n as Ardelan--a varied region containing
several lofty ridges, with broad plains lying between them.

It is remarkable that the time of this first contact of Media with
Assyria--a contact taking place when Assyria was in her prime, and Media
was only just emerging from a long period of weakness and obscurity--is
almost exactly that which Ctesias selects as a day of the great
revolution whereby the Empire of the East passed from the hands of the
Shemites into those of the Arians. The long residence of Otesias among
the Persians, gave him a bias toward that people, which even extended to
their close kin, the Medes. Bent on glorifying these two Arian races,
he determined to throw back the commencement of their empire to a period
long anterior to the true date; and, feeling specially anxious to cover
up their early humiliation, he assigned their most glorious conquests
to the very century, and almost to the very time, when they were in fact
suffering reverses at the hands of the people over whom he represented
them as triumphant. There was a boldness in the notion of thus inverting
history which almost deserved, and to a considerable extent obtained,
success. The "long chronology" of Ctesias kept its ground until
recently, not indeed meeting with universal acceptance, but on the whole
predominating over the "short chronology" of Herodotus; and it may be
doubted whether anything less than the discovery that the native records
of Assyria entirely contradicted Ctesias would have sufficed to drive
from the field his figment of early Median dominion.

The second occasion upon which we hear of the Medes in the Assyrian
annals is in the reign of Shalmanoser's son and successor, Shamas-Vul.
Here again, as on the former occasion, the Assyrians were the
aggressors. Shamas-Vul invaded Media and Arazias in his third year, and
committed ravages similar to those of his father, wasting the country
with fire and sword, but not (it would seem) reducing the Medes to
subjection, or even attempting to occupy their territory. Again the
attack is a mere raid, which produces no permanent impression.

It is in the reign of the son and successor of Shamas-Vul that the Medes
appear for the first time to have made their submission and accepted
the position of Assyrian tributaries. A people which was unable to offer
effectual resistance when the Assyrian levies invaded their country, and
which had no means of retaliating upon their foe or making him