no great eastern power but the Chaldean king of | with Sardanapalus? What learn we of those Babylon. The date which can be made out from more primeval Assyrian monarchs, the builders of the account in Herodotus of the conquest of Ninus Nineveh and of the older Babylon? Concerning or Nineveh, by Cyaxares the Mcde, singularly co- this royal race, all which has come down to us is incides with this period; and, in a word, chro- through the Greeks, and those mostly late comnologists cannot be far wrong in fixing the year pilers, though they occasionally cite earlier vouch606 B. c. for the final extinction of the empire of ers. The whole of this is so vague, wild, and Assyria. The latest dynasty of the Assyrians is unreal, as to make us suspect more than the usual familiar to us in the biblical histories. The names proverbial mendacity of Grecian history. These of Tiglath Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sennacherib, and elder Assyrian sovereigns, their achievements, Eserhaddon are known as having cuveloped the their edifices, loom dimly through the haze of imkingdom of Israel in their western conquests, and penetrable antiquity, and might seem to owe their as having menaced Jerusalem. These, Mr. La- grandeur in a great degree to their remoteness. yard seems to conclude, are the kings who built Mr. Layard devotes many pages to the fragKouyunjik, Khorsabad, and the later Nimroud ments or traditions of history concerning this earpalaces-whose victories are commemorated in lier empire. He has collected these with much the later sculptures; and at all events those industry from all quarters, but has appealed to sculptures are singularly illustrative of the cam- them with too little discrimination. Considering paigns thus incidentally or more fully described in the age, the active and adventurous life of Mr. the Hebrew writings. That some of those west- Layard, his scholarship is of so much higher orern conquests, either predicted or historically re-der than we had a right to expect; his judgment lated by the chroniclers or prophets, are recorded is so rarely led astray by the temptations of his on these very slabs, is by no means improbable. exciting theme, that we would speak with most There has been an attempt, indeed, to identify one respectful tenderness of his adherence to the old conquered people with the Jews; for this we usage (an usage, we regret to say, still countethink no sufficient proof or argument is offered-nanced by some of our most distinguished scholars but the prisoners—men, women, and children—and chronologists) of heaping together, with the who are led away into bondage from the captive more valuable authorities, passages from the most cities may doubtless represent, among other, some obscure and worthless writers concerning subjects of those who were carried off from their native on which they could not but be profoundly ignohomes in Palestine to Halah, and Hamath, and rant, or from writers of better name, where their Gozar. The identical Rab-Saris, the chief eunuch authority can have no weight. In his Introduc-perhaps the Rab-Shakeh, the chief cup-bearer- tion, it is singular that he promises to be as severe who were sent to denounce war against Jerusalem, and judicious as we would require; his conclumay possibly be seen in some of the long proces- sions are simple, sound, and just, while the unsions. The Rab-Saris is perpetually found as the feigned modesty of his language, the excuses prime-minister, the vizier, or representative of the which he urges of bad health as well as overmonarch. But the most remarkable identification whelming occupation, cannot but strongly preposof the western conquests of Assyria with those of sess us in his favor. But in the body of his work prophetic history is on certain slabs which com- he has neglected somewhat too much that rigid memorate the siege and subjugation of maritime historical criticism, without which it is impossible fortresses. In the earlier sculptures boats appear, to distinguish fact from fable, mythic legend from such as are now used on the Tigris and Euphra- historic truth. Surely, for instance, we are now tes there is one ferrying over a royal chariot, far beyond the authority of Pliny and the poet with swimmers around it, supported on bladders, Lucan, as to the inventors of written characters. as at the present day. On the later reliefs of We know that the Greeks generally supposed their Kouyunjik are vessels apparently not belonging to own to be derived from the Phoenician; and it was the Assyrians, (who never, probably, became a natural that they should esteem their teachers the maritime people,) but to the cities they are be- primary discoverers of letters; but of what weight sieging. They are shown to be sea-vessels by is that Greek opinion as to the question itself? the somewhat clumsy but significant device of seafish swimming about them; but are the same in shape and construction—and that a very peculiar construction-with vessels found on coins of the early Persian monarchy, and those of Sidon of a much later period. The cities besieged, it is no rash conclusion, may therefore be Tyre or Sidon, or some of the other flourishing mercantile towns on that coast. But what learn we of that other dynasty which -high above that which began with Pul and ended in the fall of Nineveh (see vol. ii., pp. 381, &c.) commencing with Ninus and Semiramis, is said to have endured for 1360 years, and closed As, however, this early Assyrian history must be forced, by these discoveries, on the attention even of the general reader, it may be worth the pains to examine its real amount and value. When Herodotus wrote, the great empire of Babylon had entirely swallowed up, and, as it seems, totally obscured the more ancient kingdom of Assyria. Semiramis is introduced only as having ruled in Babylon; Nineveh is hardly more than once or twice distinctly, and that incidentally, mentioned once as having been included in the conquests of the Babylonian queen Nitocris-and again, in the Median history, as having fallen under the victorious arms of Cyaxares. In another passage Herodotus speaks, as it were accidentally, of the Assyrians, as having ruled Upper Asia for 520 years. It seems absolutely impossible to limit the whole empire of Assyria to this narrow period. This sentence, therefore, probably refers to the rule of some particular Assyrian dynasty, or some period when their empire was at its height as to power and extent (Herod. i. 95.)