The End of History

In 612, Ninevah at last fell to the allied armies. Medes and Babylonians swarmed over the walls and put the capital of the Assyrians to the sack, ending once and for all that great people's reign of terror over the lands.

For centuries, the Assyrians had terrorized the Fertile Crescent. They held sway over all the lands from the Mediterranean to the Zagros Mountains, destroying or conquering hundreds of famous walled cities - among them the cities of Israel, the obscure northern half of a small, obscure kingdom involved in an ongoing civil war. The Israelis were carted off into slavery and exile, while the Judaeans, the Israelis's southern neighbors, were ignored. The Assyrians had larger conquests in mind. Their weapons of iron were easily able to overcome the feeble bronze arms of their opponents, and their reach expanded until their empire was the greatest the world had ever known. All of the civilized people whispered in awe of the might and majesty of the Assyrians.

That changed when a new group of people settled around the Zagros, calling themselves the "Medes." Fierce horse warriors, proud and mighty in war, they refused to submit to Assyrian domination. Instead, they formed an alliance with Babylon, greatest of the few remaining free cities, and raised a great rebellion against the Assyrians. The entire plain erupted into fire and war as the oppressed subject peoples rose up, and the combined armies of the invaders swept right up to the gates of Ninevah. Even the Assyrians could not match the strength of the newcomers. Their capital fell.

When the Medes and the Babylonians razed Ninevah, the greatest city in the Assyrian Empire, in 612, they destroyed only the latest in a long succession of empires that had dominated the Middle East since the days of Sargon, the Great, who lived more than 3,000 years before Christ. The defeat of the dreaded warriors left most of the Middle East in a state of uproar. Babylon, the greatest city of Mesopotamia, struck out to the west and to the south, forging an empire that stretched across the desert sands (overwhelming the tiny kingdom of Judea). The Medes, on the other hand, took the north and the east. 

In the north, the Medan warriors found their way into the central part of Asia Minor, butting up against the far eastern frontiers of the Lydian Empire, which held the western half of the peninsula, a loose collection of city-states built by a mixture of natives and a curious group of colonists from across the Aegean sea to the west, calling themselves “Greeks.” The two sides soon found themselves at war, and they met in a great battle at the Halys River in the center of the continent, in 585. Medan infantry struggled to ford the river, and each time was met with a charge by the cavalry of Lydia, the finest in the world. Midway through the fighting, however, a great eclipse of the sun occurred. Clearly, it was a sign from the gods, disapproving of the fighting. The two enemies quickly made peace and fixed the border between the two kingdoms at the Halys. An Asian force would not return to conquer the western tip of Asia for decades.

After the battle, the old king of the Medes, Cyaxeres, who had led his people from a tiny mountain tribe into a revolt against the most terrible empire in history, and onwards to conquer the largest empire yet, died. His son, Astyages, succeeded to the throne of the Medan Empire as their second king. He did not know it, but he would also be the last king.

One of the innumerable small tribes the Medes had conquered in their native mountain range, the Zagros – believed to be the highest in the world – was a people known as the Persians. In those days, to cement his rule, Astyages gave his daughter in marriage to the Persian King. Soon enough, she was with child. However, King was afflicted with an odd dream. He dreamt he saw his daughter urinating – and the urine simply kept coming, and coming, until at last the golden liquid from between her legs drowned the entire world with it. Somewhat concerned, he took his dream to the Magi, the holy men of the mountains, who interpreted it as a sign that the girl’s child was destined to rule all the world.

Astyages thus ordered his steward Harpagus to destroy the infant. Harpagus, unable to carry out the sentence, gave the child to a poor herdsman and ordered the boy to be abandoned in the mountains. The man had not the heart to do it, however, and so he took the boy in as his own. The child’s name was Cyrus.

Cyrus grew up in poverty and obscurity, but when he was ten years old, he was recognized as the son of the king of the Persians, and the grandson of the great king of the Medes. Astyages, furious when he discovered the truth of Cyrus’s survival, cooked Harpagus’s son in punishment and fed him to his father. Cyrus he leniently returned to his birth parents, and so in due time Cyrus succeeded his father as king of the Persians. 

Now Harpagus had been allowed to remain in the court of the king, but he had vowed revenge on Astyages. He met with Cyrus, and convinced him to rebel against the king. Cyrus marshaled his people, the Persians, and in 553 he led them in revolt against the massive Medan Empire.

Astyages marshaled his forces, a massive army, and ordered them to destroy the upstart rebels. Unfortunately, his old steward, Harpagus, was able to get himself appointed the head of the army, and so when the two sides faced each other, Harpagus led the defection of most of the Medan forces over to the Persians. The battle was a disaster for the Medes. The war, instead of a quick end, dragged on for 4 years as Astyages desperately brought his troops in from the far corners of the empire, but each were in turn defeated in the empire’s heart by the Persian forces. By 549, Cyrus stood before the great Medan capital of Ecbatana. 

