THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION 



149 



story of his brutality to be written indel- 

 ibly upon the walls of his house. 



But this is not the whole of the pic- 

 ture. Side by side with the ruthlessness 

 of this monster you have to place the 

 other aspect of his nature, where you see 

 him, a great and lordly gentleman, with 

 a notable taste for the fine arts, planning 

 and executing some of the most magnifi- 

 cent of buildings. 



His great palace of Kalah stood 350 

 feet square on a high platform facing 

 the temple which he had built to the god 

 Ninib. In its center was a court meas- 

 uring 125 feet by 100. Round this court 

 were grouped the innumerable rooms and 

 galleries of the great palace, chief among 

 them the throne room, which measured 

 154 feet by 33. The curious narrowness 

 of the chambers is very noticeable, show- 

 ing the continued prevalence of the old 

 Babylonian tradition, which was due to 

 lack of good building stone and scarcity 

 of timber. 



Round each room ran a range of sculp- 

 tured alabaster slabs, showing the king 

 at war, at the hunt, fording the river, or 

 marching through the mountains ; while 

 all the cruel details of his merciless war- 

 fare were represented to the life. In- 

 scriptions ran along the slabs, giving 

 practically a history of the king's reign 

 from year to year. 



The narrow galleries were roofed with 

 cedar beams, decorated with gold, silver, 

 and bronze, and gay with color. At the 

 doorways stood monstrous figures of 

 winged man-headed bulls or lions, head 

 and shoulders carefully wrought out as 

 though the creatures were leaping out of 

 the walls, the rest left only suggested in 

 outline. These were the divine spirits 

 which guarded the entrance to the king's 

 house. 



DESCRIBES HIS PALACE 



Ashur-natsir-pal thus describes his own 

 palace : "A palace for my royal dwelling- 

 place, for the glorious seat of my royalty, 

 I founded for ever, and splendidly 

 planned it ; I surrounded it with a cor- 

 nice of copper. Sculptures of the crea- 

 tures of land and sea carved in alabaster 

 I made, and placed them at the doors. 

 Lofty door-posts of cedar wood I made. 



and sheathed them with copper, and set 

 them upon the gates. Thrones of costly 

 woods, dishes of ivory containing silver, 

 gold, lead, copper, and iron, the spoil of 

 my hand, taken from conquered lands, I 

 deposited therein." 



Such was a great Assyrian monarch 

 on the evidence of his own records, which 

 there is no reason to doubt ; surely the 

 strangest combination of absolute brute 

 savagery and luxurious and artistic taste 

 that has ever walked this earth. Multi- 

 ply Ashur-natsir-pal by the dozen, and 

 you have some idea of the misery and the 

 slaughter for which the great Assyrian 

 Empire was responsible during a period 

 of at least 500 years. 



SENNACHERIB RAVAGES PALESTINE 



Ashur-natsir-pal was succeeded by 

 Shalmaneser II (860-825 B. C), first of 

 the Assyrian kings who make mention of 

 Israel in their inscriptions. He reigned 

 for thirty-five years, and during that time 

 he commanded in thirty-two campaigns, 

 which gives an idea of how much spare 

 time for peaceful industry was left to 

 the Assyrian State. As a matter of fact, 

 Assyria lived upon spoil. She was simply 

 the greatest of all robber communities, 

 and her staple industry was plundering 

 the unlucky peoples who were rich 

 enough to excite her envy and too weak 

 to resist her violence. 



Sennacherib was perhaps the most 

 widely famous of all Assyrian monarchs. 

 For us, of course, Sennacherib is the 

 Assyrian who "came down like a wolf on 

 the fold," and we think of him chiefly 

 as the assailant of Judah, whose pride 

 was so mysteriously brought low by the 

 great disaster recorded in II Kings xix : 

 35 : "The angel of the Lord went out, 

 and smote in the camp of the Assyrians 

 an hundred four score and five thousand : 

 and when they arose early in the morn- 

 ing, behold they were all dead corpses." 



As a matter of fact, however, Sen- 

 nacherib's dealings with Hezekiah of 

 Judah were but a small portion of a vast 

 campaign, and the disaster which hap- 

 pened to his army, perfectly accurately 

 recorded in Scripture, took place not near 

 Jerusalem, but down on the frontier of 

 Egypt. 



