r their heads,*** and
their iniquities are upon their bones; for they were the terror of the
mighty in the land of the living."****

* This may be deduced from the passage in Herodotus, where
he says that " the Scythians were masters of Asia for
twenty-eight years, and overturned everything by their
brutality and stupidity: for, in addition to tribute, they
exacted from every one whatever they chose, and, moreover,
they prowled here and there, plundering as they thought
good."

** Strabo refers in general terms to the presence of
Scythians (or, as he calls them, Sacae) in Armenia,
Cappadocia, and on the shores of the Black Sea.

*** This, doubtless, means that the Mushku and Tabal had
been so utterly defeated that they could not procure
honourable burial for their dead, i.e. with their swords
beneath their heads and their weapons on their bodies.

**** 1 Ezek. xxxii. 26, 27.

The Cimmerians, who, since their reverses in Lydia and on Mount Taurus,
had concentrated practically the whole of their tribes in Cappadocia
and in the regions watered by the Halys and Thermodon, shared the good
fortune of their former adversaries. At that time they lived under the
rule of a certain Kobos, who seems to have left a terrible reputation
behind him; tradition gives him a place beside Sesostris among the
conquerors of the heroic age, and no doubt, like his predecessor
Dugdamis, he owed this distinction to some expedition or other against
the peoples who dwelt on the shores of the AEgean Sea, but our knowledge
of his career is confined to the final catastrophe which overtook him.
After some partial successes, such as that near Zela, for instance, he
was defeated and made prisoner by Madyes. His subjects, as vassals of
the Scythians, joined them in their acts of brigandage,* and together
they marched from province to province, plundering as they went; they
overran the western regions of the Assyrian kingdom from Melitene
and Mesopotamia to Northern Syria, from Northern Syria to Phoenicia,
Damascus, and Palestine,** and at length made their appearance on the
Judaean frontier.

* It seems probable that this was so, when we consider the
confusion between the Scythians or Sakse, and the Cimmerians
in the Babylonian and Persian inscriptions of the
Achsemenian epoch.

** Their migration from Media into Syria and Palestine is
expre