After severe struggles the princes and people of the Medes succeeded in casting down the Assyrian empire from the supremacy it had long maintained; they conquered and destroyed their old and supposed impregnable metropolis. If the tribes of the Medes had previously been forced to bow before the Assyrians, they took ample vengeance for the degradation. Hence the Median minstrels had a most excellent reason to celebrate this crowning achievement of their nation; it afforded them a most agreeable subject. If, in the earlier and later struggles of the Medes against Assyria, the bravery of individual heroes was often celebrated in song, these songs might by degrees coalesce into a connected whole, the close of which was the overthrow of the Assyrian empire. The Median poems which dealt with this most attractive material must have commenced with the rise of the Assyrian kingdom; they had the more reason for explaining and suggesting motives for this mighty movement, as it was incumbent on them to make intelligible the wreck of the resistance of their own nation to the onset of the Assyrians, and the previous subjection of Media. In these poems no doubt they described the cruelty of the conqueror, who crucified their king, with his wife and seven children (p. 3). The more brilliant, the more overpowering the might of Assyria, as they described it, owing to eminent sovereigns in the earliest times, the wider the extent of the empire, the more easily explained and tolerable became the subjection of the Medes, the greater the glory to have finally conquered. This final retribution formed the close; the striking contrast of the former exaltation and subsequent utter overthrow, brought about by Median power and bravery, formed the centre of these poems. The prince of the Assyrians whose success is unfailing till he finds himself checked in Bactria, the woman of unknown origin found in the desert, fostered by herdsmen, and raised from the lowest to the most elevated position,[22] who in bravery surpasses the bravest, who outdoes the deeds of Ninus, whose charms allure to destruction every one who approaches her, who makes all whom she favours her slaves in order to slay them, who without regard to her years makes every youth her lover, and is, nevertheless, finally exalted to the gods--are these forms due to the mere imagination of Medo-Persian minstrels, or what material lay at the base of these lively pictures?