and carried them off to Assyria, together with a vast spoil
and numerous other captives. Hereupon the remaining chiefs, alarmed
for their safety, made their submission, consenting to pay an annual
tribute, and admitting Assyrian officers into their territories, who
watched, if they did not even control, the government.

We are now approaching the time when Media seems to have been first
consolidated into a monarchy by the genius of an individual. Sober
history is forced to discard the shadowy forms of kings with which Greek
writers of more fancy than judgment have peopled the darkness that rests
upon the "origines" of the Medes. Arbaces, Maudaces, Sosarmus, Artycas,
Arbianes, Artseus, Deioces--Median monarchs, according to Ctesias or
Herodotus, during the space of time comprised within the years B.C. 875
and 655--have to be dismissed by the modern writer without a word,
since there is reason to believe that they are mere creatures of the
imagination, inventions of unscrupulous romancers, not men who once
walked the earth. The list of Median kings in Ctesias, so far as it
differs from the list in Herodotus, seems to be a pure forgery--an
extension of the period of the monarchy by the conscious use of a system
of duplication. Each king, or period, in Herodotus occurs in the list
of Ctesias twice--a transparent device, clumsily cloaked by the cheap
expedient of a liberal invention of names. Even the list of Herodotus
requires curtailment. His Deioces, whose whole history reads more like
romance than truth--the organizer of a powerful monarchy in Media just
at the time when Sargon was building his fortified posts in the
country and peopling with his Israelite captives the old "cities of the
Medes"--the prince who reigned for above half a century in perfect
peace with his neighbors, and who, although contemporary with Sargon,
Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, and As-shur-bani-pal--all kings more or less
connected with Media--is never heard of in any of their annals, must
be relegated to the historical limbo in which repose so many "shades of
mighty names;" and the Herodotean list of Median kings must at any
rate, be thus far reduced. Nothing is more evident than that during the
flourishing period of Assyria under the great Sargonidae above named
there was no grand Median kingdom upon the eastern flank of the empire.
Such a kingdom had certainly not been formed up to B.C. 671, when
Esar-haddon reduced the more distant Medes, finding t