MR. GEORGE SMITH'S SENNACHERIB.*
"Tnis book will disappoint the reader who has expected from The title—History of Sennacherib—to find in it a history, pro- perly so called, of that Assyrian emperor, though the addi- tional words—" translated from the Cuneiforn inscriptions "- do warn Us of the narrow limits to which the meaning of the word ." history" must here be restricted. Mr. Smith had shown, in his small History of Assyria, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, that he was well able to write a spirited and interesting narrative from the materials of which so large a part had been obtained by his own actual excavations, as well as by his skilful interpretations. But what we have now before us—the last -and unfinished work of that lamented man, from whose energy and genius we had hoped for a long-continued series of new and important discoveries in Assyriology—is a beautifully printed and scholarly edition of -the cuneiform texts, from the cylinders, bulls, tablets, and bas- reliefs on which are found the records of Sennacherib's reign, together with a verbal interlinear translation of these, and a short explanatory note at the end of each of the sections into which the texts are divided. What Mr. Smith had originally intended to do more, had he lived to complete his work, is not clear. Mr. Sayce tells us that it was expected to cover from 300 to 400 pages, but that when it had proceeded as far as page 152 it was suspended, while Mr. Smith proceeded on his last expedition to Assyria; yet he goes on to say that a few pages only—the twelve which he has added— were required to complete it We can only suppose that Mr. Sayce may mean that the cuneiform text was thus completed, but that had Mr. Smith lived, he would have added disserta- tions on the various points of chief interest, especially as to the chronology and the best method of endeavouring to reconcile the Assyrian with the Jewish and the Egyptian records of the same period. On these we should have heard Mr. Smith's latest views the more gladly, because of the great modesty which he has always shown in suspending his judgment, while stating • History of Sennachera. Translated from the Cuneiform Inscription", by George Smith. Edited by the Rev. A. H. Bayne, M.A., /so London : Williams and Xorgate. 1878. the questions clearly and fully. As it is, we can only repeat the first Niords of Mr. Sayce's preface :—" The present work is a melancholy illustration of the old adage, Man proposes, but God disposes.'" The reign of Sennacherib was about the culminating period of the Assyrian Empire, which had then lasted for above a thousand years, and was to reach its end a hundred years later. It was, in its relations with the neighbouring nations, with which it was perpetually at war, a hard and cruel military despotism, the ample descriptions of which by the Hebrew prophets, and especially by Isaiah, are confirmed by the records and the sculp- tures of the Assyrians themselves, which represent the monarchs as gloating over their devastations and deportations of the coun- tries and peoples which they conquered, and the tortures which they inflicted upon the prisoners saved for that purpose from the general massacres of their battles. Yet the Assyrians were not mere barbarians, or their empire could not have lasted, and pro- duced such results as it did, for twelve h-andred years. As Rome de- rived its civilisation from the Etruscans, Macedonia from Athens, or the Tartars from their Chinese subjects, so while "the Assyrians had a strength of limb and character, a vigour of mind and body, greater than the other tribes of Semitic descent, admirably calculated to ensure their ascendency over their weaker neighbours," they brought with them from their Babylonian ancestors, or obtained from them in successive ages, a religion, literature, method of writing, science, and other forms of civilisa- tion, which probably secured for themselves a tolerable national existence at home, whatever were the misery and ruin which they spread around them. If the evidence is conclusive on which Mr. Smith (in his History of Assyria) rests his statements that in practice the rule of the king was tempered by the advice of his councillors, while each department of the State was directed by competent officers, and there was a regular code of laws for the administration of the country; that while their astronomers divided the months into weeks, their lawgivers recognised the political importance—unknown to any other nation of antiquity except the Hebrews—of a day of rest in each week ; that various kinds of trade and commerce, contracts and leases, were understood and carried on ; and that the historical records of the nation, both contemporary and of long-past times, were preserved in public libraries, and, when necessary, translated into the language of the day :—if there is evidence of such forms of civilisation as these, we may believe that even the reign of a Seunacherib—whom Mr. Smith considers to have exhibited in excess "the vices of pride and arrogance, cruelty and lust of power "—may not have been altogether evil. And though we may refuse to accept Sennacherib's own description of himself, as the "keeper of treaties, lover of righteousness, maker of peace, pro- tector of good," and as holding "a sceptre of justice," given him by Assur, father of the gods ; yet we may probably sup- pose that such virtues were more or less found in the lives and practice of the Assyrian kings, and not merely in the imagina- tions of their official eulogists.
