The power of Assyria was very great, and the Jews may well have thought that they would find safety under her protection. Yet within less than a hundred years, Assyria, as a great power, had ceased to exist, and Judæa had once more to suffer for her alliance with the beaten side. Sennacherib's victory over the Egyptians was in 701 B.C., and his son Ezar-haddon invaded and occupied Egypt and held it for some ten years. But Assyria soon began to be pressed by a wild and war-like people, the Scythians, coming from the north. Then the Babylonians, allying themselves with the Medes, a nation whose country lay on the north-west of Babylonia, attacked Assyria from the south, and while all this confusion and fighting was going on in the east, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt thought the moment good for trying to get back the old Egyptian provinces of Palestine and Syria. By the year 608 B.C. the Babylonians were besieging Nineveh, the great capital city of the Assyrians, and Necho was marching up into Palestine. Syria and Palestine, still faithful to the eastern empire, opposed him, but were utterly defeated in a battle at Megiddo. Once more Judah suffered by being on the losing side. In 607, a year later, Nineveh was taken and its fortifications razed to the ground by the victorious Babylonians. The mighty Assyrian empire was no more. {104} The explanation of this rapid fall of a people that had been so powerful seems to be that it was a power that depended entirely on its army, that the whole nation was occupied in war, and that there were no reserves, no population from which the armies could be recruited and made strong again, when once those already in the field began to be shaken. It was, as we should say, entirely a military state. To the peoples of Syria and Palestine we may suppose that it made little difference whether Assyrians or Babylonians were the great power in the east. However that may have been, they were still, like the horseshoe that a blacksmith is making, "between the hammer and the anvil." It was now, as it had been a thousand or more years before, between the hammer of Babylon and the anvil of Egypt that they lay. Nor, as we may suppose, did this change of power in the east appear to make the position of Egypt very different. The Egyptian king may well have thought that it gave him the better opportunity for extending his own authority eastward and northward. We have seen how, in former years, Thothmes, and again Thothmes III., advanced victoriously as far as Carchemish, on the Euphrates. Each set up a column there as a monument to his victories. But neither got much farther. And now again, in this later time, the Egyptian king pressed up victoriously, and again the Babylonians met him and gave him battle, at the very same point--Carehemish.