having been warned in time to meet them as they left the
desert, had followed a road parallel to their line of march, and had
taken up his position in advance of them on the plain of Megiddo, on the
very spot where Thutmosis III. had vanquished the Syrian confederates
nearly ten centuries before. The King of Judah was defeated and killed
in the confusion of the battle, and the conqueror pushed on northwards
without, at that moment, giving the fate of the scattered Jews a further
thought.* He rapidly crossed the plain of the Orontes by the ancient
caravan track, and having reached the Euphrates, he halted under the
walls of Carchemish. Perhaps he may have heard there of the fall of
Nineveh, and the fear of drawing down upon himself the Medes or the
Babylonians prevented him from crossing the river and raiding the
country of the Balikh, which, from the force of custom, the royal
scribes still persisted in designating by the disused name of Mitanni.**

* 2 Kings xxiii. 29; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 22, 23. It is
probably to this battle that Herodotus alludes when he says
that Necho overcame the Syrians at Magdolos. The identity of
Magdolos and Megiddo, accepted by almost all historians, was
disputed by Gutschmid, who sees in the Magdolos of Herodotus
the Migdol of the Syro-Egyptian frontier, and in the
engagement itself, an engagement of Necho with the Assyrians
and their Philistine allies; also by Th. Reinach, who
prefers to identify Magdolos with one of the Migdols near
Ascalon, and considers this combat as fought against the
Assyrian army of occupation. If the information in Herodotus
were indeed borrowed from Hecatasus of Miletus, and by the
latter from the inscription placed by Necho in the temple of
Branchidae, it appears to me impossible to admit that
Magdolos does not here represent Megiddo.

** The text of 2 Kings xxiii. 29 says positively that Necho
was marching towards the Euphrates. The name Mitanni is
found even in Ptolemaic times.

He returned southwards, after having collected the usual tributes and
posted a few garrisons at strategic points; at Biblah he held a kind of
_Durbar_ to receive the homage of the independent Phoenicians* and of
the old vassals of Assyria, who, owing to the rapidity of his movements,
had not been able to tender their offerings on his outward march.

* The submission of the Phoenicians to Ne