married out of their own countries, as a pledge for the
faithful observance by her relatives of the treaty which had
been concluded.

The western provinces of the empire did not permit themselves to be
drawn into the movement, and Judah, for example, remained faithful to
its suzerain till the last moment,* but Sin-shar-ishkun received no help
from them, and was obliged to fight his last battles single-handed. He
shut himself up in Nineveh, and held out as long as he could; but when
all his resources were exhausted--ammunitions of war, men and food
supplies--he met his fate as a king, and burnt himself alive in his
palace with his children and his wives, rather than fall alive into the
hands of his conquerors (608 B.C.). The Babylonians would take no
part in pillaging the temples, out of respect for the gods, who were
practically identical with their own, but the Medes felt no such
scruples. "Their king, the intrepid one, entirely destroyed the
sanctuaries of the gods of Assur, and the cities of Accad which had
shown themselves hostile to the lord of Accad, and had not rendered him
assistance. He destroyed their holy places, and left not one remaining;
he devastated their cities, and laid them waste as it were with a
hurricane." Nineveh laid low, Assyria no longer existed. After the lapse
of a few years, she was named only among the legends of mythical days:
two centuries later, her very site was forgotten, and a Greek army
passed almost under the shadow of her dismantled towers, without a
suspicion that there lay before it all that remained of the city where
Semiramis had reigned in her glory.**

* It was to oppose the march of Necho _against the King of
Assyria_ that Josiah fought the battle of Megiddo (2 Kings
xxiii. 29, 30; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-24, where the mention
of the King of Assyria is suppressed).

** This is what the _Ten Thousand_ did when they passed
before Larissa and Mespila. The name remained famous, and
later on the town which bore it attained a relative
importance.

It is true that Egypt, Chaldaea, and the other military nations of the
East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest
consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had
mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into
slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued. But
the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at