Chapter IX: Chronology and History (5)

It is probable in that in the year B.C. 699 Sennacherib conducted his second expedition into Palestine. Hezekiah, after his enforced submission two years earlier, had entered into negotiations with the Egyptians, and looking to receive important succors from this quarter, had again thrown off his allegiance. Sennacherib, understanding that the real enemy whom he had to fear on his south-western frontier was not Judaea, but Egypt, marched his army through Palestine--probably by the coast route--and without stopping to chastise Jerusalem, pressed southwards to Libnah and Lachish, which were at the extreme verge of the Holy Land, and were probably at this tune subject to Egypt. He first commenced the siege of Lachish with all his power; and while engaged in this operation, finding that Hezekiah was not alarmed by his proximity, and did not send in his submission, he detached a body of troops from Ins main force, and sent it under a Tartan or general, supported by two high officers of the court--the Rabshakeh or Chief Cupbearer, and the Rob-saris or Chief Eunuch--to summon the rebellious city to surrender. Hezekiah was willing to treat, and sent out to the Assyrian camp, which was pitched just outside the walls, three high officials of his own to open negotiations. But the Assyrian envoys had not cone to debate or even to offer terms, but to require the unconditional submission of both king and people. The Rabshakeh or cupbearer, who was familiar with the Hebrew language, took the word and delivered his message in insulting phrase, laughing at the simplicity which could trust in Egypt, and the superstitious folly which could expect a divine deliverance, and defying Hezekiah to produce so many as two thousand trained soldiers capable of serving as cavalry. When requested to use a foreign rather than the native dialect, lest the people who were upon the walls should hear, the bold envoy, with an entire disregard of diplomatic forms, raised his voice and made a direct appeal to the popular fears and hopes thinking to produce a tumultuary surrender of the place, or at least an outbreak of which his troops might have taken advantage. His expectations, however, were disappointed; the people made no response to his appeal, but listened in profound silence; and the ambassadors, finding that they could obtain nothing from the fears of either king or people, and regarding the force that they had brought with them as insufficient for a siege, returned to their master with the intelligence of their ill-success. The Assyrian monarch had either taken Lachish or raised its siege, and was gone on to Libnah, where the envoys found him. On receiving their report, he determined to make still another effort to overcome Hezckiah’s obstinacy and accordingly he despatched fresh messengers with a letter to the Jewish king, in which he was reminded of the fate of various other kingdoms and peoples which had resisted the Assyrians, and once more urged to submit himself. It was this letter perhaps a royal autograph--which Hezekiah took into the temple and there “spread it before the Lord,” praying God to “bow down his ear and hear; to open his eyes and see, and hear the words of Sennacherib, which had sent to reproach the living God.” Upon this Isaiah was commissioned to declare to his afflicted sovereign that the kings of Assyria were mere instruments in God’s hands to destroy such, nations as He pleased, and that none of Sennacherib’s threats against Jerusalem should be accomplished. God, Isaiah told him would “put his hook in Sennacherib’s nose, and his bridle in his lips, and turn him back by the way by which he came.” The Lord had said, concerning the king of Assyria, “He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city. For I will defend this city, to save it, for my own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”

Meanwhile it is probable that Sennacherib, having received the submission of Libnah, had advanced upon Egypt. It was important to crush an Egyptian army which had been collected against him by a certain Sethos, one of the many native princes who at this time ruled in the Lower country before the great Ethiopian monarch Tehrak or Tirhakah, who was known to be on his march, should effect a junction with the troops of this minor potentate. Sethos, with his army, was at Pelusium; and Sennacherib, advancing to attack him, had arrived within sight of the Egyptian host, and pitched his camp over against the camp of the enemy, just at the time to when Hezekiah received his letter and made the prayer to which Isaiah was instructed to respond. The two hosts lay down at night in their respective stations, the Egyptians and their king full of anxious alarm, Sennacherib and his Assyrians proudly confident, intending on the morrow to advance to the combat and repeat the lesson taught at Raphia and Altaku. But no morrow was to break on the great mass of those who took their rest in the tents of the Assyrians. The divine fiat had gone forth. In the night, as they slept, destruction fell upon them. “The angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.” A miracle, like the destruction of the first-born, had been wrought, but this time on the enemies of the Egyptians, who naturally ascribed their deliverance to the interposition of their own gods; and seeing the enemy in confusion and retreat, pressed hastily after him, distressed his flying columns, and cut off his stragglers. The Assyrian king returned home to Nineveh, shorn of his glory, with the shattered remains of his great host, and cast that proud capital into a state of despair and grief, which the genius of an AEschylus might have rejoiced to depict, but which no less powerful pen could adequately portray.

It is difficult to say how soon Assyria recovered from this terrible blow. The annals of Sennacherib, as might have been expected, omit it altogether, and represent the Assyrian monarch as engaged in a continuous series of successful campaigns, which seem to extend uninterruptedly from his third to his tenth year. It is possible that while the Assyrian expedition was in progress, under the eye of Sennacherib himself, a successful war was being conducted by one of his generals in the mountains of Armenia, and that Sennacherib was thus enabled, without absolutely falsifying history, to parade as his own certain victories gained by this leader in the very year of his own reverse. It is even conceivable that the power of Assyria was not so injured by the loss of a single great army, as to make it necessary for her to stop even for one year in the course of her aggressive warfare; and thus the expeditions of Sennacherib may form an uninterrupted series, the eight campaigns which are assigned to him occupying eight consecutive years. But on the other hand it is quite as probable that there are gaps in the history, some years having been omitted altogether. The Taylor Cylinder records but eight campaigns, yet it was certainly written as late as Sennacherib’s fifteenth year. It contains no notice of any events in Sennacherib’s first or second year; and it may consequently make other omissions covering equal or larger intervals. Thus the destruction of the Assyrian army at Pelusium may have been followed by a pause of some years’ duration in the usual aggressive expeditions; and it may very probably have encouraged the Babylonians in the attempt to shake off the Assyrian yoke, which they certainly made towards the middle of Sennacherib’s reign.

