ranian town.

* "The king and the princes of Elam" mentioned in Jer. xxv.
25, xlix.35-39, and in Ezele. xxxii. 24, 25, in the time of
Nebuchadrezzar, are probably the Persian kings of Anshan and
their Elamite vassals--not only, as is usually believed, the
kings and native princes conquered by Assur-bani-pal; the
same probably holds good of the Elam which an anonymous
prophet associates with the Medes under Nabonidus, in the
destruction of Babylon (Isa. xxi. 2). The princes of Malamir
appear to me to belong to an anterior epoch.

** The enumeration given in Ezelc. xxiii. 23, "the
Babylonians and all the Chaldaeans, Pelted, and Shoa, and
Koa," shows us probably that the Aramaeans of the Lower
Tigris represented by Pekod, as those of the Lower Euphrates
are by the Chaldaeans, belonged to the Babylonian empire in
the time of the prophet. They are also considered as
belonging to Babylon in the passage of an anonymous prophet
(Jer. I. 21), who wrote in the last days of the Chaldaen
empire: "Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against
it and the inhabitants of Pekod." Translators and
commentators have until quite recently mistaken the import
of the name Pekod.

The plains bordering the right bank of the Tigris, from the Uknu to
the Turnat or the Eadanu, which had belonged to Babylon from the very
earliest times, were no doubt still retained by her;* but the mountain
district which commanded them certainly remained in the hands of
Cyaxares, as well as the greater part of Assyria proper, and there
is every reason to believe that from the Eadanu northwards the Tigris
formed the boundary between the two allies, as far as the confluence of
the Zab.

* This is what appears to me to follow from the account of
the conquest oL Babylon by Cyrus, as related by Herodotus.

The entire basin of the Upper Tigris and its Assyrian colonies, Amidi
and Tushkan were now comprised in the sphere of Medic influence, and the
settlement of the Scythians at Harran, around one of the most venerated
of the Semitic sanctuaries, shows to what restrictions the new authority
of Chaldasa was subjected, even in the districts of Mesopotamia, which
were formerly among the most faithful possessions of Nineveh. If these
barbarians had been isolated, they would not long have defied the King
of Babylon, but being akin to the peoples who wer