Her _prestige_ was gone, her armed force must have been greatly diminished, her hold upon the provinces, especially the more distant ones, greatly weakened.

Phoenicia is likely to have detached herself from Assyria at latest during the time that the Scyths were dominant, which was probably from about B.C.630 to B.C.610.

When Assyrian protection was withdrawn from Syria, as it must have been during this period, and when every state and town had to look solely to itself for deliverance from a barbarous and cruel enemy, the fiction of a nominal dependence on a distant power could scarcely be maintained.

Without any actual revolt, the Phoenician cities became their own masters, and the speedy fall of Assyria before the combined attack of the Medes and Babylonians,[14191] after the Scythians had withdrawn, prevented for some time any interference with their recovered independence.
A double danger, however, impended.

On the one side Egypt, on the other Babylon, might be confidently expected to lay claim to the debatable land which nature had placed between the seats of the great Asiatic and the great African power, and which in the past had almost always been possessed by the one or the other of them.