But while it appears to be probable that consequences of some importance followed on the Pelusiac calamity, it is tolerably certain that no such tremendous results flowed from it as some writers have imagined. The murder of the disgraced Sennacherib “within fifty-five days” of his return to Nineveh, seems to be an invention of the Alexandrian Jew who wrote the Book of Tobit. The total destruction of the empire in consequence of the blow, is an exaggeration of Josephus, rashly credited by some moderns. Sennacherib did not die till B.C. 681, seventeen years after his misfortune; and the Empire suffered so little that we find Esar-haddon, a few years later, in full possession of all the territory that any king before him had over held, ruling from Babylonia to Egypt, or (as he himself expresses it) “from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the same.” Even Sennacherib himself was not prevented by his calamity from undertaking important wars during the latter part of his reign. We shall see shortly that he recovered Babylon, chastised Susiana, and invaded Cilicia, in the course of the seventeen years which intervened between his flight from Pelusium and his decease. Moreover, there is evidence that he employed himself during this part of his reign in the consolidation of the Western provinces, which first appear about his twelfth year as integral portions of the Empire, furnishing eponyms in their turn, and thus taking equal rank with the ancient provinces of Assyria Proper, Adiabene, and Mesopotamia.

The fifth campaign of Sennacherib, according to his own annals, was partly in a mountainous country which he calls Nipur or Nibur--probably the most northern portion of the Zagros range where it abuts on Ararat. He there took a number of small towns, after which he proceeded westward and contended with a certain Maniya king of Dayan, which was a part of Taurus bordering on Cilicia. He boasts that he penetrated further into this region than any king before him; and the boast is confirmed by the fact that the geographical names which appear are almost entirely new to us. The expedition was a plundering raid, not an attempt at conquest. Sennacherib ravaged the country, burnt the towns, and carried away with him all the valuables, the flocks and herds, and the inhabitants.

After this it appears that for at least three years he was engaged in a fierce struggle with the combined Babylonians and Susianians. The troubles recommenced by an attempt of the Chaldaeans of Beth-Yakin to withdraw themselves from the Assyrian territory, and to transfer their allegiance to the Elymaean king. Carrying with them their gods and their treasures, they embarked in their ships, and crossing “the Great Sea of the Rising Sun”--i.e., the Persian Gulf--landed on the Elamitic coast, where they were kindly received and allowed to take up their abode. Such voluntary removals are not uncommon in the East; and they constantly give rise to complaints and reclamations, which not unfrequently terminate in an appeal to the arbitrament of the sword. Sennacherib does not inform us whether he made any attempt to recover his lost subjects by diplomatic representations at the court of Susa. If he did, they were unsuccessful; and in order to obtain redress, he was compelled to resort to force, and to undertake an expedition into the Elamitie territory. It is remarkable that he determined to make his invasion by sea. Their frequent wars on the Syrian coasts had by this time familiarized the Assyrians with the idea, if not with the practice, of navigation; and as their suzerainty over Phoenicia placed at their disposal a large body of skilled shipwrights, and a number of the best sailors in the world, it was natural that they should resolve to employ naval as well as military force to advance their dominion. We have seen that, as early as the time of Shalmaneser, the Assyrians ventured themselves in ships, and, in conjunction with the Phoenicians of the mainland, engaged the vessels of the Island Tyre. It is probable that the precedent thus set was followed by later kings, and that both Sargon and Sennacherib had had the permanent, or occasional services of a fleet on the Mediterranean. But there was a wide difference between such an employment of the navies belonging to their subjects on the sea, to which they were accustomed, and the transfer to the opposite extremity of the empire of the naval strength hitherto confined to the Mediterranean. This thought--certainly not an obvious one--seems to have first occurred to Sennacherib. He conceived the idea of having a navy on both the seas that washed his dominions; and, possessing on his western coast only an adequate supply of skilled shipwrights and sailors he resolved on transporting from his western to his eastern shores such a body of Phoenicians as would enable him to accomplish his purpose. The shipwrights of Tyre and Sidon were carried across Mesopotamia to the Tigris, where they constructed for the Assyrian monarch a fleet of ships like their own galleys, which descended the river to its mouth, and astonished the populations bordering on the Persian Gulf with spectacle never before seen in those waters. Though the Chaldaeans had for centuries navigated this inland sea, and may have occasionally ventured beyond its limits, yet neither as sailors nor as ship-builders was their skill to compare with that of the Phoenicians. The masts and sails, the double tiers of oars, the sharp beaks of the Phoenician ships, were (it is probable) novelties to the nations of these parts, who saw now, for the first time, a fleet debouche from the Tigris, with which their own vessels were quite incapable of contending.

