This extended horizon makes clear to us what our prophet has in his view, when in this forty-first chapter he summons _Isles_ to the bar of Jehovah: _Be silent before me, O Isles, and let Peoples renew their strength_,--a vision and appeal which frequently recur in our prophecy. _Listen, O Isles, and hearken, O Peoples from afar_ (xlix. 1); _Isles shall wait for His law_ (xlii. 4); _Let them give glory to Jehovah, and publish His praise in the Isles_ (xlii. 12); _Unto me Isles shall hope_ (li. 5); _Surely Isles shall wait for me, ships of Tarshish first_.[52] The name is generally taken by scholars--according to the derivation in the note below--to have originally meant _habitable land_, and so _land_ as opposed to water. In some passages of the Old Testament it is undoubtedly used to describe a land either washed, or surrounded, by the sea.[53]
But by our prophet's use of the word it is not necessarily _maritime provinces_ that are meant. He makes _isles_ parallel to the well-known terms _nations_, _peoples_, _Gentiles_, and in one passage he opposes it, as dry soil, to water.[54] Hence many translators take it in its original sense of _countries_ or _lands_. This bare rendering, however, does not do justice to the sense of _remoteness_, which the prophet generally attaches to the word, nor to his occasional association of it with visions of the sea. Indeed, as one reads most of his uses of it, one is quite sure that the island-meaning of the word lingers on in his imagination; and that the feeling possesses him, which has haunted the poetry of all ages, to describe as _coasts_ or _isles_ any land or lighting-place of thought which is far and dim and vague; which floats across the horizon, or emerges from the distance, as strips and promontories of land rise from the sea to him who has reached some new point of view. I have therefore decided to keep the rendering familiar to the English reader, _isles_, though, perhaps, _coasts_ would be better. If, as is probable, our prophet's thoughts are always towards the new lands of the west as he uses the word, it is doubly suitable; those countries were both maritime and remote; they rose both from the distance and from the sea.
"The sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea And laugh their pride, where the light wave lisps, 'Greece.'"
But if Babylonia lay thus open to Lydia, and through Lydia to the _isles_ and _coasts_ of Greece, it was different with her northern frontier. What strikes us here is the immense series of fortifications, which Nebuchadrezzar, in spite of his alliance with Astyages, cast up between his country and Media. Where the Tigris and Euphrates most nearly approach one another, about seventy miles to the north of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar connected their waters by four canals, above which he built a strong bulwark, called by the Greeks the Median wall. This may have been over sixty miles long; Xenophon tells us it was twenty feet broad by one hundred high.[55] At Sippara this line of defence was completed by the creation of a great bason of water to flood the rivers and canals on the approach of an enemy, and of a large fortress to protect the bason. Alas for the vanity of human purposes! It is said to have been this very bason which caused the easy fall of Babylon. By turning the Euphrates into it, the enemy entered the capital through the emptied river-bed.
The triple alliance--Lydia, Media, Babylonia--stood firm after its founders passed away. In 555, Crœsus and Astyages, who had succeeded their fathers at Sardis and Ecbatana respectively, and Nabunahid, who had usurped the throne at Babylon, were still at peace, and contented with the partition of 585. But outside them and to the east, in a narrow nook of land at the head of the Persian Gulf, the man was already crowned, who was destined to bring Western Asia again under one sceptre. This was Kurush or Cyrus II. of Anzan, but known to history as Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Persian. Cyrus was a prince of the Akhæmenian house of Persia, and therefore, like the Mede, an Aryan, but independent of his Persian cousins, and ruling in his own right the little kingdom of Anzan or Anshan, which, with its capital of Susan, lay on the rivers Choaspes and Eulæus, between the head of the Persian Gulf and the Zagros Mountains.[56]