* Almost the whole of the Ninevite history, therefore, is found in the compilation of Diodorus Siculus, and is avowedly transcribed from that of Ctesias-with some few additions from other less trustworthy authorities. What, then, is this history? A full and particular account only of the first and most remote ancestors of this race, of Ninus and Semiramis; and of the last of the dynasty, Sardanapalus. There is nothing, except perhaps the enormous numbers of their forces, absolutely incredible in the campaigns and conquests of Ninus; nothing more surprising than in those attributed to Sesostris, or even to modern conquerors, Zengis or Tamerlane. In the history of Semiramis, Diodorus endeavors to discriminate the mythic from the historical; the supernatural and religious from the real. Eastern annals, however, or even western, may furnish examples of women of inferior birth becoming by their beauty and fascinations, first the wives of powerful satraps or viziers, afterwards of doting monarchs; now assuming the reins of empire in their husbands' name, then in their own; carrying on long and perpetual wars; conducting remote campaigns; and founding magnificent cities. We see no reason to doubt, à priori, though the vastness of her works may be heightened and in great degree fabulous, that Semiramis may have built the primeval Babylon, waged war in India, or even been the first to employ Rab-Sares in her great offices of state. She may even have furnished a precedent for that lawless and prodigal plan of indulging her own *We agree with those modern critics who do not be lieve that Herodotus ever wrote an Assyrian history. This work was unknown to any writer of antiquity. Mr. Layard is wrong when he says, in his Introduction, that "Aristotle, de Auim. viii. 18, mentions having seen it." Aristotle merely mentions a fact in natural history, of which a certain author was ignorant-for that author in his account of the taking of Nineveh describes an eagle drinking. But the name of that author in the best MSS is Hoodos-which reading is retained by Bekker; and, however it may seem more probable that Herodotus should have described the taking of Nineveh than Hesiod, yet, even if so, there is nothing to show that Aristotle did not cite from memory, or copy from some other less | accurate writer. The two passages in Herodotus, where he speaks of his 'Ασσύριοι λόγοι, and his ἕτεροι λόγοι (1. c. 106 and 184,) by no means show that he ever ful filled his intention, if he had such intention, of writing a separate Assyrian history. There is a slight inaccuracy in the article Herodotus, in the excellent Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, edited by Dr. W. Smith. It is the long line of Babylonian kings, not the taking of Nineveh, which Herodotus promises (c. 184) to relate in other discourses or books. It is in c. 106 that he says, "How they (the Medes) took Nineveh, I will describe in other books." (ivitioodi koyoii.) It is by no means impossible that Herodotus may have designed either to be more full on the history of Assyria in his great work, or may have projected another, and abandoned either design from want of materials. Such a book, by such an author, if written, could hardly have perished entirely, and escaped all later compilers." passions without endangering her power, which acquired for a late imperial female the name of the Northern Semiramis. Let us grant, then, that there may be some historic ground for the actual being of Ninus and Semiramis. We say not whether Diodorus or Ctesias had any foundation for the definite period of 1360 years (so we read in our edition, Wesseling's, of Diodorus, not 1306, as stated by some chronologists) which they assign to this dynasty. But what follows in Diodorusno doubt in Ctesias-these accounts of the campaigns, conquests, buildings of Ninus and Semiramis? How are these annals, so splendidly begun, and with so many historic particulars, continued? By a total blank of thirty generations! Of the 1360 years assigned to the dynasty, more than a thousand were, as we are informed, altogether barren of events worthy of record. From Ninyas, the son of Semiramis, the first of that character, a race of Rois Fainéants succeeded-without doing any one great achievement or suffering any one memorable revolution. The plain and glaring truth is, that later ages knew nothing whatever about the period; as no one knew what was done, the complacent later historians determined that nothing was done. We should have made an exception ; there is one single so-called historic fact, one event recorded, which, as coming from a Greek historian, is no less strange than suspicious-it is the mission by the Assyrian King Teutames, of Memnon, at the head of a powerful force, 20,000 foot and 200 chariots, to his vassal, King Priam, during the siege of Troy. And Ctesias would persuade us that he read this in the royal archives! What archives? Ctesias of Cnidos was, as is well known, a contemporary of Xenophon, and employed as a physician at the court of Persia. It is marvellous surely how this fragment, and this fragment alone, not only of ante-Persian, but of ante-Babylonian history, should find its way among the records of the house of Darius. We dwell on this the more because it is one of those cases in which Mr. Layard has betrayed some want of discrimination. We will not quite say that he relates it as if persuaded of its credibility, though in a note he somewhat gravely rebukes the blunder of Virgil in With Mr. Grote we making Memnon a black. must take the freedom of abandoning the whole story to "the Legend of Troy," and we know not why the cyclic Ethiopis, from which no doubt Virgil borrowed his black Memnon, is not quite as