The invasion of Upper Asia by the Scythians appears to have been nearly simultaneous with that of Asia Minor by the Cimmerians, but more ruinous and longer protracted. The Median king Kyaxarês, called away from the siege of Nineveh to oppose them, was totally defeated; and the Scythians became full masters of the country. They spread themselves over the whole of Upper Asia, as far as Palestine and the borders of Egypt, where Psammetichus the Egyptian king met them, and only redeemed his kingdom from invasion by prayers and costly presents. In their return, a detachment of them sacked the temple of Aphroditê at Askalon; an act of sacrilege which the goddess avenged both upon the plunderers and their descendants, to the third and fourth generation. Twenty-eight years did their dominion in Upper Asia continue,[485] with intolerable cruelty and oppression; until, at length, Kyaxarês and the Medes found means to entrap the chiefs into a banquet, and slew them in the hour of intoxication. The Scythian host once expelled, the Medes resumed their empire. Herodotus tells us that these Scythians returned to the Tauric Chersonese, where they found that, during their long absence, their wives had intermarried with the slaves, while the new offspring which had grown up refused to readmit them. A deep trench had been drawn across a line[486] over which their march lay, and the new-grown youth defended it with bravery, until at length,—so the story runs,—the returning masters took up their whips instead of arms, and scourged the rebellious slaves into submission. [485] Herodot. i, 105. The account given by Herodotus of the punishment inflicted by the offended Aphroditê on the Scythian plunderers, and on their children’s children down to his time, becomes especially interesting when we combine it with the statement of Hippokratês respecting the peculiar incapacities which were so apt to affect the Scythians, and the religious interpretation put upon them by the sufferers (De Aëre, Locis, et Aquis, c. vi, s. 106-109). [486] See, in reference to the direction of this ditch, Völcker, in the work above referred to on the Scythia of Herodotus (Mythische Geographie, ch. vii, p. 177). That the ditch existed, there can be no reasonable doubt; though the tale given by Herodotus is highly improbable. Little as we know about the particulars of these Cimmerian and Scythian inroads, they deserve notice as the first—at least the first historically known—among the numerous invasions of cultivated Asia and Europe by the nomads of Tartary. Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Turks, Mongols, Tartars, etc., are found in subsequent centuries repeating the same infliction, and establishing a dominion both more durable, and not less destructive, than the transient scourge of the Scythians during the reign of Kyaxarês.