natural that the Jewish prince should have been held in captivity there as at the northern capital of Nineveh.

The allusion to the capture of No-Ammon, or Thebes, by the prophet Nahum was never understood until the interpretation of the cuneiform inscriptions threw light upon it. From these it appears that Thebes was taken by Ashurbanipal or Sardanapalus in the course of a successful campaign in Egypt. The prince Urdamani fled from Thebes on the approach of the Assyrian army. The fate of the city thus abandoned is described in the following terms:

"My hands vanquished this city by the help of Ashur and Ishtar. I seized upon the silver, gold, precious stones, the furniture of the palace, all that was found, garments of variegated stuffs, horses, slaves, both male and female, two obelisks weighing 2,500 talents, which stood at the door of the temple; and all this I took with me to Assyria. Booty without number I captured in Thebes."

As for the last king of Assyria, Sin-shar-ishkun, or Saracus, he is perhaps alluded to in the brief description of Pharaoh-necho's campaign against the "king of Assyria," in the course of which Josiah, king of Judah, was slain at the battle of Megiddo, fighting against the Egyptians.*

At the end of the seventh century before Christ, the Assyrian supremacy was overthrown by the Babylonians, and the great king of the southern State, Nebuchadnezzar, now appears as the invader and oppressor of the West-Syrian countries. Of this monarch we possess many monuments, consisting of bricks, tablets, and cylinders, *2 Kings xiii. 29.

inscribed with cuneiform characters. At present, however, no account of his campaigns has been found; the inscriptions are entirely occupied with his work as a builder and restorer of palaces and temples, and his improvements of the city of Babylon. As for the supposed portrait of Nebuchadnezzar preserved on a well-known cameo,† there can be no doubt that, although the inscription engraved around it is a genuine Babylonian inscription, containing the name of the great monarch, yet the head itself is Greek in character, and must have been carved under the Macedonian dynasty on an older gem. The activity of Nebuchadnezzar as a builder, illustrated by the cuneiform inscriptions already found, fully corresponds to the words of the Book of Daniel, which speak of the king as exulting over the magnificence of the city which he had himself done so much to enlarge and beautify

:

"The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?"

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In his own annals, Nebuchadnezzar speaks in the same way of the palace which he had built as the dwelling-place of his kingdom," or "royalty," and boasts of having enlarged the city of Babylon and built the two great walls around it. Within this great city,

* There are two fragments of a clay tablet which contained an account of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Egypt (Jer. xliii. 16 ff.; Ez. xxix. 19). Only a few words can be made out.

Now in the Museum at Florence. If not of the Macedonian period, it may well have been carved under the Parthians, who allowed Seleucia to remain in many ways a Greek city.

as he says, he received tribute from all the princes of the earth, and the homage of all mankind. The chief temples were restored by him, and overlaid with gold until they shone like the sun. It is well known that almost all the bricks dug up in such quantities by, the Arabs on the site of Babylon, and employed in the erection of modern houses, bear the name of "Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabopolassar," upon them.

Of the last days of the Babylonian monarchy we have already heard in a former chapter. We have seen that Belshazzar was an historical personage, to whose existence ample testimony is borne by the native records, as well as by the Book of Daniel, and that the capture of Babylon by Cyrus is mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions in terms that agree with the allusions in the same book: the city was taken unexpectedly, and without resistance. Nothing, however, has yet been found to explain the position of Darius the Mede, but the same observation would have been made some time ago about Belshazzar, about Pul, and about Sargon. The Babylonian tablets have shown us the origin of the names of the months employed by the Jews from the time of the captivity. Two of these names may be singled out-that of Marches van, which is in Babylonian Arakh-samna: that is to say, the eighth month, in accordance with its position in the calendar; and Weadar, which was called on the banks of the Euphrates "the intercalary month of Adar," and was inserted from time to time, to keep the calendar in accordance with the march of the sun.

The Persian kings who are named in the Books of . Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther are well known to us from the cuneiform inscriptions, as it has already been pointed out. The character of Cyrus and the conciliatory policy which he adopted towards the peoples whom he conquered are well illustrated by the monuments of his reign found in Babylonia. He professes in these documents to be the servant of the native gods, and he carries out the desire of the priests in restoring the images of the gods to their own cities and temples from which they had been brought to Babylon by Nabonidus, whose policy it seems to have been to make the capital a centre of religious worship, just as Jerusalem was in the west, and to destroy the local cults, which were so deeply rooted in the hearts of his subjects, that in the hope of their restoration they eagerly welcomed a foreign invader.

See Sayce: "Hibbert Lecturas."

CHAPTER XV.

THE ASSYRIANS AS CONQUERORS.

FROM the glimpses that we catch in the pages of the Hebrew prophets and historians, we are able to form some idea of the power and wealth of the Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs. We hear of their repeated invasions of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and of the countries that lay upon the borders of these small principalities; and we see the kings of Samaria and of Jerusalem paying heavy tribute, or carried off as captives, or put to death as a punishment for having intrigued with other nations against the Assyrians. To collect together the amount of the tribute extorted by their suzerains, the vassal-kings would even tear off the gold with which the doors and pillars of the Temple itself were overlaid, and would pillage the treasury of Jehovah in order to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful monarch, whose armies were ravag ing the surrounding regions, carrying away the inhabitants into slavery, and leaving desolation behind wherever they appeared. We also hear of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the capitals of empires and the centres of trade, where all the culture and