the structures of his predecessors. The vast halls, the large portals, the sculptured alabaster slabs, the decorated walls, are wanting. A palace built by Sardanapalus, his father, however, shows a great progress in Assyrian art. Sardanapalus seems to have had a passion for the chase, and the pictures of wild animals with which he adorned his palace have a freedom, delicacy and truth unknown to previous Assyrian sculpture. Thus in Assyria, as in Greece and Rome, the arts of peace flourished in the decline of the arts of war. Of the final catastrophe which overwhelmed Nineveh, there are of course no monumental records.

Having followed the empire through its later stages, let us turn back and see what light is shed upon its earlier epoch. The oldest palace at Nimroud is that on the northwest corner of the terrace. It is obviously earlier by several generations than that of Korsabad; yet it is, next to the palace of Koyunjik, the most magnificent of the Assyrian edifices. It was a store-house of building materials for the latter princes of the empire, and has furnished a large portion of the sculptures of the British museum. The annals of its founder are very full and complete, and show him to have been a great conqueror, who carried his arms far and wide through western Asia, from Babylonia to the Mediterranean. Remarkably enough his name is Assardonpal, identical with the Sardanapalus of the later empire; and hence, perhaps, the contradictory traditions current in Asia, one of which made Sardanapalus an effeminate reveller, the other, a conquering hero, an energetic and widely ruling sovereign, who founded Auchiale and Tarsus in a day, and whose tomb was shown at Nimroud in the time of Alexander the Great. Indeed, the conical hill at Nimroud was anciently called the tomb of Sardanapalus. Layard found in it a long vaulted room, intended apparently for a sepulchre, and the bricks bearing the name of the son of Sardanapalus. The foundation he believed to have been laid by Sardanapalus himself.

The son of this Assardonpal, called by Rawlinson Shalmanubar or Shalmanassar, built the so-called central palace at Nimroud, and his deeds, comprising the annals of 31 years,

men.

are recorded on the celebrated black obelisk in the British Museum. They constitute one long series of martial enterprises. Armenia, Media, Babylonia, Phoenicia, are repeatedly invaded, sometimes by an army of an hundred thousand He conducts repeated expeditions to countries bordering on Palestine, and among his enemies are recognized Benhadad and Hazael, and among his tributaries, Jahua, son of Khumri, who, we cannot doubt, is Jehu, king of Samaria, and thus by common oriental usage called the son of its founder, Omri. This enables us to fix the date of his reign, which falls early in the ninth century, and that of his father, Sardanapalus, which must be late in the tenth.

The successor of Shalmanubar is read upon the monuments as Shamasivah; a younger son, who puts down a rebellion raised against his father by the eldest son, and consequently takes his place on the throne. His reign is of uncertain length, but the four years of his annals include important military campaigns, in one of which he captures two hundred towns, and defeats the combined forces of the Chaldeans, Elamites, and Syrians, mustered by the king of Babylon. He slays 5,000 men, and takes 2,000 prisoners, with 1,000 chariots.

The son and successor of Shamasivah is read as Ivalush, the third of that name. He is conjectured by Rawlinson to be the Pul of the Hebrew Scriptures. Pul appears in Berosus as a Babylonian prince, and it is probable that his rule embraced both Nineveh and Babylon. Ivalush seems "to have been in an especial way connected with Babylonia. He appears to style himself the king to whose son Asshur, the chief of the gods, has granted the kingdom of Babylon,' and relates that on his return from a campaign in Syria, in which he had taken Damascus, he proceeded to Babylonia, where he received the homage of the Chaldeans, and sacrificed in Babylon, Borsippa, and Cutha, to the respective gods of those cities, Bel, Nebo, and Nergal."

Our limits restrict us from pursuing the subject further. The chronology of the entire period is yet too unsettled to allow of satisfactory conclusions. In this remote region. innumerable deceptive or doubtful flashes must gleam upon

the inquirer's path, mocking, and perplexing, and often misleading him, before the separate rays gradually blend and brighten into the steady light of sure discovery. But that they ultimately will so brighten, we feel assured. From innumerable and unexpected quarters insulated facts will come to light, until at length this vast chasm in the ages will be bridged over by a series of well-ascertained and solid facts, and the growth of the Assyrian empire will become matter of history. Ascending through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the monuments present a series of names as yet but imperfectly deciphered, and of which too little is known to justify our dwelling upon them. They only appear in general as conquering and able princes, extending their dominion abroad, and establishing it at home, utterly exploding the worthless statements of Ctesias as to the imbecile character of the Assyrian sovereigns. Thus far, too, the evidence sustains Herodotus as to the antiquity of the Assyrian sway. It is interesting to see at how many vital points they corroborate the statements of the Jewish Scriptures, strengthening our conviction that, even apart from inspiration, we have in them incomparably the most trustworthy documents in the whole compass of ancient history. Their impartiality vindicates itself, and their truthfulness has thus far received attestation from every decisive evidence that has been gathered from the banks of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris.