The annals of Sennacherib's campaigns, which alone—or with some notices of his magnificent buildings—he cared to record, would hardly have more interest for us than so many descriptions of "battles of kites and crows " (to borrow Milton's phrase), if it were not for our greater interest in the nations with whom he thus came into contact,—with Phoenicia, Cyprus, Egypt, and, above all, Judea. The student of Jewish history and politics finds much important light, though also some perplexing shadows, thrown by these Assyrian records. The picture which Isaiah draws of the Assyrian despots and conquerors is the exact counterpart of their own boastful descrip. tions of themselves and their achievements; their lists of cities taken, and nations deported, the resistless array of their troops, their contempt for other gods than their own, the amount of their plunder, the indignities and the tortures they inflicted on their prisoners, and the very phrases and imagery of their language, are the same in both. But on the other hand, there are. some perplexing difficulties, not to say contradictions, which we dis- cover when other parts of the Assyrian annals are brought into comparison with the Hebrew records of the same period. Our readers are probably aware that among the Assyrian tablets more than one copy has been found of a chronological table, from about B.C. 909 to B.C. 680, in which each year is marked by the name of a king, general, or other official personage, with an occasional note of some important event. And the various annals and other inscriptions are dated by giving the day and
month of such or such a " limmu " or eponymy for the year, while the connection between this and our own chronology is established by the following record:—" In the eponymy of Bur-sagale, prefect of Gozan, the city of .A_ssur revolted, and in the month Sivan the sun was eclipsed;" and Mr. Hind has calculated that this eclipse passed over Assyria June 15th, B.C. 763. This Assyrian Canon then fixes the date of the taking of Samaria in 721 B.C., which is also the date (as far as can be calculated) of the Hebrew records. But then the two diverge in a way for which all our learning, French, English, and German, has as yet found no explanation. For the Hebrew account says that this taking of Samaria was in the sixth year of Hezekiah's reign, and that Sennacherib's invasion of Judea was in Hezekiah's fourteenth year, or 713 B.C., while the Assyrian annals put that campaign in B.C. 701: and while Merodach Baladan, king of Babylon, is in the Hebrew history said to have sent an embassy from Babylon "in those days" to Hezekiah, he was according to the Assyrian annals at that time a fugitive, if indeed still alive, having been driven from his throne by Senna- cherib before his expedition into Judea. The persistence with which Merodach Baladan is—in the Assyrian accounts—said to have continued to make head against Sennacherib, even when in exile, might suggest that he sent the embassy to Hezekiah after his actual dethronement, but while he was still endeavouring to recover his crown, and so after and not before Sennacherib's invasion of Judea: still, some ten years must be struck out of one or other of the chronologies, in order to bring them into harmony, while each has apparently very strong evidence of its accuracy. The difficulty in reconciling Setmacherib's account of his invasion of Judwa, and his war with Egypt and Ethiopia which it involved, with the historical records of the Jews and the story given us by Herodotus, is not less great, though of a different kind. Up to the point of the siege of Lachish, the Assyrian and Jewish accounts are in remarkable accord; but then follow, on the one hand the Jewish account of a great de- struction of the Assyrian army, which is confirmed by the story which Herodotus heard from the Egyptian priests, and, on the other, Sennacherib's detailed record of his triumphant success in the campaign, and how he next year proceeded to new wars and victories in other directions. Some writers sug- gest that Sennacherib invaded Judrea a second time, in the year 690 B.C., when he is supposed to have made an expedition into Arabia, and that it was then, and not after the campaign which he has recorded so fully, that the great disaster befell him. But this is mere conjecture, without evidence to rest upon. All we can say is that the Assyrian monarchs do not record defeats or disasters upon other occasions, and we have no xeason to expect that Sennacherib would have done so now. We have no solutions of our own to propose. The learned Gutschmid would probably repeat "old Cato's warning, Chaldasos ne consulito,' " and advise more scepticism as to the reality, or at least the accuracy, of the decipherment of the inscriptions ; but we will meddle with that controversy no further than to say that the evidence in favour of the general truth of the interpretations—even of the names of the kings-- seems to us very strong.
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