His first occupation was to crush a revolt in Egypt. Tirhakah was once more driven out of the country, and Thebes, called Ni in the Assyrian texts, and No-Amon, or 'No of the god Amun' in Scripture, was plundered and destroyed. Its temples were hewed in pieces, and two of its obelisks, weighing 70 tons in all, were carried as trophies to Nineveh. It is to this destruction of the old capital of the Pharaohs that Nahum refers in his prophecy (iii. 8).
Meanwhile Tyre had been besieged and forced to surrender, and Cilicia had paid homage to the Assyrian king. Gog, or Gyges, of Lydia, too, voluntarily sent him tribute, including two Kimmerian chieftains whom the Lydian sovereign had captured in battle. When the Lydian ambassadors arrived in Nineveh they found no one who could understand their language; in fact, the very name of Lydia had been unknown to the Assyrians before.
The Assyrian Empire had now reached its widest limits. Elam had fallen after a long and arduous struggle. Shushan, its capital, was razed to the ground, and the three last Elamite kings were bound to the yoke of Assur-bani-pal's chariot, and made to drag their conqueror through the streets of Nineveh. The Kedarites and other nomad tribes of Northern Arabia were also chastised, the land of the Minni was overrun, and the Armenians of Van begged for an alliance with the Assyrian king.
But while at the very height of his prosperity, the empire was fast slipping away from under Assur-bani-pal's feet. In b.c. 652 a rebellion broke out headed by his brother, the Babylonian viceroy, which shook it to the foundations. Babylonia, Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia made common cause against the oppressor. Lydia sent Karian and Ionic mercenaries to Psammetikhos of Sais, with whose help he succeeded in overthrowing his brother satraps, and in delivering Egypt from the Assyrian yoke. The revolt in Babylonia took long to quell, and for a time the safety of Assur-bani-pal himself was imperilled. At last in 647 Babylon and Cuthah were reduced by famine, and Samas-sum-yukin burnt himself to death in his palace. Fire and sword were carried through Elam, and the last of its monarchs became an outlawed fugitive.
When Assyria finally emerged from the deadly struggle, Egypt was lost to it for ever, and Babylonia was but half subdued. The latter province was placed under the government of Kandalanu, who ruled over it for twenty-two years, more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy. His successor, Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, threw off all semblance of submission to Nineveh, and prepared the way for the empire of his son. But meanwhile the once proud kingdom of Assyria had been contending for bare existence. Assur-bani-pal's son, Assur-etil-ilani, rebuilt with diminished splendour the palace of Calah, which seems to have been burnt by some victorious enemy; and when the last Assyrian king, Esar-haddon II, called Sarakos by the Greeks, mounted the throne, he found himself surrounded on all sides by threatening foes. Kaztarit or Kyaxares, Mamitarsu the Median, the Kimmerians, the Minni, and the people of Sepharad leagued themselves together against the devoted city of Nineveh. The frontier towns fell first, and though Esar-haddon in his despair proclaimed public fasts and prayers to the gods, nothing could ward off the doom pronounced by God's prophets against Nineveh so long before. Nineveh was besieged, captured, and utterly destroyed; and the second Assyrian Empire perished more hopelessly and completely than the first. All that survived was the old capital of the country, Assur, whose former inhabitants were allowed to return to it by Cyrus at the time when the Jewish exiles also were released from their captivity in Babylon. [2]
