Nebuchadnezzar--so far as his records have been found and read--did not
adopt the Assyrian custom of enumerating first and foremost his
expeditions and his battles; and were it not for the Hebrew Scriptures,
we should hardly know that his armies ever left Babylonia, the
rebuilding and redecoration of whose cities and shrines appear to have
constituted his chief concern. True, that in such silence about warlike
operations, he follows the precedent of previous Babylonian kings; but
probably that precedent arose from the fact that for a long time past
Babylon had been more or less continuously a client state.

We must, therefore, proceed by inference. There are two or three
recorded events earlier and later than our date, which are of service.
First, we learn from Babylonian annals that Kyaxares, besides
overrunning all Assyria and the northern part of Babylonia after the
fall of Nineveh, took and pillaged Harran and its temple in north-west
Mesopotamia. Now, from other records of Nabonidus, fourth in succession
to Nebuchadnezzar, we shall learn further that this temple did not come
into Babylonian hands till the middle of the following century. The
reasonable inference is that it had remained since 606 B.C. in the power
of the Medes, and that northern Mesopotamia, as well as Assyria, formed
part of a loose-knit Median "Empire" for a full half century before 552
B.C.

Secondly, Herodotus bears witness to a certain event which occurred
about the year 585, in a region near enough to his own country for the
fact to be sufficiently well known to him. He states that, after an
expedition into Cappadocia and a war with Lydia, the Medes obtained,
under a treaty with the latter which the king of Babylon and the prince
of Cilicia promoted, the Halys river as a "scientific frontier" on the
north-west. This statement leaves us in no doubt that previously the