When his fleet was ready Sennacherib put to sea, and crossed in his Phoenician ships from the mouth of the Tigris to the tract occupied by the emigrant Chaldaeans, where he landed and destroyed the newly-built city, captured the inhabitants, ravaged the neighborhood, and burnt a number of Susianian towns, finally reembarking with his captives. Chaldaean and Susianian whom he transported across the gulf to the Chaldaean coast, and then took with him into Assyria. This whole expedition seems to have taken the Susianians by surprise. They had probably expected an invasion by land, and had collected their forces towards the north-western frontier, so that when the troops of Sennacherib landed far in their rear, there were no forces in the neighborhood to resist them. However, the departure of the Assyrians on an expedition regarded as extremely perilous, was the signal for a general revolt of the Babylonians, who once more set up a native king in the person of Susub, and collected an army with which they made ready to give the Assyrians battle on their return. Perhaps they cherished the hope that the fleet which had tempted the dangers of an unknown sea would be seen no more, or expected that, at the best, it would bring back the shattered remnants of a defeated army. If so, they were disappointed. The Assyrian troops landed on their coast flushed with success, and finding the Babylonians in revolt, proceeded to chastise them; defeated their forces in a great battle; captured their king, Susub; and when the Susianians came, somewhat tardily, to their succor, attacked and routed their army. A vast number of prisoners, and among them Susub himself, were carried off by the victors and conveyed to Nineveh.

Shortly after this successful campaign, possibly in the very next year, Sennacherib resolved to break the power of Susiana by a great expedition directed solely against that country. The Susianians had, as already related, been strong enough in the reign of Sargon to deprive Assyria of a portion of her territory; and Kudur-Nakhunta, the Elymaean king, still held two cities, Beth-Kahiri and Raza, which were regarded by Sennacherib as a part of his paternal inheritance. The first object of the war was the recovery of these two towns, which were taken without any difficulty and reattached to the Assyrian Empire. Sennacherib then pressed on into the heart of Susiana, taking and destroying thirty-four large cities, whose names he mentions, together with a still greater number of villages, all of which he gave to the flames. Wasting and destroying in this way he drew near to Vadakat or Badaca, the second city of the kingdom, where Kudur-Nakhunta had for the time fixed his residence. The Elamitic king, hearing of his rapid approach, took fright, and, hastily quitting Badaca, fled away to a city called Khidala, at the foot of the mountains, where alone he could feel himself in safety. Sennacherib then advanced to Badaca, besieged it, and took it by assault; after which affairs seem to have required his presence at Nineveh, and, leaving his conquest incomplete, he returned home with a large booty.

A third campaign in these parts, the most important of all, followed. Susub, the Chaldaean prince whom Sennacherib had carried off to Assyria, in the year of his naval expedition escaped from his confinement, and, returning to Babylon, was once more hailed as king by the inhabitants. Aware of his inability to maintain himself on the throne against the will of the Assyrians, unless he were assisted by the arms of a powerful ally, he resolved to obtain, if possible, the immediate aid of the neighboring Elamitic monarch. Kolar-Nakhunta, the late antagonist of Sennacherib, was dead, having survived his disgraceful flight from Badaca only three months; and Ummanminan, his younger brother, held the throne. Susub, bent on contracting an alliance with this prince, did not scruple at an act of sacrilege to obtain his end. He broke open the treasury of the great temple of Bel at Babylon, and seizing the gold and silver belonging to the god, sent it as a present to Ummanminan, with an urgent entreaty that he would instantly collect his troops and march to his aid. The Elamitic monarch, yielding to a request thus powerfully backed, and perhaps sufficiently wise to see that the interests of Susiana required an independent Babylon, set his troops in motion without any delay, and advanced to the banks of the Tigris. At the same time a number of the Aramaean tribes on the middle Euphrates, which Sennacherib had reduced in his third year, revolted, and sent their forces to swell the army of Susub. A great battle was fought at Khaluli, a town on the lower Tigris, between the troops of Sennacherib and this allied host; the combat was long and bloody, but at last the Assyrians conquered. Susub and his Elamitic ally took to flight and made their escape. Nebosumiskun, a son of Merodach-Baladan, and many other chiefs of high rank, were captured. The army was completely routed and broken up. Babylon submitted, and was severely punished; the fortifications were destroyed, the temples plundered and burnt, and the images of the gods broken to pieces. Perhaps the rebel city now received for viceroy Regibelus or Mesesimordachus, whom the Canon of Ptolemy, which is silent about Susub, makes contemporary with the middle portion of Sennacherib’s reign.

The only other expedition which can be assigned, on important evidence, to the reign of Sennacherib, is one against Cilicia, in which he is said to have been opposed by Greeks. According to Abydenus, a Greek fleet guarded the Cilician shore, which the vessels of Sennacherib engaged and defeated. Polyhistor seems to say that the Greeks also suffered a defeat by land in Cilicia itself, after which Sennacherib took possession of the country, and built Tarsus there on the model of Babylon. The prominence here given to Greeks by Greek writers is undoubtedly remarkable, and it throws a certain amount of suspicion over the whole story. Still, as the Greek element in Cyprus was certainly important at this time, and as the occupation of Cilicis, by the Assyrians may have appeared to the Cyprian Greeks to endanger their independence, it is conceivable that they lent some assistance to the natives of the country, who were a hardy race, fond of freedom, and never very easily brought into subjection. The admission af a double defeat makes it evident that the tale is not the invention of Greek national vanity. Abydenus and Polyhistor probably derive it from Berosus, who must also have made the statement that Tarsus was now founded by Sennacherib, and constructed, after the pattern of Babylon. The occupation of newly conquered countries, by the establishnient in them of large cities in which foreign colonists were placed by the conquerors, was practice commenced by Sargon, which his son is not unlikely to have followed. Tarsus was always regarded by the Greeks as an Assyrian town; and although they gave different accounts of the time of its foundation, their disagreement in this respect does not invalidate their evidence as to the main fact itself, which is intrinsically probable. The evidence of Polyhistor and Abydenus as to the date of the foundation, representing, as it must, the testimony of Berosus upon the point, is to be preferred; and we may accept it as a fact, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the native city of St. Paul derived, if not its origin, yet, at any rate, its later splendor and magnificence, from the antagonist of Hezekiah.

