In the 7th century BC, Nomadic mountain tribes of brutal warriors, later called the Cimmerians (inspiration for Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian), were descending into Mesopotamia. King Ashurbanipal of Assyria happily watched them attack Lydia, to his west. The Lydian king, Gyges, had assisted Egypt in its resistance to Assyrian imperialism, and Ashurbanipal held a grudge.

Led by their barbarian king, Dugdamme, the Cimmerians killed King Gyges and sacked the Lydian capital of Sardis.

Susan Wise Bauer writes:

Ashurbanipal was willing to let the Cimmerians teach another nation a lesson, but he didn’t want them on his own land.

He began to organize an expedition north, but was terrified by an eclipse which his court priests interpreted as a very bad omen indeed: “There will be an attack on your land,” they told their king, “and the land will be destroyed.”[29] Fortunately for Ashurbanipal, not long after the sack of Sardis, Dugdamme grew sick with a revolting disease that combined the vomiting of blood and gangrene of the testicles.[30] The illness carried him off, and a relieved Ashurbanipal was able to abandon his expedition north.”

(The History of the Ancient World, p. 408f)

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[29] Olmstead, History of Assyria, p. 423.

[30] Phillips, “The Scythian Domination in Western Asia,” p. 132.