The inscriptions indicate with striking clearness the character of the Assyrian empire. That there was no consolidation, no organizing policy, such as gave compactness and durability to the vast dominion of Rome, appears in all the records. Assyria was an empire made up of loosely aggregated kingdoms, held together by nothing but the present conscious pressure of fear and force. The kings were mere conquerors. They swoop down upon the devoted territory with the strength and swiftness of the eagle, receive homage, and levy tribute, but institute no system which shall insure the permanency of the acquisition. Hence they are perpetually fighting "their battles o'er again," reconquering the conquered, and enforcing,

by the presence of a fresh army, the tribute which was withheld as soon as the invading force was withdrawn. Hence, too, the ever-varying limits of the empire, its dependence, far more than in modern states, on the personal ability of the sovereign, and, finally, the almost incredible ease and rapidity with which it fell into dissolution, compared with the long-continued shocks which broke up the thoroughly compacted structure of Roman power.

One word as to the testimony of the monuments regarding the mythical hypothesis of Assyrian history. They evince at once the sagacity and shortsightedness of the criticism which originated it, and which, analyzing a few traditionary names of Assyrian princes, sought to explode the whole from the terra firma of history into the airy regions of fable. They establish its premises and nullify its conclusions. Amidst the varying orthography of the royal names of Assyria, certain names of deities, with certain standing epithets, are of perpetual recurrence. First, and most frequent, is the word Assar, or Asshur, the name at once of the country and of the great Assyrian war-god; in San, Nebo, Bel, we have the names of other divinities; in don, or adon, an equivalent to the Hebrew Adonai (lord); and in pal, or pul, a standing epithet for great or illustrious. These, with kindred elements, constantly enter into the names of the Assyrian monarchs. Thus Assardon-pal is Sardanapalus, Assar-don-assar or Assar-don, is our Esarhaddon. Tiglath-pal-assar draws its first element probably from the word Tigris. San-herib (Sennacherib) draws its first element probably from the god San. So Nebo-pal-assar, Nebuch-adon-assar. Of course of names thus compounded, some syllables might be often dropped; some doubtless were written that were not pronounced; official designations, like the Augustus Cæsar of the Roman emperors, might often coexist with strictly personal appellations, and thus in many ways the orthography of the princely names of Assyria and Babylon might be rendered very fluctuating. But he would be a bold man who, in the face of all the monumental records, should for any nominal reason, consign all these monarchs to the limbo of fable. Ghosts do not rear such palaces, nor chisel their deeds in marble slabs and granite pillars.

ARTICLE VI.-INDIA.*

PART FIRST-ANCIENT INDIA.

ONE of the most curious evidences of the many-sided intellectualism of the age is the readiness with which it pushes forth its vaunted energies in directions precisely opposite. With equal facility it personates the prophet and the historian, ever and anon suddenly halting in its onward progress to make its reverent salaam to hoary antiquity. Nothing more clearly indicates the complete emancipation of modern genius from all specializing tendencies than this, that an age, unparalleled in the ardor with which it engages in the work of invention, is also an age unparalleled in the enthusiasm with which it devotes itself to the enterprise of unearthing the sepulchred past. While enterprising speculators are laying out phantom cities on our western prairies, or steaming down the Mississippi on the look-out for favorable openings, or prospecting among the California placers, explorers not less enterprising are threading the Roman catacombs, and laboriously poling up the Nile, and hunting for winged bulls beyond the Euphrates. While bashful country schoolmistresses, in these summer months, are patiently drilling the unnumbered rosycheeked scions of our happy land in their pictorial alphabets, erudite linguists are themselves conning over the alphabets of languages which had ceased to be spoken when Prince Eumenes supplanted the ancient rolls with vellum leaves. At

* 1. India, Ancient and Modern. By David O. Allen, D. D., Missionary of the American Board for twenty-five years in India; Member of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Corresponding Member of the American Oriental Society. Boston: J. P. Jewett & Company. 1856.

2. The Three Presidencies of India. By John Capper, F. R. A. S. London: Ingram, Cooke & Co. 1853.

8. Modern Investigations on Ancient India. A Lecture delivered in Berlin, March 4, 1854. By Professor A. Weber. Translated from the German by Fanny Metcalfe. London: Williams & Northgate. 1857.

4. India, Pictorial, Descriptive and Historical, from the earliest times to the present. London: Henry G. Bohn. 1854.