_Rise of the Babylonian empire.—Media.—Pharaoh-Necho.—The battle of Carchemish.—Nebuchadrezzar ascends the throne.—The splendour of Babylon.—No monuments yet discovered recording Nebuchadrezzar’s Jewish and Syrian campaigns.—Evil-Merodach.—Clay documents recently discovered in Babylonia.—New light thrown on the empire of Cyrus.—The cylinder of Cyrus.—Cyrus not a monotheist.—The Babylonian King of Isaiah xiv.—Cyrus not a King of Persia at all.—Babylon not besieged by Cyrus.—How Cyrus came to let the Jews return.—Correspondence between the language of Cyrus and of Scripture.—__“__The god who raises the dead to life.__”__—Prayer after a bad dream.—Babylonian penitential psalms.—A translation of one of them.—Chronological table of the events of the chapter._ The empire of Babylonia arose out of the ashes of the empire of Assyria. While the bands of the enemy were gathering round the doomed city of Nineveh, Nabopolassar, the viceroy of Babylonia, seized the opportunity for revolt. There were no armies now, as in former days, that could pour out of the gates of the Assyrian capital to punish the rebel, and Nabopolassar was allowed to establish his new monarchy undisturbed. But the fall of the imperial city left the other provinces of the Assyrian empire without a master or a defence. Its latest conquest, Elam, seems to have recovered its independence for a short time—at all events, Jeremiah (xxv. 25) in the year 606 B.C. speaks of “the kings of Elam”—but elsewhere its possessions became the battle-ground of the three rival powers of Babylon, of Media, and of Egypt. Media was the name given by Persian and Greek writers to the kingdom of Ekbatana, a city now represented by Hamadan. Its native name, at all events in the time of Sargon, was Ellip, and the title of Media applied to it in later history seems to have been due to a confusion between the Assyrian words _Madâ_ “Medes,” and _Manda_, “barbarian.” As we shall see, Astyages, the king of Ekbatana, is called “the king of the people of _Manda_,” or “barbarians,” by the Babylonian king Nabonidos. The tablets which describe the approach of the last enemies of Nineveh draw a careful distinction between Kaztarit, or Kyaxares, “lord of the city of Car-Cassi,” and Mamiti-arsu, “lord of the city of the Medes.” For the Assyrians, the Medes were only the small tribes which inhabited the regions eastward of Kurdistan. The error, however, which turned the kingdom of Ekbatana into a kingdom of Media has fixed itself in literature, and the Old Testament also has adopted in regard to it the current language of the day. It is now too late to disturb the time-honoured title, and we shall therefore continue to speak of a Median empire and a Median kingdom, even though we now know that the terms rest on an ancient mistake.