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in the earliest ages, are not, as they are generally supposed to be, 

 wholly imaginary. As the Median kings extended their power over 

 the southern and eastern provinces, adjoining their hereditary domain, 

 they seem to have excited alternately the envy and assaults of the 

 Assyrians and Tartars, between whom they were situated ; for, we 

 have seen, at page 220 and those succeeding, that both the Assyrian 

 Ninus and the Scythian Oghuz subjugated them to their control. 

 Indeed, so fatal to that power proved the assaults of these formidable 

 nations, that it was not till the entire subversion of the Assyrian 

 monarchs, that the Median empire again reared its head under 

 Dejoces, generally, but improperly, considered as its first monarch ; 

 nor till Cyaxares, by a bold and successful manoeuvre, had expelled 

 from his oppressed country the Tartar hordes, which had inundated 

 the Southern Asia, that Media reached the height of its glory as an 

 empire. Now there is a train of indisputable evidence to prove 

 not only that Cyaxares was the Cai-Cobad of the Persians, but that 

 the chief and the Scythians thus expelled were this very Afrasiab 

 concerning whom so much has previously occurred, and those very 

 Turanians, or Oriental Tartars, his subjects, who have been in this as well 

 as in many other instances, confounded with the northern Scythians. 

 It is remarkable that Cai-Khosru is represented by the Asiatic writers 

 to have been the grandson of Cai-Cobad, in the very same manner as 

 Cyrus is stated by the Greek historians to have been the grandson of 

 Cyaxares. It does not appear, however, from Oriental writers, that 

 this expulsion of the invading Tartars took place, in the manner de- 

 scribed by the Greeks, after a banquet to which their chiefs had 

 been invited and massacred by Cyaxares, but that they were com- 

 pelled, by a vigorous and united exertion of the invaded nation, to 

 repass the Oxus*. The subsequent conquest of Assyria, and destruc- 



Short Hist, of Persia, p. 47. 



