The Press.
London, England, 1854-09-23 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

which Colonel Rawlinson thinks is the Upper
Nahrwan.

" ' The fear of my gods, Asshur and the Sun, fell
upon the people of the country, and they submitted
to my power. The men of the country I defeated,
and I gave over their property and their gods to my
own people. I crossed the Turnab by a bridge (or
by fording). The city of Tikne, and two hundred
towns in the vicinity, I destroyed, and overthrew, and
burnt with fire. I ravaged the country of Yal►roman,
and attacked the city of Dihhina. The fear of
Asshur fell upon the people, and they submitted.'
" More details follow, all in the same style, till the
King fairly enters Akkidim.
" Then,' he adds, the people feared from the
wrath of my victorious troops, and from the power of
my army, whose conquests were not to be arrested,
and they betook themselves to the city of —, which
was their capital city, and situated on the river
Surabbi, the waters of which were impassable to an
army, and around which were 447 dependent towns.
This city I took by assault, and I slew 18,000 of the
garrison. Their blood ran like the waters of the
rivers which surrounded their city : 3,000 of the in-
habitants I took alive. The wealth or arms of the
garrison, plentiful as drops of rain, I gave over to my
troops ; the city I destroyed and overthrew, and
burned with fire. The Mersdach . . . betook him-
self to his army. He collected the Chaldeans, the
Elamites, the Mimri, and the Arameans—forces in-
numerable—and came to meet me in battle. On the
river Dab, below the city of (as above), I fought
with his army and their auxiliaries, and defeated
them; 5,000 of the fighting men I slew; 2,000 1
took alive, 1,000 chariots, 2,000 tents, the royal pavi-
lion and standard, and the whole camp I captured.'
And so the inscription ends abruptly. After giving
the above professedly hasty sketch of the annals of
Shamasphul, Colonel Rawlinson notices a few points
of the geography of Assyria at that early period; the
rivers Surab and Dab he believes to be the Sure and
Zab of the Arabs, the left branch of the Euphrates,
which bifurcated at Babylon. He had formerly sup-
posed the Surab to be the Kukha; but he believes
that Shamasphul could not have gone so far without
much more fighting than is narrated in the annals.
He also remarks on Akkadim, applying here, as on
the older obelisk, to Babylonia, so far north as the
Assyrian frontier, whereas, in after times the name
was restricted to the lower country. The colonel
states that he has been down the river to Bassorah,
whence he has shipped off several cases to the British
Museum and Crystal Palace by the Acbar steam-
frigate, which was sent up from Bombay for that
purpose, so that we may expect these valuable relics
in a few months.
" The excavations of Mr. Taylor atiUmgheir have
satisfactorily proved the architectural plan of the
Babylonian and Chaldean temples, showing that they
were built stage upon stage, with a single chamber
at the summit as the adytum—i►► fact, in precise ac•
cordance with the description gi'.en of the Temple of
Jupiter Belus, by Herodotus, 1181. Five cylinders,
covered with writing, have also resulted from Mr.
Taylor's researches ; and a great number of bricks,
with names of Kings not found on the monuments
previously discovered. From these relics Colonel
Rawlinson has sent home lists of names, some of
them being of monarchs who must have reigned over
the plains of Mesopotamia before the establishment
of the Assyrian empire, and others of governors of
provinces of the country, under the authority of the
supreme monarch. The chronology of Assyria
has received a valuable accession by the dis-
covery of a record of one of the early Kings,
whose name is read Tiglath-Pileser, like that
of the later King of Assyria known to the Hebrews,
Tiglath-Pileser the First, was shown to have flou-
rished 418 years before the reign of Sennacherib,
by a passage in an inscription which had peen trans-
lated by Dr. Hincks, to whom Mr. Layard communi
cated a copy. The same learned scholar subse-
quently found a cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser in the
British Museum, recording the construction of a
temple at a !preceding date, which he satisfactorily
proved to correspond either with 1750 or 1840 B.C.
This discovery he published in the month of July ;
and it is gratifying to be enabled to state that Colonel
Rawlinson fully confirms this discovery, having since
found a duplicate cylinder in a more perfect condi-
tion, which shows that the earlier date—or 1840
B.C.—is the correct one. The colonel's letter which
communicated this was read at a meeting of the
4th of March last. From letters more recently re-
ceived from that gentleman we learn that he has
read the name of Semiramis on a statue of the god
Nebo, dug up from the ruins of the Palace of Nim-
rod. Semiramis appears, in a legend upon the statue,
to have been really the wife of Pul, King of Assyria,
the same as is mentioned in the Book of Kings, the
contemporary of Menahem, King of Israel. This
would place Semiramis 150 years before Nebuchad-
nezzar, which will curiously confirm the tradition
recorded by Herodotus, that this Queen preceded
Nitocris by five generations, equal to 150 years. It
is observed by the colonel► that the works which

Herodotus attributes to Nitocris were certainly
erected by Nebuchadnezzar, as is duly attested by
Berossus, and recorded in the Babylonian Cunei-
form Annals; ' and he conjectures accordingly that
Nitocris was the wife of Nebuchadnezzar.