, the herds swept off or destroyed, the villages and
homesteads burnt, the whole country made a scene of desolation. Their
ravages would resemble those of the Huns when they poured into Italy, or
of the Bulgarians when they overran the fairest provinces of the
Byzantine Empire. In most instances the strongly fortified towns would
resist them, unless they had patience to sit down before their walls and
by a prolonged blockade to starve them into submission. Sometimes,
before things reached this point, they might consent to receive a
tribute and to retire. At other times, convinced that by perseverance
they would reap a rich reward, they may have remained till the besieged
city fell, when there must have ensued an indescribable scene of havoc,
rapine, and bloodshed. According to the broad expression of Herodotus,
the Scythians were masters of the whole of Western Asia from the
Caucasus to the borders of Egypt for the space of twenty-eight years.
This statement is doubtless an exaggeration; but still it would seem to
be certain that the great invasion of which he speaks was not confined
to Media, but extended to the adjacent countries of Armenia and Assyria,
whence it spread to Syria and Palestine. The hordes probably swarmed
down from Media through the Zagros passes into the richest portion of
Assyria, the flat country between the mountains and the Tigris. Many of
the old cities, rich with the accumulated stores of ages, were besieged,
and perhaps taken, and their palaces wantonly burnt, by the barbarous
invaders. The tide then swept on. Wandering from district to district,
plundering everywhere, settling nowhere, the clouds of horse passed over
Mesopotamia, the force of the invasion becoming weaker as it spread
itself, until in Syria it reached its term through the policy of the
Egyptian king, Psammetichus. This monarch, who was engaged in the siege
of Ashdod, no sooner heard of the approach of a great Scythian host,
which threatened to overrun Egypt, and had advanced as far as Ascalon,
than he sent ambassadors to their leader and prevailed on him by rich
gifts to abstain from his enterprise. From this time the power of the
invaders seems to have declined. Their strength could not but suffer by
the long series of battles, sieges, and skirmishes in which they were
engaged year after year against enemies in nowise contemptible; it would
likewise deteriorate through their excesses; and it may even have
received some injury fr