History in the Mounds of Nineveh.
By R.
The Bible has made us familiar with the wars of Sennacherib against Israel and Judah; the capture of their cities; the long and obstinate siege of Lachish, during which Sennacherib extorted from Hezekiah thirty talents of gold and three hundred talents of silver; that he sent forces to take Jerusalem, where 185,000 were destroyed in one night by “the angel of the Lord;” and that Sennacherib, returning to Nineveh, was slain by his own sons while worshiping the very idol he had trusted in. Twenty-five centuries have passed. The mighty power of Nineveh has disappeared; its walls and temples have been destroyed; not even a village bears the name once so famous; and infidels denied that Nineveh had ever existed, and called the Scripture narrative a fiction. But the mounds of ruins are now excavated; the remains of buried palaces explored. Their walls are found to have been formed of large stone tablets covered with historical and other inscriptions. The key to decipher many of these inscriptions has been discovered, and these ancient records confirm the Scripture. Over one highly finished bas-relief representing the king on his throne in state, with his officers around him, and many prisoners before him, some of them in the hands of “tormentors,” is this inscription: “Sennacherib the mighty king, king of the country of the Assyrians, sitting on the throne of judgment at the gate of the city Lachish—I give permission for its slaughter.” Another tablet says, “Because Hezekiah king of Judah did not submit to my yoke, forty-six of his strong-fenced cities, and innumerable smaller towns which depended on them, I took and plundered. But I left(!) to him Jerusalem his capital city.” The record also speaks of having exacted of him thirty talents of gold and eight hundred talents of silver, including perhaps the spoils of the other cities of Judah. If these stone tablets had remained exposed to the weather, they would have perished ages ago; but a sudden and overwhelming desolation entombed and thus guarded them. Little did Sennacherib imagine that his mighty capital would be obliterated, as the prophets foretold it should be; still less, that his own stone memorials of his exploits in Judea should, after48so many centuries, re-appear—to prove the divinity of the God whom he defied, and the vanity of the idol he worshiped. R.