That this Cilician war occurred late in the reign of Sennacherib, appears to follow from the absence of any account of it from his general annals. These, it is probable, extend no further than his sixteenth year, B.C. 689, thus leaving blank his last eight years, from B.C. 689 to 681. The defeat of the Greeks, the occupation of Cilicia, and the founding of Tarsus, may well have fallen into this interval. To the same time may have belonged Sennacherib’s conquest of Edom.

There is reason to suspect that these successes of Sennacherib on the western limits of his empire were more than counterbalanced by a contemporaneous loss at the extreme south-east. The Canon of Ptolemy marks the year B.C. 688 as the first of an interregnum at Babylon which continues from that date till the accession of Esar-haddon in B.C. 680. Interregna in this document--[--Greek--] as they are termed--indicate periods of extreme disturbance, when pretender succeeded to pretender, or when the country was split up into a number of petty kingdoms. The Assyrian yoke, in either case, must have been rejected; and Babylonia must have succeeded at this time in maintaining, for the space of eight years, a separate and independent existence, albeit troubled and precarious. The fact that she continued free so long, while she again succumbed at the very commencement of the reign of Esar-haddon, may lead us to suspect that she owed this spell of liberty to the increasing years of the Assyrian monarch, who, as the infirmities of age crept upon him, felt a disinclination towards distant expeditions.

The military glory of Sennacherib was thus in some degree tarnished; first, by the terrible disaster which befell his host on the borders of Egypt; and, secondly, by his failure to maintain the authority which, in the earlier part of his reign, he had estaldished over Babylon. Still, notwithstanding these misfortunes, he must be pronounced one of the most successful of Assyria’s warrior kings, and altogether one of the greatest princes that ever sat on the Assyrian throne. His victories of Eltekeh and Khaluli seem to leave been among the most important battles that Assyria ever gained. By the one Egypt and Ethiopia, by the other Susiana and Babylon, were taught that, even united, they were no match for the Assyrian hosts. Sennacherib thus wholesomely impressed his most formidable enemies with the dread of his arms, while at the same time he enlarged, in various directions, the limits of his dominions. He warred in regions to which no earlier Assyrian monarch had ever penetrated; and he adopted modes of warfare on which none of them had previously ventured. His defeat of a Greek fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean, and his employment of Phoenicians in the Persian Gulf, show an enterprise and versatility which we observe in few Orientals. His selection of Tarsus for the site of a great city indicates a keen appreciation of the merits of a locality, if he was proud, haughty, and self-confident, beyond all former Assyrian kings, it would seem to have been because he felt that he had resources within himself--that he possessed a firm will, a bold heart, and a fertile invention. Most men would have laid aside the sword and given themselves wholly to peaceful pursuits, after such a disaster as that of Pelusium. Sennacherib accepted the judgment as a warning to attempt no further conquests in those parts, but did not allow the calamity to reduce him to inaction. He wisely turned his sword against other enemies, and was rewarded by important successes upon all his other frontiers.

But if, as a warrior, Sennacherib deserves to be placed in the foremost rank of the Assyrian kings, as a builder and a patron of art he is still more eminent. The great palace which he raised at Nineveh surpassed in size and splendor all earlier edifices, and was never excelled in any respect except by one later building. The palace of Asshur-bani-pal, built on the same platform by the grandson of Sennacherib, was, it must be allowed, more exquisite in its ornamentation; but even this edifice did not equal the great work of Sennacherib in the number of its apartments, or the grandeur of its dimensions. Sennacherib’s palace covered an area of above eight acres. It consisted of a number of grand halls and smaller chambers, arranged round at least three courts or quadrangles. These courts were respectively 154 feet by 125, 124 feet by 90, and probably a square of about 90 feet. Round the smallest of the courts were grouped apartments of no great size, which, it may be suspected, belonged to the seraglio of the king. The seraglio seems to have been reached through a single narrow passage, leading out of a long gallery--218 feet by 25--which was approached only through two other passages, one leading from each of the two main courts. The principal halls were immediately within the two chief entrances one on the north-east, the other on the opposite or south-west front of the palace. Neither of these two rooms has been completely explored: but the one appears to have been more than 150 and the other was probably 180 feet in length, while the width of each was a little more than 40 feet. Besides these two great halls and the grand gallery already described, the palace contained about twenty rooms of a considerable size, and at least forty or fifty smaller chambers, mostly square, or nearly so, opening out of some hall or large apartment. The actual number of the rooms explored is about sixty; but as in many parts the examination of the building is still incomplete, we may fairly conjecture that the entire number was not less than seventy or eighty.

