11 
on the Tigris. There they remained, unseen and unread, 
till, after a lapse of 3,000 years, they were dug up, deciphered, 
and interpreted, by natives of countries never heard of by any 
Assyrian monarch. This cylinder relates the events of five suc¬ 
cessive campaigns in which Tiglath Pileser carried his victo¬ 
rious arms among the nations bordering the upper regions of 
the Tigris and Euphrates. The lower regions, including Baby¬ 
lon, appear to have been still independent. Another of these 
clay cylinders contains the annals of Sargon (Sargina in the 
inscriptions), whose general, Tartan, is mentioned in Isaiah 
XX. 1, as besieging Azotus. His predecessor, Shalmaneser 
IV., had been engaged in expeditions against Judaea and 
Palestine, had taken Samaria, as related in 2 Kings xvii. 24, 
and attempted the reduction of Tyre. It is probable that Sargon 
had availed himself of the King's absence to usurp his throne, 
as he claims no descent from the ancient kings of Assyria. His 
monuments, on stone and clay, are so numerous that M. 
Oppert, in his Annates des Sargonides, has reconstructed from 
them the whole history of his wars and conquests. Isaiah 
warns the Jews not to put their trust in Egypt and Ethiopia, 
as capable of resisting the King of Assyria ; and the annals of 
Sargon relate that he defeated the Egyptians in a great 
battle near Gaza. The monuments of Sennacherib, his son 
and successor, are especially interesting from his connec¬ 
tion with the history of the Jews. Two cylinders, besides 
other records, give very full details of his campaigns against 
Palestine and Egypt. It was in the first of these, in the 19th 
year of his reign (686 b. c.), he tells us, that Hezekiah the Jew 
refused submission, and that he shut him up in his city, after 
reducing all the towns and. fortresses in his kingdom. These 
he detached from Hezekiah’s dominions, giving some of them 
to the King of Ashdod, some to the King of Gaza, and block¬ 
aded Jerusalem so closely that he was like a bird in a cage,” 
and whosoever went out of the gate was taken pnisoner and 
carried off. The Jew Hezekiah, he continues, was seized with 
awe of my Majesty; he dismissed the garrison which he had 
collected for the defence of his city, and sent to me at Nineveh 
thirty talents of gold and four hundred talents of silver, with 
