Necho also pursued the policy of his Father in attempting to recover for the Double Crown of the then reunited Upper and Lower Egypt, the Asiatic dependencies, of which the Assyrians had despoiled it. For nine and twenty years had Psammetichus been barred in the first step of this enterprise by the obstinate resistance of Ashdod, which had thus sustained, as Herodotus observes, the longest siege then known to History. At last, however, it had succumbed; and being now, again, in the hands of the Egyptians, the old line of march into, and through, Syria was open, and Necho set out for the re-conquest of the old provinces. He could not deem that his Egypt was the Egypt of Tuthmosis and Rameses, unless what they had held along the maritime plain of Syria, and back to Carchemish on the Euphrates, and which had been—more or less completely—in subjection to Egypt during the intervening nine centuries, with the exception of the short period of Assyrian supremacy, had been recovered. As might have been expected, he could not see that, though Nineveh had fallen, its power had only been transferred to Babylon; and that behind Babylon was being organized the Empire of the still more energetic Persians, which was soon to overshadow all that part of the world. It was, in truth, only wasting his resources to retake Carchemish: he should have attacked Babylon itself. Nothing was gained if its power was not destroyed. But, however, as he advanced along the maritime plain, with which the Egyptians had been familiar from time out of mind, Josiah, we know, attempted to stop him at Megiddo, where he was defeated and slain. The Hebrew Prophets of these times saw as clearly, as we do now, that the course of events had transferred the constituents of power from the Nile to the Euphrates; and so they became the uncompromising instigators of this anti-Egyptian policy. Of course it would have been wise in Josiah to have remained quiet: his best policy would have been that of “masterly inactivity.” Necho, however, as it happened, having easily crushed him, did not allow himself to be diverted from his main object by the tempting facility thus offered to him for at once taking possession of the Kingdom of Judah, but continued, as rapidly as he could, his advance to the Euphrates. Having reached Carchemish, and provided sufficiently, as he thought, for the permanent re-occupation of all that had thereabouts “pertained to Egypt,” he returned home; and, by the way, settled, without any resistance having been offered to him, the conditions of the subjection of the Kingdom of Judah. At this juncture Egypt must have deemed that all was recovered, and that everything was again, and would continue to be, as of old. Isaiah, however, and Jeremiah, and the other Prophets of the time were right; for the Babylonians were not long in expelling the Egyptians from Asia.