The palace of Sennacherib preserved all the main features of Assyrian architecture. It was elevated on a platform, eighty or ninety feet above the plain, artificially constructed, and covered with a pavement of bricks. It had probably three grand facades--one on the north-east, where it was ordinarily approached from the town, and the two others on the south-east and the south-west, where it was carried nearly to the edge of the platform, and overhung the two streams of the Khosr-su and the Tigris. Its principal apartment was that which was first entered by the visitor. All the walls ran in straight lines, and all the angles of the rooms and passages were right angles. There were more passages in the building than usual but still the apartments very frequently opened into one another; and almost one-half of the rooms were passage-rooms. The doorways were mostly placed without any regard to regularity, seldom opposite one another, and generally towards the corners of the apartments. There was the curious feature, common in Assyrian edifices, of a room being entered from a court, or from another room, by two or three doorways, which is best explained by supposing that the rank of the person determined the door by which he might enter. Squared recesses in the sides of the rooms were common. The thickness of the walls was great. The apartments, though wider than in other palaces, were still narrow for their length, never much exceeding forty feet; while the courts were much better proportioned.

It was in the size and the number of his rooms, in his use of passages, and in certain features of his ornamentation, that Sennacherib chiefly differed from former builders. He increased the width of the principal state apartments by one-third, which seems to imply the employment of some new mode or material for roofing. In their length he made less alteration, only advancing from 150 to 180 feet, evidently because he aimed, not merely at increasing the size of his rooms, but at improving their proportions. In one instance alone--that of a gallery or passage-room, leading (apparently) from the more public part of the palace to the hareem or private apartments--did he exceed this length, uniting the two portions of the palace by a noble corridor, 218 feet long by 25 feet wide. Into this corridor he brought passages from the two public courts, which he also united together by a third passage, thus greatly facilitating communication between the various blocks of buildings which composed his vast palatial edifice.

The most striking characteristic of Sennacherib’s ornamentation is its strong and marked realism. It was under Sennacherib that the practice first obtained of completing each scene by a background, such as actually existed as the time and place of its occurrence. Mountains, rocks, trees, roads, rivers, lakes, were regularly portrayed, an attempt being made to represent the locality, whatever it might be, as truthfully as the artist’s skill and the character of his material rendered possible. Nor was this endeavor limited to the broad and general features of the scene only. The wish evidently was to include all the little accessories which the observant eye of an artist might have noted if he had made his drawing with the scene before him. The species of trees is distinguished, in Sennacherib’s bas-reliefs; gardens, fields, ponds, reeds, are carefully represented; wild animals are introduced, as stags, boars, and antelopes; birds fly from tree to tree, or stand over their nests feeding the young who stretch up to them; fish disport themselves in the waters; fishermen ply their craft; boatmen and agricultural laborers pursue their avocations; the scene is, as it were, photographed, with all its features--the least and the most important--equally marked, and without any attempt at selection, or any effort after artistic unity.

In the same spirit of realism Sennacherib chooses for artistic representation scenes of a commonplace and everyday character. The trains of attendants who daily enter his palace with game and locusts for his dinner, and cakes and fruit for his dessert, appear on the walls of his passages, exactly as they walked through his courts, bearing the delicacies in which he delighted. Elsewhere he puts before us the entire process of carving and transporting a colossal bull, from the first removal of the huge stone in its rough state from the quarry, to its final elevation on a palace mound as part of the great gateway of a royal residence. We see the trackers dragging the rough block, supported on a low flat-bottomed boat, along the course of a river, disposed in gangs, and working under taskmasters who use their rods upon the slightest provocation. The whole scene must be represented, and so the trackers are all there, to the number of three hundred, costumed according to their nations, and each delineated with as much care as it he were not the exact image of ninety-nine others. We then observe the block transferred to land, and carved into the rough semblance of a bull, in which form it is placed on a rude sledge and conveyed along level ground by gangs of laborers, arranged nearly as before, to the foot of the mound at whose top it has to be placed. The construction of the mound is most elaborately represented. Brickmakers are seen moulding the bricks at its base, while workmen, with baskets at their backs, full of earth, bricks, stones, or rubbish, toil up the ascent--for the mound is already half raised--and empty their burdens out upon the summit. The bull, still lying on its sledge, is then drawn up an inclined plane to the top by four gangs of laborers, in the presence of the monarch and his attendants. After this the carving is completed, and the colossus, having been raised into an upright position, is conveyed along the surface of the platform to the exact site which it is to occupy. This portion of the operation has been represented in one of the illustrations in an earlier part of this volume. From the representation there given the reader may form a notion of the minuteness and elaboration of this entire series of bas-reliefs.

Besides constructing this new palace at Nineveh, Sennacherib seems also to have restored the ancient residence of the kings at the sane place, a building which will probably be found whenever the mound of Nebbi-Yunus is submitted to careful examination. He confined the Tigris to its channel by an embankment of bricks. He constructed a number of canals or aqueducts for the purpose of bringing good water to the capital. He improved the defences of Nineveh, erecting towers of a vast size at some of the gates. And, finally, he built a temple to the god Nergal at Tarbisi (now Sherif khan), about three miles from Nineveh up the Tigris.

