acknowledge the superior power of the newcomers and, probably, to accept
a kind of vassalage. Thus, since all lower Mesopotamia with most part of
Syria obeyed the Babylonian, a power, partly Iranian, was already
overshadowing two-thirds of the East before Cyrus and his Persians
issued upon the scene. It is important to bear this fact in mind when
one comes to note the ease with which a hitherto obscure king of Anshan
in Elam would prove able to possess himself of the whole Semitic Empire,
and the rapidity with which his arms would appear in the farthest west
of Asia Minor on the confines of the Greeks themselves. Nebuchadnezzar
allied with and obedient to the Median king, helping him on the Halys in
585 B.C. to arrange with Lydia a division of the peninsula of Asia Minor
on the terms _uti possidetis_--that is the significant situation which
will prepare us to find Cyrus not quite half a century later lord of
Babylon, Jerusalem and Sardes.

What events, passing in the far East among the divers groups of the
Iranians themselves and their Scythian allies, led to this king of a
district in Elam, whose own claim to have belonged by blood to any of
those groups is doubtful, consolidating all the Iranians whether of the
south or north under his single rule into a mighty power of offence, we
do not know. Stories current among the Greeks and reported by Herodotus
and Ctesias represented Cyrus as in any case a Persian, but as either
grandson of a Median king (though not his natural heir) or merely one of
his court officials. What the Greeks had to account for (and so have we)
is the subsequent disappearance of the north Iranian kings of the Medes
and the fusion of their subjects with the Persian Iranians under a
southern dynasty. And what the Greeks did not know, but we do, from
cuneiform inscriptions either contemporary with, or very little
subsequent to, Cyrus' time, only complicates the problem; since these
bear witness that Cyrus was known at first (as has been indicated