    10

    abili

    ty to overwhelm peaceful towns by surprise attack, coming down

    "like a wolf on the fold."11  What's worse, not long ago the Assyrians

    had reduced the Babylonians to a secondary power.  Babylon's

    politicians did  not want to see that fate occur again.

    As for the Median threat, the Babylonian queen Nitocris was so

    concerned that she underwrote a strategic defense initiative on the

    scale of Star Wars.  She literally had a new course dug for the

    Euphrates River, forcing the water to loop around in a confusing tangle

    that would presumably keep the Medes from mounting a surprise

    naval attack against her capital.  In addition, she fortified the river's

    edge with huge embankments, and--to slow the Euphrates'

    current--dug a lake some 47 miles in circumference, reinforcing the

    margins with stone.12

    With evil empires like those of the Medes and Assyrians

    threatening them, who needed to worry about rabble from the hills?

    But the rabble from the hills did, indeed, turn out to be the

    Babylonians' major problem.  A tribe from the rocky Zagros Mountains

    of southwestern Iran decided it would like to rule the lush valleys

    where cities flourished and the wealthy wore fine apparel.  That tribe

    was the Persians.

    The Persians were unlettered and uncouth.  But they loved a

    good  fight.13  It wasn't long before this mob no one had ever heard of

    overwhelmed the Assyrians and the Medes--Babylon's two rival

    superpowers.14  Then the Persians turned on the isolated Babylonians.

    You can imagine who won.15

    The irony came a few decades later.  By now, the victorious

    Persian rulers had turned from barbarians to urbane city dwellers.

    True, they still traveled up into the hills to eat and drink with the old

    folks for a few weeks.16  But then they went back to their estates, their

    servants, their armies of bureaucrats, and their imported luxuries.  One

    by one they took over the superpowers of the day, finally subduing

    Egypt in 525 BC.17  The Persian superorganism was now the master of

    the international pecking order.

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