In the construction of these great works he made use chiefly, of the forced labor with which his triumphant expeditions into foreign countries had so abundantly supplied him. Chaldaeans, Aramaeans, Armenians, Cilicianns and probably also Egyptians, Ethiopians, Elamites, and Jews, were employed by thousands in the formation of the vast mounds, in the transport and elevation of the colossal bulls, in the moulding of the bricks, and the erection of the walls of the various edifices, in the excavation of the canals, and the construction of the embankments. They wrought in gangs, each gang having a costume peculiar to it, which probably marked its nation. Over each was placed a number of taskmasters, armed with staves, who urged on the work with blows, and severely punished any neglect or remissness. Assyrian foremen had the general direction of the works, and were entrusted with all such portions as required skill or judgment. The forced laborers often worked in fetters, which were sometimes supported by a bar fastened to the waist, while sometimes they consisted merely of shackles round the ankles. The king himself often witnessed the labors, standing in his chariot, which on these occasions was drawn by some of his attendants.

The Assyrian monuments throw but little light on the circumstances which led to the assassination of Sennacherib; and we are reduced to conjecture the causes of so strange an event. Our various sources of information make it clear that he had a large family of sons. The eldest of them, Asshurinadi-su, had been entrusted by Sennacherib with the government of Babylon and might reasonably have expected to succeed him on the throne of Assyria; but it is probable that he died before his father, either by a natural death, or by violence, during one of the many Babylonian revolts. It may be suspected that Sennacherib had a second son, of whose name Nergal was the first element; and it is certain that he had three others, Adrammelech (or Ardumuzanes), Sharezer, and Esar-haddon. Perhaps, upon the death of Asshur-inadi-su, disputes arose about the succession. Adrammelech and Sharezer, anxious to obtain the throne for themselves, plotted against the life of their father, and having slain him in a temple as he was worshipping, proceeded further to remove their brother Nergilus, who claimed the crown and wore it for a brief space after Sennacherib’s death. Having murdered him, they expected to obtain the throne without further difficulty; but Esar-haddon, who at the time commanded the army which watched the Armenian frontier, now came forward, assumed the title of King, and prepared to march upon Nineveh. It was winter, and the inclemency of the weather precluded immediate movement. For some months probably the two assassins were recognized as monarchs at the capital, while the northern army regarded Esar-haddon as the rightful successor of his father. Thus died the great Sennacherib, a victim to the ambition of his sons.

It was a sad end to a reign which, on the whole, had been so glorious; and it was a sign that the empire was now verging on that decline which sooner or later overtakes all kingdoms, and indeed all things sublunary. Against plots without, arising from the ambition of subjects who see, or think they see, at any particular juncture an opportunity of seizing the great prize of supreme dominion, it is impossible, even in the most vigorous empire, to provide any complete security. But during the period of vigor, harmony within the palace, and confidence in each other inspires and unites all the members of the royal house. When discord has once entered inside the gates, when the family no longer holds together, when suspicion and jealousy have replaced the trust and affection of a happier time, the empire has passed into the declining stage, and has already begun the descent which conducts, by quick or slow degrees, to destruction. The murder of Sennacherib, if it was, as perhaps it was, a judgment on the individual, was, at least equally, a judgment on the nation. When, in an absolute monarchy, the palace becomes the scene of the worst crimes, the doom of the kingdom is sealed--it totters to its fall--and requires but a touch from without to collapse into a heap of ruins.

Esar-haddon, the son and successor of Sennacherib, is proved by the Assyrian Canon, to have ascended the throne of Assyria in B.C. 681--the year immediately previous to that which the Canon of Ptolemy makes his first year in Babylon, viz., B.C. 680. He was succeeded by his son Asshur-bani-pal, or Sardanapalus, in B.C. 668, and thus held the crown no more than thirteen years. Esar-haddon’s inscriptions show that he was engaged for some time after his accession in a war with his half-brothers, who, at the head of a large body of troops, disputed his right to the crown. Esar-haddon marched from the Armenian frontier, where (as already observed) he was stationed at the time of his father’s death, against this army, defeated it in the country of Khanirabbat (north-west of Nineveh), and proceeding to the capital, was universally acknowledged king. According to Abydenus, Adrammelech fell in the battle; but better authorities state that both he and his brother, Sharezer, escaped into Armenia, where they were kindly treated by the reigning monarch, who gave them lands, which long continued in the possession of their posterity.

The chief record which we possess of Esar-haddon is a cylinder inscription, existing in duplicate, which describes about nine campaigns, and may probably have been composed in or about his tenth year. A memorial which he set up at the mouth of the Nahr-el-Kolb, and a cylinder of his son’s, add some important information with respect to the latter part of his reign. One or two notices in the Old Testament connect him with the history of the Jews. And Abydenus, besides the passage already quoted, has an allusion to some of his foreign conquests. Such are the chief materials from which the modern inquirer has to reconstruct the history of this great king.

It appears that the first expedition of Esar-haddon was into Phoenicia. Abdi-Milkut king of Sidon, and Sandu-arra king of the adjoining part of Lebanon, had formed an alliance and revolted from the Assyrians, probably during the troubles which ensued on Sennacherib’s death. Esar-haddon attacked Sidon first, and soon took the city; but Aladi-Milkut made his escape to an island--Aradus or Cyprus--where, perhaps, he thought himself secure. Esar-haddon, however, determined on pursuit. He traversed the sea “like a fish,” and made Abdi-Milkut prisoner; after which he turned his arms against Sandu-arra, attacked him in the fastnesses of his mountains, defeated his troops, and possessed himself of his person. The rebellion of the two captive kings was punished by their execution; the walls of Sidon were destroyed; its inhabitants, and those of the whole tract of coast in the neighborhood, were carried off into Assyria, and thence scattered among the provinces; a new town was built, which was named after Esarhaddon, and was intended to take the place of Sidon as the chief city of these parts; and colonists were brought from Chaldaea and Susiana to occupy the new capital and the adjoining region. An Assyrian governor was appointed to administer the conquered province.

