Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/63

 THE HISTORY OF CIIALD/KA AND ASSYRIA. 43 SHALMANESER III. belongs the obelisk of basalt which also stands in the British Museum. Its four faces are adorned with reliefs and with a running commentary engraved with extreme care. 1 Shalmaneser was an intrepid man of war. The inscriptions on his obelisk recall the events of thirty-one campaigns waged against the neighbouring peoples under the leadership of the king himself. He was always victorious, but the nations whom he crushed never accepted defeat. As soon as his 'back was well turned they flew to arms, and again drew him from his repose in the great palace which he had built at Calach, close to that of his father. 2 Under the immediate successors of Shalmaneser the Assyrian prestige was maintained at a high level by dint of the same lavish bloodshed and truculent energy ; but towards the eighth century it began to decline. There was then a period of languor and decadence, some echo of which, and of its accompanying disasters, seems to have been embodied by the Greeks in the romantic tale of Sardanapalus. No shadow of confirmation for the story of a first destruction of Nineveh is to be found in the in- scriptions, and, in the middle of the same century, we again find the Assyrian arms triumphant under the leadership of TIGLATH PILESKR II., a king modelled after the great warriors of the earlier days. This prince seems to have carried his victorious arms as far east as the Indus, and west as the frontiers of Egypt. And yet it was only under his second successor, SARYOUKIN, or, to give him his popular name, SARGON, the founder of a new dynasty, that Syria, with the exception of Tyre, was brought into complete submission after a great victory over the Egyptians (72 1 -704). 3 In the intervals of his campaigns Sargon built the town and palace which have been discovered at Khorsabad, Dour-Saryoukin, or the " town of Sargon." His son SENNACHERIB equalled him both as a soldier and as a builder. He began by crushing the rebels of Elam and Chaldaea with unflinching severity ; in his anger he almost exterminated the inhabitants of Babylon, the perennial seat of revolt ; but, on 1 LA YARD, TJie Monuments of Nineveh, from Drawings made on the spot, Illustrated in one Hundred Plates (large folio, London : 1849), plates 53-56. 2 It is now called the Central Palace at Nimroud. 3 The chief work upon this period, the most brilliant and the best known in Assyrian history, is the Faites de Sargon of MM. OPPERT and MKNANT (Paris: 1865).