They have been engraved in the two halls of the palace of Khorsabad, built by Sargon himself at Nineveh. They have been accurately copied by M. Botta in his Monuments de Ninive, and translated by the skill of Dr. Julius Oppert, one of the first Assyrian scholars of the day. No less than four specimens of the following text appear on the walls of the Assyrian palace, as if to show the importance of the announcement, which is thus recorded :

"Palace of Sargon, the great king, the powerful king, king of the legions, king of Assyria, viceroy of the gods at Babylon, &c., &c.

"In the beginning of my reign....(three lines wanting).... with the help of the sun, I besieged and occupied the towns of Samaria, and carried into captivity 27,280 persons. I took them to Assyria, and placed in their stead people to live there whom my hand had conquered. I instituted my lieutenants as governors over them, and imposed on them the same tribute which one of my predecessors had done....

"In the second year of my reign, Hanun king of Gaza, and Sebech (So) siltan of Egypt, allied themselves to oppose me at Raphia, and to fight against me, but I conquered them. Sebech yielded to my arms; he fled, and no trace of him has been discovered since. I imposed a tribute on Pharoah king of Egypt, and Samsie queen of Arabia, &c., &c.

"To maintain my position in Media, I have erected fortifications in the neighbourhood of Kar-Larkin. I annexed thirty-four towns of Media to Assyria, and levied annual tributes of horses upon them.

The records of Sargon, from Khorsabad; those of his son Sennacherib, from Kouyunjik; of his grandson Esarhaddon, from Nebbi Yunus; and of his great grandson Assur-bani-pul, from various cylinders now in the British Museum, have thrown much light on the synchronous histories of Israel, Assyria, and Egypt in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., each and all of them tending to confirm both prophecy and history as related in the sacred oracles of God. In a chamber belonging to the palace of Kouyunjik, Layard discovered a piece of clay bearing the seal of the Egyptian sultan Sebech (the Scripture So), and that of Sennacherib king of Assyria, which originally

7 The Assyrian word siltan is the same as the Hebrew shilton and the Arabic sultan, and means "power," belonging to a mighty sovereign, and is retained to this day, to signify the sovereign of Turkey.

8 Records of the Past, vol. v., 21-28; ix. 1-5.

was affixed to a treaty between the two, the parchment or papyrus on which the treaty was written has long crumbled into dust, but the seal, discovered by an enterprising Englishman twenty-six centuries after the event, is sufficient to tell its own tale.9

Manetho gives the names of three kings as forming the twenty-fifth, or Ethiopian dynasty of the Pharaohs, as Manetho writes them in Greek: 1. Sabacon; 2. Sebechus, his son; 3. Tarchus. The two last are respectively mentioned in Scripture as "So king of Egypt," and "Tirhakah king of Ethiopia." "So" in Hebrew, "Sebech" in Assyrian, as Oppert writes it, answers to the "Sebechus" of Manetho; as the "Tirhakah" of Scripture answers to the "Tarchus" of the Egyptian historian. The chronology of Manetho answers very well to the Biblical chronology in respect to these two sovereigns who are described as contemporaries with Shalmaneser, Sargon, and Sennacherib, kings of Assyria, and Hoshea the last king of Israel. The fall of Samaria may be positively dated as B.C. 721, one year after the accession of Sargon; the three years' siege having been begun by Shalmaneser B.C. 724. Sennacherib succeeded his father Sargon B.C. 705, and was succeeded by his son Esarhaddon B.C. 681.2 The reigns of Sebech, or So, and Tirhakah extended, according to a computation founded on Manetho, to B.c. 732—680.

Although both Sargon and Sennacherib inflicted punishment on the Egyptians, the prophecies of Isaiah and Nahum relating to the punishment inflicted by the Assyrians, appear to refer to the reigns of Esarhaddon and his son Assur-bani-pul. In the Egyptian campaigns of Esarhaddon and Assur-bani-pul, by G. Smith, and the Assyrian Inscriptions, by Dr. Julius Oppert, we have satisfactory evidence of the conquest of Egypt by the Assyrians. Esarhaddon, after having established himself in his kingdom, and recovered much which had been lost by his father Sennacherib's unhappy campaign against Judæa, resolved upon the conquest of Egypt, which he effected in the ninth 1 2 Kings xvii. 4; xix. 9. 2 The Assyrian Eponym Canon, by G. Smith, pp. 66—68,

Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, p. 156.

year of his reign. After having divided Egypt into twenty satrapes on his return to Assyria, he caused a tablet to be carved on a rock at the mouth of the Nahr-el-kelb in Syria, a cast of which is now in the British Museum, describing the conquest of Egypt, the capture of Memphis, and defeat of Tirhakah.

