or papyrus, by Syrian merchants traveling through Mesopotamia, and also by clerks of their race employed in the business-houses of Ninevah and Babylon.

Just the same thing happened in Palestine, where Hebrew was superseded for ordinary use by Aramaic, the language of Jesus and His diciples, in which His sayings were in all probability first recorded.

It ls to the reign Darius that we owe the famous Behistun monument, sometimes called the Rosetta Stone of Asia because this proclamation of the Great King's triumphs is inscribed in three types of cuneiform, Babylonian, Persian, and the local language of Suas "By the grace of Ahura Mazda," It runs, "these lands had conformed to my decree. Even as I commanded so was it done"

No ruler of the ancient world had ever before exercised so great a power with the possible exception of Hammurabi - so intelligently. Where Assyrian conquest Inevitably left a trail of massacre and ruin, the Persian established satrapies under governors responsible to the king. Taxes were paid sometimes in gold - but often in kind, the army drew its quota of recruits, but on the whole - while the Great King himself was alive - without undue extortion or hardship.

One thing novel in a Mesopotamian monarch was the interest Darius took in the sea Hitherto the empires with which we have been dealing had been great land-powers; but now the Persian. not only looked on the Gulf we have called after their name but - the overthrow of Lydia - out across the Mediterranean .

With regard to the Persian Gulf, Darius gave a Greek sailor called Scylax a commission to explore the coast of Asia towards India and down towards the Isthmus of Suez on the west. In the cast of the Mediterranean., he took into his employment that seafaring folk, the Phoenicians, formerly under Egypt. Also through his conquest of Asia Minor, he was brought in contact with the trading colonies that Greece had by this time planted along the shores of Anatolia. In attempting to exercise the same control over their affairs he adopted elsewhere in his empire he was met by a most determined opposition.