B.O. 680-625.]

RAPID DECLINE OF ASSYRIA.

223

the Asshur-akh-iddina of the inscriptions, who reigned in person at Babylon as well as Nineveh.* His inscriptious claim victories over the Egyptians, and over the old enemies on the confines of Assyria. He was probably, as we have seen, the king who colonized the waste lands of Samaria with settlers from Babylonian cities, a proceeding which implies the treatment of Babylonia, to some extent, as a conquered province. This agrees with the mention of a war in Susiana against a son of Merodach-Baladan. Like his two predecessors, Esar-haddon was a magnificent builder. Besides extensive repairs of former edifices, he erected the southwest palace of Nimrud, and one of those at Nebbi-Yunus, which he styles "the palace of the pleasures of all the year." His inscriptions record the aid he received in these works from the kings of Syria, Judah, and Phoenicia, and even from the princes of the Greek cities of Cyprus, not only in materials but in the services of skilled artists. The bas-reliefs of his palaces show that freer and more graceful style which had already begun to modify the old archaic stiffness of Greek art. We have already seen the same influences at work in Egypt under Psammetichus, who was contemporary with the later years of Esar-haddon. But in Assyria, as in many other countries, the fine arts culminated just as the power of the empire was dying out, under Sardanapalus (Asshurbani-pal II.), the son of Esar-haddon.

The causes of the rapid decline of the Assyrian power may be traced in the nature of the empire, as it is exhibited to us in the records of the Lower Dynasty, and especially when at its height, under Sargon, Sennacherib, and Esar-haddon. Nominally including the whole of Western Asia from the river Halys and the Mediterranean to the Desert of Iran, and from the Caspian and the mountains of Armenia to Arabia and the Persian Gulf, it was utterly wanting in unity, even of administration. It embraced a number of small kingdoms, and of cities and tribes under many petty chieftains who were bound to pay tribute and render personal homage to the sovereign, and to give a free passage to his troops.† But this duty was limited by the king's power to enforce it; nor would the yoke be made more welcome by the severe measures used to suppress revolt,-the destruction of cities and the cruel execution of their defenders,-forays in which men and cattle were carried off by tens and hundreds of thousands,--the deportation of whole nations, to labour as captives on the king's buildings, or to

* This accounts for Manasseh's being carried captive to Babylon, 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11. Military service in the armies of Assyria does not seem to have been required.

mourn as exiles beside the waters of a strange land. The Assyrian armies marched back when they had inflicted these chastisements, and there was no military occupation of the conquered countries.* The fabric of the empire was a web of Penelope, ever undoing and beginning again. We have seen even the most powerful kings constantly renewing the same wars with the same frontier tribes; and the accession of a weak ruler was the signal for the resolution of the empire into its independent elements. The want of cohesion, however, among these scattered elements, secured the central government from a speedy overthrow; to effect this needed. some concentrated power from without. Egypt threatened more than once to do the work; but the distance was too great, and her strength was unequal to the task. Babylon, the nearest neighbour of Assyria, was in a state of chronic disaffection, but her attempts at open revolt were speedily put down. At length a new power comes upon the stage, alien from Assyria in race and religion, and recently consolidated into a great nation. We have seen, from the very first, that the range of Mount Zagros, bordering the Tigris and Euphrates valley on the east, divided its Semitic and Hamite nations from the Aryan tribes of the tableland of Iran. The MEDES, who occupied the latter region, have often been mentioned among the peoples conquered by successive Assyrian kings; but these appear to have been only partial conquests made from time to time over separate tribes. We have yet to trace the history of the great Median nation, which, consolidated by Cyaxares, became the instrument for overthrowing the power of Assyria, and even blotting out her existence.+

The interval from the death of Esar-haddon to this catastrophe is exceedingly obscure. The Assyrian monuments have as yet supplied the names of only two kings. Asshur-bani-pal is supposed to have reigned from about B.c. 660 to about B.c. 640. The narrow limits of his recorded wars, in Susiana against the grandson of Merodach-Baladan, and in Armenia, indicate those within which the empire was contracted. His successor, Asshur-emit-ili is only known as the builder of a palace at Nimrud, the comparative meanness of which gives a sign of the degradation of the monarchy. One cause of its rapid decline may be found in that great irruption of the Scythians into Western Asia, of which we shall have to speak further in the next chapter.

How such countries were left to themselves, may be seen from the proceedings of Hezekiah and Josiah in Northern Palestine.

+ See Chapter x.

B.C. 625.]

THE FALL OF NINEVEH..

225

From the former of these two kings the Greek writers, by a very natural confusion, obtained the name of that Sardanapalus, whose fate they have told so romantically. Berosus is said to have named Saracus as the king under whom Nineveh was destroyed; but it remains doubtful whether he is identical with Asshur-emitili, and indeed whether the latter was the last king of Assyria.

Of the events attending the fall of Nineveh and the empire the monuments contain no record, beyond the incontestable evidence of their own condition. "Calcined alabaster, masses of charred wood and charcoal, colossal statues split through with the heat, are met with in all parts of the Ninevite mounds, and attest the veracity of prophecy." All bears witness to a conflagration of the palaces which could only have attended on an utter destruction of the monarchy, and tends so far to confirm the details which we only possess on the doubtful authority of Ctesias, and the more trustworthy narrative which Abydenus professes to have borrowed from Berosus. He tells us that Saracus, being alarmed by the news of forces advancing against him from the sea, sent Nabopolassar to take the command at Babylon. The latter seized the opportunity to rebel, and formed an alliance with the Median king. The united armies of the Medes, Chaldæans, and Babylonians marched against Nineveh; and Saracus, after a brief defence, retired to his palace, to which he set fire with his own hand, and perished, like Zimri, in the conflagration. Ctesias assigns a duration of two years to the siege, and ascribes its success to an inundation of the Tigris, which swept away a part of the city wall. The prophet Nahum seems to indicate an entrance by the river gates, such as led to the capture of Babylon by Cyrus. A similar false security may easily have led to a similar catastrophe.

