ASSYRIA
ASSYRIA
179
wat, witli its sculptures dating from the 9th cent. B.C. (see below, under Slialmaneser II.), and 1400 more tablets from the library of As.surbanipal, not to speak of the ' finds ' on Bab. ground niaile in 1878-71t and 1880-81. Since then no further systematic excavations have been organised in Assyria, but every year some fresh Assyr. relics are brought to England through the agents of the British .Museum.
Several Assyr. monuments and inscriptions have also coine to light outside Assyria. To this class belong, first of all, the statues of the As.syr. kings found at Xahr el-lvelb, or Dog Kiver, two leagues north of Beirut ; next, some inscriptions of the kings found in the district at the source of the Tigris, and in the ruins of Kurkh, 20 miles beyond Diarbekr ; and, above all, the tablets, dating from li.C. 1500, discovered about the end of 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Ksypt. Among these were the letters written in cuneiform charac- ters and directed to the I'haraohs Amenhotep HI. and IV., the greater number of which are now in the Berlin .Museum, though a good many are in the Briti.sh Museum, and a few in Cairo. The last included a letter written by the Assyr. king Assur-uballit to Amenhotep IV. It may be here remarked that the letters of the kings of Mitanni (on the middle Euphrates), which belong to tlie Tel el-Amarna find, are also written in Assyr. cuneiform characters, as is the case with the so- called Van inscriptions of the Armenian kings, which belong to a later time, B.C. 800. As.syr. inscriptions have also been found in Cappadocia, which probably date about B.C. 2000, but unfor- tunately they do not contain the names of any kinss.
Kiiially, a short account must be given of the valuable find some years ago — also made outside As.syria — in Zinjirli near Mar'a.sh, on the borders of Cilicia and Syria, by the Oriental ethnologist Felix von l.uschan. After the discovery by L. Ho.ss in 1845 of a stele of Sargon in Cyprus, Luschan found in the neighbourhood of Zinjirli (the A.ssyr. va-ssal slate of Sam'al) a monument of the Assyr. king Esarliaddon, with a full inscription, besides eighteen llittite scul)>tures and three old Aramaic inscriptions. Both the moiuunent of Sargon and that of Ksailmddon are in the Hoyal Museum .at Berlin, which also contains the many relics dug up in Zinjirli.
The excavations just described have brought to light Assyr. inscriptions which constitute our primnrij simrccs for As.syr. history. These sources are most copious, being composed not only of annals and the so-called votive insrriptions which form the most important element, but also of decrees, letters, reports, sale-contracts, etc. Chronicles too, which date from the first beginnings of real historiography, were discovered. While the inscriptions of the kings were written either on the walls of the palaces or on obeli.sks and monoliths, lu- even on the sides of rocks, the chronicles were found in the As.syr. librarii's. The two most complete wiu"ks that have vtniw down to us are: (I) the so-calliHl <S'vh- chronistic llinUirtj of ISiihiilniiia and Aiinyria, from c. B.C. 1400-HiH), in which there is unfortunately a great g.ap between li.c. 1050-000; and (2) the lialiiiliiiiitdi Vhronirle, which covers the time from Nabona.ssar t« A.ssurbanipal (744-(JU8). Since Babylonia all through this period was subject to the supremacy of Assyria, the last-mentioned do<Miinent, which is of paramount importance, affords far more valuable contributions towards Assyrian th.an towards Babylonian history. Most welcome light is also thrown on As.syrian history by other Babylonian documents, of which we may mention a long inscription, which has been brought to Constantinople, of the Babylonian king Nabo-
nidus, dealing with the invasions of Assyria by the .Medes.
Second in importance as sources for the history of Assyria come the Books of the Kings of Israel. which form a most valuable complement to the official account of the Assyr. kings, the latter being sometimes a little coloured and not always absolutely true to fact. Furthermore, we have tiie Prophetic Literature of the OT, which is in many respects more important for our subject than the historical records. Last of all may be mentioned the records of the Classical Uistoriuns, which, how- ever, with the single exception of the famous Canon of I'tolemy, as it is called, are of very little use.
This table of rulers, which begins with Xabon- assar, B.C. 747, brings us to the question of Chron- ology. It contains the list of Bab. kings (including also the As.syrians Poros [Puru, Tiglath-pileser], Sargon, and Esarhaddon), with accurate particulars of the dates of their reigns, down to Xabonidu.s. Then it gives their Acliieinenid;ean successors down to Alexander the Great, and ends with the rulers of Egypt (the Ptolemies and the Bomans). The Canon of Ptolemy was appended to the well-known astronomical work of Claudius Plolemanis, as a commentary (based on Bab. and Alex, computa- tions) upon the ccliijses of the sun and moon alleged to have been seen; and consequently it bears within itself the guarantee of its trust- worthiness. The statements of the Bab. Chronicle and the many chronological notes on Assyr. and Bab. inscriptions were confirmed by it, and, con- versely, confirmed its accuracy. It also furnished the key for determining the chronology of the most im- portant Assyr. chronological document, the Eponym Canon, found in the library of Assurbanijial.