How far the Lydian kingdom of Sardis extended during the reign of Gygês, we have no means of ascertaining. Strabo alleges that the whole Troad[430] belonged to him, and that the Greek settlement of Abydus on the Hellespont was established by the Milesians only under his auspices. On what authority this statement is made, we are not told, and it appears doubtful, especially as so many legendary anecdotes are connected with the name of Gygês. This prince reigned (according to Herodotus) thirty-eight years, and was succeeded by his son Ardys, who reigned forty-nine years (about B. C. 678-629). We learn that he attacked the Milesians, and took the Ionic city of Priênê, but this possession cannot have been maintained, for the city appears afterwards as autonomous.[431] His long reign, however, was signalized by two events, both of considerable moment to the Asiatic Greeks; the invasion of the Cimmerians,—and the first approach to collision, at least the first of which we have any historical knowledge, between the inhabitants of Lydia and those of Upper Asia under the Median kings. [430] Strabo, xiii, p. 590. [431] Herodot. i, 15. It is affirmed by all authors that the Medes were originally numbered among the subjects of the great Assyrian empire, of which Nineveh—or Ninos, as the Greeks call it—was the chief town, and Babylon one of the principal portions. That the population and power of these two great cities, as well as of several others which the Ten Thousand Greeks in their march found ruined and deserted in those same regions, is of high antiquity,[432] there is no room for doubting; but it is noway incumbent upon a historian of Greece to entangle himself in the mazes of Assyrian chronology, or to weigh the degree of credit to which the conflicting statements of Herodotus, Ktêsias, Berosus, Abydênus, etc. are entitled. With the Assyrian empire,[433]—which lasted, according to Herodotus, five hundred and twenty years, according to Ktêsias, thirteen hundred and sixty years,—the Greeks have no ascertainable connection: the city of Nineveh appears to have been taken by the Medes a little before the year 600 B. C. (in so far as the chronology can be made out), and exercised no influence upon Grecian affairs. Those inhabitants of Upper Asia, with whom the early Greeks had relation, were the Medes, and the Assyrians or Chaldæans of Babylon,—both originally subject to the Assyrians of Nineveh,—both afterwards acquiring independence,—and both ultimately embodied in the Persian empire. At what time either of them became first independent, we do not know:[434] the astronomical canon which gives a list of kings of Babylon, beginning with what is called the era of Nabonassar, or 747 B. C., does not prove at what epoch these Babylonian chiefs became independent of Nineveh: and the catalogue of Median kings, which Herodotus begins with Dêïokês, about 709-711 B. C., is commenced by Ktêsias more than