power of Ecbatana had been spread through Armenia into the old Hatti
country of Cappadocia, as well as over all the north of Mesopotamia, in
the widest sense of this vague term.

Something more, perhaps, may be inferred legitimately from this same
passage of Herodotus. The mediation of the two kings, so unexpectedly
coupled, must surely mean that each stood to one of the two belligerents
as friend and ally. If so (since a Babylonian king can hardly have held
such a relation to distant Lydia, while the other prince might well have
been its friend), Cilicia was probably outside the Median "sphere of
influence," while Babylon fell within it; and Nebuchadnezzar--for he it
must have been, when the date is considered, though Herodotus calls him
by a name, Labynetus, otherwise unknown--was not a wholly independent
ruler, though ruler doubtless of the first and greatest of the client
states of Media. Perhaps that is why he has told us so little of
expeditions and battles, and confined his records so narrowly to
domestic events. If his armies marched only to do the bidding of an
alien kinsman-in-law, he can have felt but a tepid pride in their
achievements.

In 600 B.C., then, we must picture a Median "Empire," probably of the
raiding type, centred in the west of modern Persia and stretching
westward over all Armenia (where the Vannic kingdom had ceased to be),
and southward to an ill-defined point in Mesopotamia. Beyond this point
south and west extended a Median sphere of influence which included
Babylonia and all that obeyed Nebuchadnezzar even to the border of Elam
on the one hand and the border of Egypt on the other. Since the heart of
this "Empire" lay in the north, its main activities took place there
too, and probably the discretion of the Babylonian king was seldom
interfered with by his Median suzerain. In expanding their power