Ecbatana was the greatest city the Medes, who had long been a barbarous, mountain-dwelling nomadic group of herdsmen and wanderers. In the old days, before the Empire, Ecbatana had been the yearly meeting place of the tribes, where they would gather to trade goods and information and arrange marriages. Upon their sack of Ninevah, however, the king had constructed his royal palace on the top of the great hill of the meeting place. Around this, he built seven concentric walls, each of a finer material than the last. The city grew fat from the wealth of the conquests, and before long it was the most magnificent city of the Zagros. Now it fell to Cyrus. The Medan Empire, after a bare 60 years of life, was dead. Cyrus assumed the throne and declared himself king of the Medes and of the Persians, and his new empire was now the Persian.

~
Far away from all this war and conflict, in the prosperous Lydian empire, there dwelt Croesus, the richest man in the world. Croesus was the king of Lydia, and thus far most of his attention had been attempting to keep the peace amongst his squabbling Greek subjects and their neighbors across the western sea. The border with Media had long been secure since the battle at the Halys more than thirty years before, but now he heard disturbing news of a new power rising. Concerned, he sent to the Oracle at Delphi for advice. 

The response he received encouraged Croesus. “If you attack Persia, you will destroy a great empire.” During Cyrus’s war, most of the Medan subjects had thrown off their yoke. The empire was just in its infancy. If Croesus attacked it now he would stand the best chance of destroying it. He set out and attacked a Persian border city, enticing Cyrus’s army out.

But the Persian army, battle-seasoned from four years of warfare with the formidable Medan armies, was no easy conquest. The two sides met in a battle on the edge of Anatolia, which was a draw. With winter drawing on, Croesus assumed the campaign was coming to an end, and so withdrew to his capital of Sardis, far to the west, almost within sight of the Aegean sea. There, he dispersed his army for winter quarters, sent for allies from the free Greek states to the West, and prepared to resume the war the following spring. 

Great was Croesus’s shock when he found the Persian army at the gates of his capital the next week. 

Cyrus had correctly guessed his enemy’s intention of dispersing his forces for the winter, and so instead of withdrawing himself, he had stealthily stalked Croesus across Lydia, moving so quickly that no word of his advance could reach the king before Cyrus himself arrived. 

Croesus desperately gathered his allies, but most of his armies were gone. Nevertheless, he rode out to meet Cyrus, depending on the famous Lydian cavalry to defeat the invader. The Persian king, however, had placed men mounted on dromedary camels before his wings, and his infantry were both more numerous and better-armed than their Lydian opponents. The Lydian horse, when it caught the scent of the strange beasts, panicked and abandoned the field. The Persian infantry met the Lydian center in a tumultuous charge, and after a brief battle, the Lydians fled into their capital of Sardis. The Persians pursued, and after a brief siege stormed the city and captured Croesus.

The Persian Empire had arrived on the Aegean. 

Cyrus spent some months in the west, ordering his new dominions, which now stretched from the Zagros to the Aegean. While he was there, he received a strange embassy.

A group of men wearing scarlet cloaks and carrying enormous shields and armor approached him. The men claimed that they had been among the allies summoned by Croesus when he had returned to Sardis that winter, but had arrived to find the war already over. They warned the Great King that, while he could do as he wished with the conquered Lydians, if he did harm to the Greek city-states there, or harmed their ally, Croesus, he would have to answer to the Spartans. 

Cyrus responded with a contemptuous snort. “Who are the Spartans?” he asked, and thought no more of it.

The career of Cyrus, by now called Cyrus the Great, although already more glorious than any of his predecessors, had only just begun. He rode back to Persia, and soon was at war with Babylon and her empire. By 539, he had captured the greatest city in the world, and added her dominions to his empire. With all the west of Asia conquered, the Great King crossed the Zagros and entered the mountains of Iran. There, for the remainder of his life, he battled and warred against the strange people and the exotic nomads he found there, pushing his border almost to the Indus river. At last, in 530, Cyrus the Great, by now a man of advanced age, led his troops into battle against the barbarians of Central Asia. There, in a fierce battle, the fiercest of his career and of the ancient world up to that point, the old king, leading from the front as he always had, was killed, along with a great many of his men. 

Cyrus was the greatest statesman who had ever lived to this point. In war, he was unmatched, conquering everything he laid his eyes upon. In victory, he was gracious. In defeat...he was not defeated. His empire was the most well-organized yet seen in history. It incorporated a thousand different peoples beneath its banner, and stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, and from the Caucasus to the Sinai peninsula, the largest the world had ever known. Cyrus had found his people a poor tribe of slaves and had left them masters of the world.