The death of Ashurbanipal coincided also with the end of direct Assyrian rule over Babylon. After the death of a rebellious brother and viceroy in 648, the Great King himself assumed the Babylonian crown and ruled the sacred city under a Babylonian name. But there had long been Chaldaean principalities in existence, very imperfectly incorporated in the Assyrian Empire, and these, inspiring revolts from time to time, had already succeeded in placing more than one dynast on the throne of Babylon. As soon as "Sardanapal" was no more and the Scythians began to overrun Assyria, one of these principalities (it is not known which) came to the front and secured the southern crown for its prince Nabu-aplu-utsur, or, as the Greeks wrote the name, Nabopolassar. This Chaldaean hastened to strengthen himself by marrying his son, Nebuchadnezzar, to a Median princess, and threw off the last pretence of submission to Assyrian suzerainty. He had made himself master of southern Mesopotamia and the Euphrates Valley trade-route by the year 609.
At the opening of the last decade of the century, therefore, we have this state of things. Scythians and Medes are holding most of eastern and central Assyria; Chaldaeans hold south Mesopotamia; while Syria, isolated from the old centre of empire, is anyone's to take and keep. A claimant appears immediately in the person of the Egyptian Necho, sprung from the loins of that Psammetichus who had won the Nile country back from Assyria. Pharaoh entered Syria probably in 609, broke easily through the barrier which Josiah of Jerusalem, greatly daring in this day of Assyrian weakness, threw across his path at Megiddo, went on to the north and proceeded to deal as he willed with the west of the Assyrian empire for four or five years. The destiny of Nineveh was all but fulfilled. With almost everything lost outside her walls, she held out against the Scythian assaults till 606, and then fell to the Mede Uvakhshatra, known to the Greeks as Kyaxares. The fallen capital of West Asia was devastated by the conquerors to such effect that it never recovered, and its life passed away for ever across the Tigris, to the site on which Mosul stands at the present day.