Persia from the Earliest Period to the Arab

HISTORY OF PERSIA. 31
the kings of Assyria, rather than a sustained and
continuous campaign of many years' duration.
At all events, when Cyrus died his empire was the
most extensive that had yet existed in the East. He
had succeeded to the heritage of the great powers
which had previously ruled over Western Asia, Assyria,
and Babylonia, and though Egypt still remained to be
conquered, he had reduced under his sway countries
which had been independent of the most powerful
Assyrian and Babylonian kings. Not only was Asia
Minor in the west subject to him, but he had subdued
tribes and districts in the distant north and east, many
of which had hardly been known even by name to his
predecessors.
Of the rest of the life of Cyrus, we have no satisfac-
tory account; but it is probable
that he fell in a
war with some of the tribes to the north-east of Asia,
a conflict on the origin of which it is easy enough to
speculate, as the wild tribes of that part of Asia, like
other nomads, are almost always in a state of partial
insurrection. Certain, however,
it is, that he died
B.C. 529, after a reign of twenty-nine years, while his
remarkable tomb at Pasargadae, affords some evidence
that his body was recovered and carried back to
the centre of his kingdom or faith. Professor
Rawlinson, justly remarks that "the character of
Cyrus as represented to us by the Greeks, is the
most favourable that we possess of any early Oriental
monarch."
On the death of Cyrus, a conqueror rather than an
administrator, his vast domains, mainly
descended to
his eldest son Cambyses, but Cyrus, at the same time,
arranged that his second son, Bardes, or,
as he is called