300 On Scriptural and profane Accounts 
with Nineveh. The first mention of con- 
quering monarchs at Nineveh, in the Jewish 
annals, is in the reign of Pul, 771 B. C., by 
whom and his successors Syria and Palestine 
were invaded, and the two branches of the 
Jewish people reduced to dependence and 
captivity. (7) 
Such is the antiquity and uninterrupted 
series of the Jewish annals, and the position. 
of this nation relatively to a power on the 
banks of the Tigris, extending its dominions 
westward, that we may safely say, that had 
any such power existed previously to the 8th 
century before Christ, it must have come into 
collision with the Jewish nation, and that 
collision must have been recorded in Jewish 
history. We are next to see how far profane 
history agrees with sacred. 
From Herodotus, whose Assyrian history 
is lost, we learn little more in his general 
history, (3) than that the Assyrians had been 
masters of Upper Asia (Asia beyond the 
Halys) 520 years, when the Medes shook off 
the yoke; which, reckoned backwards from 
710 B. C., brings us to 12830 B.C. As how- 
ever he does not describe the extent of their 
power, his account is not irreconcileable 
with scripture, since they might be masters 
of Upper Asia, without holding the sea-coast, 