The destruction of the empire and its capital were alike complete. Nineveh was not even permitted to become, like Babylon in later times, a capital of the conquering monarchy. Her ruin appears to have been hastened by the nature of the city, which seems only to have deserved the name in virtue of her palaces and temples. The

* Rawlinson, Herod. vol. i. p. 488; Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 71, 103, 121, &c.; Nahum ii. 13, iii. 13, 15. The predictions of the fall of Nineveh and Assyria by Nahum and Zephaniah are so exact as to have a real historic value.

See the fragment in Eusebius, Chron. part. i. c. 9.

Rawlinson takes these for the Chaldæans and Susianians, who are known to have been in revolt during the preceding reign.

§ Both Abydenus and Polyhistor call this king Astyages; but the order of the Median history proves that it was Cyaxares.

| 1 Kings xvi. 18.

VOL. 1.-15

great mounds which are scattered over a space of about sixty miles from north to south along the course of the Tigris, above the confluence of the Great Zab, are found to contain the remains of palaces and temples, within enclosures as large as some cities. The spaces within these enclosures are strewn with fragments of pottery and other objects, undoubted signs of human habitation, but all traces of private houses have vanished. As the kings glorified only themselves in their sculptures, so they built for themselves alone; and the houses of unburnt brick which were scattered probably far and wide about their palaces, would soon return to dust. This circumstance has made it almost impossible to identify the true site of Nineveh, the knowledge of which had been lost as early as the time of Herodotus. No traces remain (as at Babylon) of the vast enclosures of the immense city which the ancient writers ascribed to Ninus. It seems most probable that the people dwelt in scattered villages among the several groups of palaces built by successive kings on elevated platforms, and that these latter alone were fortified. Of these edifices four chief groups are marked by as many mounds, on or near the left bank of the Tigris, not including Kileh-Shergat (the supposed ancient Asshur), which lies on the right bank, much farther to the south. These are Nimrud (Calah) above the confluence of the Great Zab, with the smaller mound of Selamiyeh a little further to the north; Koyunjik and Nebby-Yunus, opposite Mosul; Shereef-Khan, about five and a half miles further north; and Khorsabad, about ten miles N. by E. of Shereef-Khan. Considering the scattered mode of building Oriental cities, it is by no means improbable that all this area may have been included in the widest extent of the name of Nineveh, and such a supposition would explain the description of the prophet Jonah: "Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey." But the name must have had originally a more definite meaning; and in this sense it probably belonged to the group of mounds opposite Mosul, which was at all events the Nineveh of Sennacherib's great palace. Here the mounds of Koyunjik and Nebby-Yunus are enclosed within a well-marked line of once strong fortifications, the circuit of which is about seven and a half miles, quite large enough for a primitive city, though far smaller than the Nineveh of tradition.

We must leave to the writers on Assyrian antiquities the de

* Jonah iii. 3. That this is no mere hyperbole is evident from the specific statement that "Jonah began to enter into the city, a day's journey," in his first preaching.

ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION.

227

scription of the state of art and civilization attested by the Assyrian remains. The whole is summed up by Professor Rawlinson in the following terms: "With much that was barbaric still attaching to them, with a rude and inartificial government, savage passions, a debasing religion, and a general tendency to materialism, they were, towards the close of the empire, in all the arts and appliances of life, very nearly on a par with ourselves; and thus their history furnishes a warning, which the records of nations constantly repeat, that the greatest material prosperity may coexist with the decline-and herald the downfall -of a kingdom."*

It is now time to look back to the former seat of empire on the lower course of the Euphrates, and to trace the steps by which old Babylon regained the imperial state, which she was destined to enjoy but for a comparatively short time. Her eclipse, overshadowed even when not entirely subdued by Assyria, lasted for about 650 years (B.c. 1273-625); her recovered greatness, surpassing all her predecessors, under the dynasty of Nabopolassar, perished before the power of Persia after only 87 years (B.c. 625538). But before the beginning of this last period, she had risen into importance under the Lower Assyrian Dynasty, the accession of which we have seen to coincide with the new state of things at Babylon marked by the era of Nabonassar (B.c. 747). A few words will suffice to describe what is known of Babylon under the two Assyrian dynasties, as a preface to the brief and brilliant period of her true historical importance.

The confusion between the earliest history of Assyria and Babylonia, in the Greek traditions, is but very partially unravelled by the Assyrian records. We only learn from them, that when the Assyrians obtained that supremacy which the Arabs had wrested from Babylon, the latter did not sink into a mere subject condition. Unfortunately the native records of the period are lost, having been destroyed, Berosus tells us, by Nabonassar, and thus the Assyrian history absorbs that of both states. But even the

* Rawlinson's Herodotus, Appendix to Book i., Essay vii., vol. i. p. 499. In the great uncertainty which still besets the science of cuneiform interpretation, we have closely followed the system developed in the above Essay, as upon the whole the most probable and consistent. Essays and discussions upon new discoveries made from time to time are contained in several recent numbers of the Athenæum. Among the writers whose views are either wholly or chiefly independent of the science of cuneiform interpretation, the most important are Niebuhr, in his Lectures on Ancient History, and Mr. Grote, in his History of Greece.