Nabu-aplu-utsur, or, as the Greeks wrote the name, Nabopolassar. This
Chaldaean hastened to strengthen himself by marrying his son,
Nebuchadnezzar, to a Median princess, and threw off the last pretence of
submission to Assyrian suzerainty. He had made himself master of
southern Mesopotamia and the Euphrates Valley trade-route by the year
609.

At the opening of the last decade of the century, therefore, we have
this state of things. Scythians and Medes are holding most of eastern
and central Assyria; Chaldaeans hold south Mesopotamia; while Syria,
isolated from the old centre of empire, is anyone's to take and keep. A
claimant appears immediately in the person of the Egyptian Necho, sprung
from the loins of that Psammetichus who had won the Nile country back
from Assyria. Pharaoh entered Syria probably in 609, broke easily
through the barrier which Josiah of Jerusalem, greatly daring in this
day of Assyrian weakness, threw across his path at Megiddo, went on to
the north and proceeded to deal as he willed with the west of the
Assyrian empire for four or five years. The destiny of Nineveh was all
but fulfilled. With almost everything lost outside her walls, she held
out against the Scythian assaults till 606, and then fell to the Mede
Uvakhshatra, known to the Greeks as Kyaxares. The fallen capital of West
Asia was devastated by the conquerors to such effect that it never
recovered, and its life passed away for ever across the Tigris, to the
site on which Mosul stands at the present day.


SECTION 5. THE BABYLONIANS AND THE MEDES

Six years later,--in 600 B.C.--this was the position of that part of the
East which had been the Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldaean