115 



tlieir country, and the kings going by their side, shall not 

 exist/ In the third year (after the vision) he caused Cyrus, 

 king of Anzan, his young servant, to go with his little army ; 

 he overthrew the wide-spreading Sabmanda. He captured 

 Istuvegu (Astyages), king of Sabmanda, and took his treasures 

 to his own land/'* The vision occurs to Nabonidus early in 

 his reign, in B.C. 556-5, and three years after, in B.C. 550, 

 as we know from the chronicle I have previously quoted, 

 Astyages was overthrown by Cyrus. This passage is full of 

 important comment on the prophecies of Jeremiah quoted 

 above. It is evident that early in the reign of Nabonidus 

 Babylonia was threatened by a confederation of north-eastern 

 tribes, headed by the Medes under Astyages, 



The capita] of the Medes was the city of Agamtanu, 



Ty \^ K^^ I *^ A-gam-ta-nu, the Ecbatana of Greek writers, 



and the t«^r\OniSI of the Hebrews, the site of which, as Sir 



Henry Rawlinson has shown, is to be identified with Hamadan. 

 North-east of the Medes, on the south-west shore of Lake 



Urumiyeh, were the ^^ ^^^f Ty Tt^ Man-na-ai, or Mini ; and 



north of the Medes was the old Yannic kingdom, the 



-:;< ^yyy^ ^^yy <;y-^yy<y j^, Mat U-ra-ar-dU, or Ararat of 



the Assyrian inscriptions, but called in the Armenian or 

 Vannic inscriptions Bianajf the modern Van. The Ash- 



chenaz, Hebrew, T!35UJi^, of Jeremiah is probably, as Professor 



Sayce has suggested, a mis-reading for tl^ti^t^, which maybe 

 the Asguza one of the Median kingdoms mentioned by 

 Esarhaddon (W. A. I., I. 45, ii. 30). The whole of these 

 regions were sometimes embraced by the Assyrian and 

 Babylonian geographers under the general name of the 



V ^i^ ^y< S=^ Mat. GiL-ti-i, or ■JVi^ ^y< Jr^yy Gu-ti-um, 



which must, as Sir Henry Rawlinson first pointed out, be the 

 L^^'\^, or Goyyim of the Hebrews (Genesis xiv.), and the general 

 terms used in the above passages fi'om Jeremiah for the nations. 

 These tribes were called the " Sahmanda, or Barbarians, and 

 the kings going by their side,'' by the Assyrian scribe, — a 

 phrase which very closely resembles the words of the Hebrew 

 prophet. 



* I am unable to give the text of this important extract, but hope to treat 

 of this cylinder in a future paper. 



t For a clear exposition of the geography of these regions, see Professor 

 Sayce's paper on " Vannic Inscriptions," in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic 

 Society. 