Esar-haddon’s next campaign seems to have been in Armenia. He took a city called Arza**, which, he says, was in the neighborhood of Muzr, and carried off the inhabitants, together with a number of mountain animals, placing the former in a position “beyond the eastern gate of Nineveh.” At the same time he received the submission of Tiuspa the Cimmerian.

His third campaign was in Cilicia and the adjoining regions. The Cilicians, whom Sennacherib had so recently subdued, reasserted their independence at his death, and allied themselves with the Tibareni, or people of Tubal, who possess at the high mountain tract about the junction of Amaans and Taurus. Esar-haddon inflicted a defeat on the Cilicians, and then invaded the mountain region, where he took twenty-one towns and a larger number of villages, all of which he plundered and burnt. The inhabitants he carried away captive, as usual but he made no attempt to hold the ravaged districts by means of new cities or fresh colonists.

This expedition was followed by one or two petty wars in the north-west and the north-east after which Esar-haddon, probably about his sixth year B.C. 675, made an expedition into Chaldaea. It appears that a son of Merodach-Baladan, Nebo-zirzi-sidi by name, had re-established himself on the Chaldaean coast, by the help of the Susianians; while his brother, Nahid-Marduk, had thought it more prudent to court the favor of the great Assyrian monarch, and had quitted his refuge in Susiana to present himself before Esar-haddon’s foot-stool at Nineveh. This judicious step had all the success that he could have expected or desired. Esar-haddon, having conquered the ill-judging Nebo-zirzi-sidi, made over to the more clear-sighted Nahid-Marduk the whole of the maritime region that had been ruled by his brother. At the same time the Assyrian monarch deposed a Chaldaean prince who had established his authority over a small town in the neighborhood of Babylon, and set up another in his place, thus pursuing the same system of division in Babylonia which we shall hereafter find that he pursued in Egypt.

Esar-haddon after this was engaged in a war with Edom. He there took a city which bore the same name as the country--a city previously, he tells us, taken by his father--and transported the inhabitants into Assyria, at the same time carrying off certain images of the Edomite gods. Hereupon the king, who was named Hazael, sent an embassy to Nineveh, to make submission and offer presents, while at the same time he supplicated Isar-haddon to restore his gods and allow them to be conveyed back to their own proper country. Esarhaddon granted the request, and restored the images to the envoy; but as a compensation for this boon, he demanded an increase of the annual tribute, which was augmented in consequence by sixty-five camels. He also nominated to the Edomite throne, either in succession or in joint sovereignty, a female named Tabua, who had been born and brought up in his own palace.

The expedition next mentioned on Esar-haddon’s principal cylinder is one presenting some difficulty. The scene of it is a country called Bazu, which is said to be “remote, on the extreme confines of the earth, on the other side of the desert.” It was reached by traversing it hundred and forty _farsakhs_ (490 miles) of sandy desert, then twenty _farsakhs_ (70 miles) of fertile land, and beyond that a stony region. None of the kings of Assyria, down to the time of Esar-haddon, had ever penetrated so far. Bazu lay beyond Khazu, which was the name of the stony tract, and Bazu had for its chief town a city called Yedih, which was under the rule of a king named Laile. It is thought, from the combinaqon of these names, and from the general description of the region--of its remoteness and of the way in which it was reached--that it was probably the district of Arabia beyond Nedjif which lies along the Jebel Shammer, and corresponds closely with the modern Arab kingdom of Hira. Esar-haddon boasts that he marched into the middle of the territory, that he slew eight of its sovereigns, and carried into Assyria their gods, their treasures, and their subjects; and that, though Laile escaped him, he too lost his gods, which were seized and conveyed to Nineveh. Then Laile, like the Idumaean monarch above mentioned, felt it necessary to humble himself. He went in person to the Assyrian capital, prostrated himself before the royal footstool, and entreated for the restoration of his gods; which Esar-haddon consented to give back, but solely on the condition that Laile became thenceforth one of his tributaries.

If this expedition was really carried into the quarter here supposed, Esar-haddon performed a feat never paralleled in history, excepting by Augustus and Nushirvan. He led an army across the deserts which everywhere guard Arabia on the land side, and penetrated to the more fertile tracts beyond them, a region of settled inhabitants and of cities. He there took and spoiled several towns; and he returned to his own country without suffering disaster. Considering the physical perils of the desert itself, and the warlike character of its inhabitants, whom no conqueror has ever really subdued, this was a most remarkable success. The dangers of the simoom may have been exaggerated, and the total aridity of the northern region may have been overstated by many writers; but the difficulty of carrying water and provisions for a large army, and the peril of a plunge into the wilderness with a small one, can scarcely be stated in too strong terms, and have proved sufficient to deter most Eastern conquerors from even the thoughts of an Arabian expedition. Alexander would, perhaps, had he lived, have attempted an invasion from the side of the Persian Gulf; and Trajan actually succeeded in bringing under the Roman yoke an outlying portion of the country--the district between Damascus and the Red Sea; but Arabia has been deeply penetrated thrice only in the history of the world; and Esar-haddon is the sole monarch who ever ventured to conduct in person such an attack.

