Herodotus expressly calls the dominion of Deioces a tyranny. It is a fact beyond dispute that Herodotus was influenced by such conceptions in shaping and forming the material which came to him from tradition. Apart from the motives which influenced him in describing the elevation of Deioces, Herodotus wishes to show how the nations of Asia obtained their freedom, and subsequently lost it. He begins with the statement, that the Medes revolted from Assyria, and all the nations of Asia followed their example. According to his dates, which have been already mentioned, the Medes must have revolted precisely at the time when Tiglath Pilesar II. and Sargon reigned over Assyria, _i.e._ in the period between 745 and 705 B.C. The liberation of the remaining nations must therefore have taken place under Sargon or his successors, Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, _i.e._ between the year 705 and 668 B.C. That this general liberation from the sovereignty of the Assyrians did not take place at this period is abundantly clear from the inscriptions of the kings and the Hebrew Scriptures. We have seen above to what an extent Tiglath Pilesar caused the whole of Syria to feel the weight of the Assyrian arms; he reduced Babylonia to dependence as far as the Persian Gulf; Sargon was sovereign of Babylonia, maintained Syria, and received the homage of the island of Cyprus, and the islands of the Persian Gulf. His successor, Sennacherib, though unable to protect Syria against Egypt, yet retained Babylonia and the eastern half of Asia Minor under his dominion. Esarhaddon united the crowns of Asshur and Babel, restored the supremacy of Assyria over Syria, subjugated a part of Arabia and the whole of Egypt.[468] Hence it is clear, that precisely at the time when, according to Herodotus, the rest of the nations following the example of the Medes threw off the Assyrian yoke, that kingdom reached a wider extent than at any previous time. If, nevertheless, we wish to maintain the statement that the rest of the nations followed the example which the Medes are supposed to have set about the year 736 B.C.,[469] we must place these events in the last decade of the reign of Assurbanipal, _i.e._ in the period between 636 and 626 B.C. We must therefore bring them down a full century, and this was a very late result of the action of the Medes.