bitions. Inheriting a disorganised army,
proclaimed king in the midst of mourning, on the morrow of a defeat
in which the fate of his kingdom had hung in the balance, he succeeded
within a quarter of a century in overthrowing his enemies and
substituting his supremacy for theirs throughout the whole of Western
Asia. At his accession Media had occupied only a small portion of the
Iranian table-land; at his death, the Median empire extended to
the banks of the Halys. It is now not difficult to understand why
Nebuchadrezzar abstained from all expeditions in the regions of the
Taurus, as well as in those of the Upper Tigris. He would inevitably
have come into contact with the allies of the Lydians, perchance with
the Lydians themselves, or with the Medes, as the case might be; and
he would have been drawn on to take an active part in their dangerous
quarrels, from which, after all, he could not hope to reap any personal
advantage. In reality, there was one field of action only open to him,
and that was Southern Syria, with Egypt in her rear. He found himself,
at this extreme limit of his dominions, in a political situation almost
identical with that of his Assyrian predecessors, and consequently more
or less under the obligation of repeating their policy. The Saites, like
the Ethiopians before them, could enjoy no assured sense of security in
the Delta, when they knew that they had a great military state as their
nearest neighbour on the other side of the isthmus; they felt with
reason that the thirty leagues of desert which separated Pelusium from
Gaza was an insufficient protection from invasion, and they desired
to have between themselves and their adversary a tract of country
sufficiently extensive to ward off the first blows in the case of
hostilities. If such a buffer territory could be composed of feudal
provinces or tributary states, Egyptian pride would be flattered, while
at the same time the security of the kingdom would be increased, and
indeed the victorious progress of Necho had for the moment changed their
most ambitious dreams into realities. Driven back into the Nile valley
after the battle of Carchemish, their pretensions had immediately
shrunk within more modest limits; their aspirations were now confined to
gaining the confidence of the few surviving states which had preserved
some sort of independence in spite of the Assyrian conquest, to
detaching them from Chaldoan interests and making them into a prote