The Sun.
London, England, 1862-03-13 00:00:00

FRESII ASSYRIAN DISCOVERIES BY

A 5.11? HENRY RA WLINSON.

Sir Henry Rawlinson has written to the Aths-
nceum, giving the result of some recent investiga-
tions of the Assyrian tablets in the British
Museum.

London, Feb. 28, 1E62.
In examining the many fragments of the historical
tablets of Ashur-bani-pal, the son of Eser• Haddon, which
crowd the shelves of the British Museum, with a view of
arranging, if possible, one complete copy of the annals for
publication, I have, within these few days, lighted upon a
passage which had previously escaped my observation, but
which I have now found repeated in a more or less perfect
state on several of these mutilated terracotta records.
The possage is of great interest, as it furnishes the first
point of undoubted contact between Greek and Assyrian
history, and I hasten, therefore, to announce the discovery.
Ashur-bani-pal states as follows :—" Gyges was King of
Lydia, a country on the seashore, and so far off that the
kings, my fathers, who reigned before me, had never even
heard the name of it. In obedience to my royal proclama-
tion—(the proclamation is given at length, and invites all
people to do homage and offer tribute to Ashur-bani-pal,
King of Asyria, on pain of incurring the vengeance of
Ashur, King of the Gods)—the said Gyges sent his officers
to my presence to propitiate me ; and they brought with
them some Cimmerian slaves whom they had t•ken in
battle when those tribes invaded Lydia, together with a
heavy tribute. They brought these things before me at
Nineveh, and they kissed my yoke."
This Lydian tribute was brought to Nineveh, it would
seem, early in the reign of Ashur-bani• pal, perhaps as
early as B.C. 660; but the event could hardly have occurred
anterior to that date, and we must either, therefore, re-
duce by some 20 years the ordinarily received chronology,
or we must suppose the Gyges of the inscriptions to be the
Ardys of Herodotus. The Cimmerian invasion favours the
latter explanation ; but, on the other hand, we must re-
member that a passage of Dionysius (tom. vi., p. 773,
Reiske) does actually fix the commencement of the Lydian
kingdom as late as B.C. 698, so that Gyges, who reigned 38
years, would have been still living in n.o. 660. It is fur-
ther ethnologically interesting to find that the Scythians,
who invaded Lydia in the seventh century rec., and whom
Herodotus calls Cimmerians, were really the same people
as the Sacra of later history; the title of Gimirri, which
is used in this passage of Ashurbani-pal's annals (and pre-
viously, for the first time, in the annals of Esar-Haddon),
being the Assyrian equivalent for the Persian Saca in the
trilingical inscriptions of Darius Hystaspes.
Whether this name of Gimirri, however, has any real
connexion with the modern Cymri, or Celts. is, I think,
exceedingly doubtful. H. C. RAWLINSON.
London, March 4.
P.S.—Since writing the above I have continued ray
search among the hitherto unexamined tablets of the
British Museum, and have been rewarded by further dis-
coveries. Upon a broken clay tablet belonging to the
Biblical Tiglath-Pileser I have found an epitome of the
historical events of this monarch's reign from his first to
his seventeenth year. The campaigns described are-1. In
Babylonia ; 2. In Media and Armenia ; 3. In Asia Minor;
and 4. In Syria ; and the narrative throughout is far more
detailed than on the slabs, with which alone we have been
previously acquainted. In the Syrian chapter, for in-
stance, after the usual lists of kings who brought their
tribute to Tiglath-Pileser in his eighth year, and among
whom, as is already known, are Menahem of Samari
d Resin of Damascus, we have a supple-
mentary Hiram of Tyre, an
Samaria,
list of the tributary kings of Southern Syria,
which is entirely new, and which, although unfortunately
imperfect owing to a fracture in the tablet, still preserves
the names of the kings of Arced, Beth Ammon, Moab,
Ascalon, Judaea, Edom, and Gazah. The name of the
Jewi-h king ought, according to the Scriptural narrative,
to be Ahaz ! but on the tablet we find Jeho-ahaz (or, as it
is written in Assyrian in the oblique case, Yahu-khazi).
What are we to suppose from this? Was it really the case
that the Assyrians did not know the names of the foreign
kings who brought or sent them tribute ; mistaking Pekah
for his predecessor Menahem, and confounding Ahaz, king
of Judah, with Jeho-ahaz, king of Israel, who reigned a
century earlier P or has the Hebrew nomenclature come
down to us in a corrupted state ? There can be no doubt
whatever, from the general concurrency of the chronology,
as well as from the mention of Resin of Damascus, that
the Tiglath-Pileser the Second of the Assyrian annals is
the same king whose Syrian expedition is described in
2 Kings xiv.; (?) yet it is equally certain that, instead of
the Pekah and Ahaz of the Bible, we have the cuneiform
names of Menahem and Jeho-ahaz for the contemporary
monarchs of Israel and Judah,
The tablet of Tiglath-Pileser, which I am now describ-
ing, is, like all other monuments of this monarch, entirely
e
silent as to his ancestry, thus affording strong
negative
evidence that he was a usurper, and initiated
to a e second
eery
close lower dynasty of Assyria ; and it also Pointe
close connection in time between Tiglath-
"
gon, the names of the tributary kings which enumerates
Pile ser and Saryr-
being, for the most part, the same
whose conquests is narrated on
really
the
intervene betweene
" thoes of the monarchs
marbles of Khorsabad.
If the reign of Shalmaneser did
that of Tiglath•Pileser and that of Sargon, it could have
been but of very short duration. Merodach-Baladin, in-
deed,—who is stated at Khorsabad to
haventheee son
cled of Y
throne of Babylrnin the same year that
Sargon commenced his reign at Ninevah—was already in
ascended ertle
power when
cemmencement of
his career, invaded
of the Euphrates.
Babylonia; though at that time, it is
theat t he
ovue
trhy
on the sea-coast, an
true, his dominion seems to have been confined to the
Tiglath-Pilecsi ear,t
terri-
toryC R
• • .

REPRESENTATION OF WYCOMBE._Mr. Campbell
Sleigh has retired, leaving Mr. Remington Mills, the only
Liberal candidate, in the field. Mr. D. Cameron, of Hemp-
bas issued an address, in which he describes
himself as an "independent Liberal Conservative," but
say, he "has no wish to see the present Government su-
perseded," and especially praises Lord Palmerston's foreign
policy. Mr. Remington Mills addressed the electors yes-
terday in the Town-hull, and a unanimous vote in his
favour was passed, The nomination takes place on Mon-
day.