Esarhaddon returned to Nineveh with the spoils of Egypt, and the Egyptians remained subject to Assyria for several years; until "Tirhakah king of Ethiopia" made an attempt to recover his power in Egypt, and marched against Thebes which he succeeded in taking. Esarhaddon being at that time very ill, and near the end of his days, associated his son Assur-banipul in the kingdom, on the twelfth of the month Ayar, B.C. 686; and sent him to recover Egypt. In the mean while, Tirhakah having conquered the whole of Upper Egypt, marched against Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt.

Assur-bani-pul was at that time at Nineveh, and being much moved with the loss of Egypt, set out at the head of his army to reconquer the country. On his march various tributary chiefs on the shores of the Mediterranean, and among them ten kings of the Isle of Cyprus, did homage to the great king of Assyria. A battle was fought near the eastern branch of the Nile-the river with seven streams spoken of by Isaiah (xi. 15), when the Egyptians were completely overthrown. Tirhakalı fled from Memphis, and embarking on the Nile sailed for Thebes. Assur-bani-pul followed, and, as the record states, marched "a journey of forty days to Thebes," a distance of about three hundred miles," when Tirhakah having fled, the whole country submitted to the Assyrians.

But the prophecy was not yet fully accomplished; for although the King of Assyria returned to Nineveh laden with the spoils of Egypt, a successful conspiracy of some Egyptian chiefs hitherto faithful to Assyria, enabled Tirhakah to recover Thebes, which he made his capital. Niku, however, one of the leaders in the conspiracy, having been taken captive, made his

3 Nineveh and Babylon were about the same distance from each other as Memphis from Thebes.

submission to Assur-bani-pul, who restored him to his throne at Sais, in Lower Egypt. Niku's son Psammeticus succeeded him at Sais, about the year 650 B.C., as Urdamane, son of Tirhakah, succeeded him at Thebes. Psammeticus revolted against the Assyrians, and drove them out of Memphis. But the power of Assyria was still unbroken, and though at that time a revolt of the Tyrians compelled Assur-bani-pul to divide his army, sending one part against Tyre, he in person marched on Egypt, recovered Memphis, and drove the rebel sovereign back to Thebes, which this time one of the inscriptions says he reached after "a march of ten days," though as the terminus a quo is not mentioned it does not necessarily conflict with the previous and longer march to Thebes already mentioned of" forty days." Urdamane, the son of Tirhakah, is said to have fled to a place called Kip-kiki. The King of Assyria, after plundering Thebes, and carrying with him two huge granite obelisks as part of his spoils, returned in triumph to Nineveh; thus literally accomplishing what Isaiah (xx. 4, 5) had predicted a hundred years before, and Nahum (iii. 8, 10) half a century later, concerning the conquest of Egypt and the sacking of their cities by the victorious arms of the mighty King of Assyria, whose kingdom within less than fifty years later was so suddenly to pass away, and to become "empty, void, and waste," an "utter desolation" for ever.

362

CHAPTER XVII.

PROPHECIES RELATING TO BABYLON.

PASSING by for want of space the intensely interesting evidence which archæology has brought to light by the Cuneiform inscriptions in confirmation of the truth of the Bible, we must confine ourselves to what the Hebrew prophets predicted respecting Babylon, an empire as mighty and as evanescent in the ancient world, as that of Napoleon in our own day.

The 13th chapter of Isaiah opens with the ominous words, "THE BURDEN OF BABYLON;" and bearing in mind that the prophecies of Isaiah were written upwards of two centuries before the first blow which Babylon received from Cyrus with the combined army of Medes and Persians, and nearly five centuries before the predicted doom of desolation began to be fulfilled, we shall have sure evidence that Isaiah was one of those to whom the apostle Peter refers, when he says

"For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 4

In the chapter already mentioned we find in ver. 4 an account of the mustering of the nations destined by the Almighty to punish Babylon; ver. 17 specifies "the Medes" by name as one of those nations, and alludes to their disregard of "silver and gold; " vv. 19-22 speak of "Babylon, the glory of kingdoms," becoming "as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah "uninhabitable" from generation to generation "-— the Arabians refusing to "pitch tent there," and the shepherds declining to "fold their sheep there."

In chapter xiv., after alluding to "this proverb against the King of Babylon," in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, Isaiah

42 Pet. i. 21.