good history as this strange passage of the Cnidian physician. It may be uncourteous, but it is tempting to speculate, whether Ctesias invented the fable, either as a court flatterer, to prove the ancient title of the great Eastern sovereigns to the allegiance of the kings of Asia Minor; or as a patriotic Greek, to boast of the total defeat of the first great Eastern host which encountered the Greeks in those regions. This is the great problem which must test the sagacity of foreign and English scholars, the Lassens and Bournoufs of the continent, our own Rawlinsons, Birches, and Layards. There is every probability that it will turn out, if ever clearly deciphered, a Semitic language; but even on this point there is as yet no absolute certainty. stance, that the act of Sardanapalus, in making his guage. This chasm of above 1000 years, which Diodorus has left in the Assyrian history, is filled up with a barren list of names by the Christian chronologists, by Eusebius and Syncellus, who frequently differ in the number and the names of the kings. We know not whether they took, either directly or through later writers, from Ctesias, the names which Diodorus suppressed as unworthy of record, or drew them from some other, perhaps more questionable, source. The biblical records, which we must remember do not assert themselves to be the history of the world, but of one peculiar race, afford no information; yet neither is their silence to be considered as any valid objection. A mighty empire may have existed on the Tigris, as it certainly existed in Egypt, after Abraham, and long before Abraham, but would by no means necessarily find its place in the annals of the race of Abraham. On the progress made in the deciphering this arrow-headed writing, though not unwatchful of its extent, at present we must decline to enter, and for obvious reasons; want of space, and consequent inability to make the subject intelligible to the ordinary reader. We are anxiously waiting too the communication of Major Rawlinson's latest and most mature views, his ultimate judgment on the Assyrian character and language. This we know at present only from rumor and from casual hints in Mr. Layard's volumes. But having acknowledged our full trust, as far as its general truth, in Major Rawlinson's interpretation of the great tri-charactered or trilinguar inscription of Bisutun, and looking with anxious expectation for the details of his announced discovery of the annals of the Ninevite kings, we can only express our most friendly solicitude that the students in this difficult inquiry may not imperil their science by crude or hasty conclusions. Mr. Layard mentions one very happy mutual testimony furnished by the interpreters of Egyptian and of cuneiform What, then, if at this period of the world we writing. The same name, expressed in the parshould recover history which has perished from allel columns of a bilinguar inscription, in hierothe memory of man since the fall of Nineveh, glyphics and arrow-headed characters, was read history of which the Greeks, perhaps the Persians, off, (without any communication between the parwere altogether ignorant? It is difficult to doubt ties,) the arrow-headed from Major Rawlinson's that much which is historical is wrapped up in the alphabet, the hieroglyphic by Sir Gardner Willong inscriptions that accompany every siege or kinson, as "Artaxerxes." But it is discouraging, battle-piece; assign his proper name to every as to the Assyrian cuneiform, to find such senking; and contain within their hidden character tences as these in Mr. Layard's book: "Letters a succession of kings, with their most memorable differing widely in their forms, and evidently the achievements. There then are the records, the most opposite in their phonetic powers, are interarchives of Nineveh; and many of these of great changeable. The shortest name may be written length are now secured from further destruction. in a variety of ways:—every character in it may They have been copied with the utmost care; and be changed.”—(Vol. ii., p. 190.) We do not transferred from the perishable stone or alabaster mean to assert that the principles of these variato printed pages, which the careful philologist may tions may not hereafter be discovered, and their study at his leisure in his own chamber, and with laws laid down by long and patient philological inall the aids of learning. But they are not only investigation, and by analogy with other languages; a character, if known at all, (for Major Rawlinson's but we must think that caution becomes more and is the Persian, not Assyrian alphabet,) as yet im- more imperative; that every step must be secured perfectly known :—a character, which, no doubt, before another can be made in advance. We varied so considerably with the different races must, moreover, plead guilty to some misgivings, which employed it, that to read it to good purpose when we find a particular character with the force on the stones of Nimroud, may almost require a of the letter N assigned to it by Mr. Layard; new discovery as felicitous as that of Grotefend, while another zealous student-whose able, though, Lassen, and Rawlinson. That the Assyrians, as we must be permitted to say, somewhat confused, the oldest people who had attained to any degree papers demand a closer examination than we have of civilization, should have been the inventors of been able to bestow upon them, but who is acthis cuneiform, arrow-headed or wedged-shaped knowledged at all hands to have developed the writing, is in itself highly probable; and their form system of numerals with success-while Dr. of letters would be, as accordingly Mr. Layard Hincks is convinced it is either the name, or an actually asserts that it is, the most simple and least abbreviation of the name, of Athur, the kingdom complicated. But beyond this there is the further of Assyria. All to which Mr. Layard has asdifficulty; we have not merely to decipher the pired in the present work, is the detection of cercharacter, but to discover and interpret the lan-tain names of kings, following each other in regu |