From the arid regions of the great peninsula Esar-haddon proceeded, probably in another year, to the invasion of the marsh-country on the Euphrates, where the Aramaean tribe of the Gambulu had their habitations, dwelling (he tells us) “like fish, in the midst of the waters”--doubtless much after the fashion of the modern Khuzeyl and Affej Arabs, the latter of whom inhabit nearly the same tract. The sheikh of this tribe had revolted; but on the approach of the Assyrians he submitted himself, bringing in person the arrears of his tribute and a present of buffaloes, whereby he sought to propitiate the wrath of his suzerain. Esar-haddon states that he forgave him; that he strengthened his capital with fresh works, placed a garrison in it, and made it a stronghold to protect the territory against the attacks of the Susianians.

The last expedition mentioned on the cylinder, which seems not to have been conducted by the king in person, was against the country of Bikni, or Bikan, one of the more remote regions of Media--perhaps Azerbijan. No Assyrian monarch before Esar-haddon had ever invaded this region. It was under the government of a number of chiefs--the Arian character of whose names is unmistakable--each of whom ruled over his own town and the adjacent district. Esar-haddon seized two of the chiefs and carried them off to Assyria, whereupon several others made their submission, consenting to pay a tribute and to divide their authority with Assyrian officers.

It is probable that these various expeditions occupied Esarhaddon from B.C. 681, the year of his accession, to B.C. 671, when it is likely that they were recorded on the existing cylinder. The expeditions are ten in number, directed against countries remote from one another; and each may well have occupied an entire year. There would thus remain only three more years of the king’s reign, after the termination of the chief native record, during which his history has to be learnt from other sources. Into this space falls, almost certainly, the greatest of Esar-haddon’s exploits the conquest of Egypt; and, probably, one of the most interesting episodes of his reign--the punishment and pardon of Manasseh. With the consideration of these two events the military history of his reign will terminate.

The conquest of Egypt by Esar-haddon, though concealed from Herodotus, and not known even to Diodorus, was no secret to the more learned Greeks, who probably found an account of the expedition in the great work of Berosus. All that we know of its circumstances is derived from an imperfect transcript of the Nahr-el-Kelb tablet, and a short notice in the annals of Esar-haddon’s son and successor, Asshur-bani-pal, who finds it necessary to make an allusion to the former doings of his father in Egypt, in order to render intelligible the state of affairs when he himself invades the country. According to these notices, it would appear that Esar-haddon, having entered Egypt with a large army, probably in B.C. 670, gained a great battle over the forces of Tirhakah in the lower country, and took Memphis, the city where the Ethiopian held his court, after which he proceeded southwards, and conquered the whole of the Nile valley as far as the southern boundary of the Theban district. Thebes itself was taken and Tirhakah retreated into Ethiopia. Esar-haddon thus became master of all Egypt, at least as far as Thebes or Diospolis, the No or No-Amon of scripture. He then broke up the country into twenty governments, appointing in each town a ruler who bore the title of king, but placing all the others to a certain extent under the authority of the prince who reigned at Memphis. This was Neco, the father of Psammetichus (Psamatik I.)--a native Egyptian of whom we have some mention both in Herodotus and in the fragments of Manetho. The remaining rulers were likewise, for the most part, native Egyptians: though in two or three instances the governments appear to have been committed to Assyrian officers. Esar-haddon, having made these arrangements, and having set up his tablet at the mouth of the Nahr-el-Kelb side by side with that of Rameses II., returned to his own country, and proceeded to introduce sphinxes into the ornamentation of his palaces, while, at the same time, he attached to his former titles an additional clause, in which he declared himself to be “king of the kings of Egypt, and conqueror of Ethiopia.”

The revolt of Manasseh king of Judah may have happened shortly before or shortly after the conquest of Egypt. It was not regarded as of sufficient importance to call for the personal intervention of the Assyrian monarch. The “captains of the host of the king of Assyria” were entrusted with the task of Manasseh’s subjection; and, proceeding into Judaea, they “took him, and bound him with chains, and carried him to Babylon,” where Esar-haddon had built himself a palace, and often held his court. The Great king at first treated his prisoner severely; and the “affliction” which he thus suffered is said to have broken his pride and caused him to humble himself before God, and to repent of all the cruelties and idolatries which had brought this judgment upon him. Then God “was entreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him back again to Jerusalem into his kingdom.” The crime of defection was overlooked by the Assyrian monarch, Manasseh was pardoned, and sent back to Jerusalem: where he was allowed to resume the reins of government, but on the condition, if we may judge by the usual practice of the Assyrians in such cases, of paying an increased tribute.

It may have been in connection with this restoration of Manasseh to his throne--an act of doubtful policy from an Assyrian point of view--that Esar-haddon determined on a project by which the hold of Assyria upon Palestine was considerably strengthened. Sargon, as has been already observed when he removed the Israelites from Sumaria, supplied their place by colonists from Babylon, Cutha, Sippara, Ava, Hamath, and Arabia; this planting a foreign garrison in the region which would be likely to preserve its fidelity. Esar-haddon resolved to strengthen this element. He gathered men from Babylon, Orchoe, Susa, Elymais, Persia, and other neighboring regions, and entrusting them to an officer of high rank--“the great and noble Asnapper”--had them conveyed to Palestine and settled over the whole country, which until this time must have been somewhat thinly peopled. The restoration of Manasseh, and the augmentation of this foreign element in Palestine, are thus portions, but counterbalancing portions, of one scheme--a scheme, the sole object of which was the pacification of the empire by whatever means, gentle or severe, seemed best calculated to effect the purpose.