The Elamites renounced their claims to the possession of Namar, and restored the statues of the gods: Nebuchadrezzar “at once laid hold of the hands of Bel,” and thus legalised his accession to the throne. Other expeditions against the peoples of Lulurne and against the Cossæans restored his supremacy in the regions of the north-east, and a campaign along the banks of the Euphrates opened out the road to Syria. He rewarded generously those who had accompanied him on his raid against Elam. After issuing regulations intended to maintain the purity of the breed of horses for which Namar was celebrated, he reinstated in their possessions Shamuâ and his son Shamaî, the descendants of one of the priestly families of the province, granting them in addition certain domains near Upi, at the mouth of the Turnât. He confirmed Rittimerodach in possession of all his property, and reinvested him with all the privileges of which the King of Elam had deprived him. From that time forward the domain of Bitkarziabku was free of the tithe on corn, oxen, and sheep; it was no longer liable to provide horses and mares for the exchequer, or to afford free passage to troops in time of peace; the royal jurisdiction ceased on the boundary of the fief, the seignorial jurisdiction alone extended over the inhabitants and their property. Chaldæan prefects ruled in Namar, at Khalman, and at the foot of the Zagros, and Nebuchadrezzar no longer found any to oppose him save the King of Assyria.
The long reign of Assurdân in Assyria does not seem to have been distinguished by any event of importance either good or bad: it is true he won several towns on the south-east from the Babylonians, but then he lost several others on the north-west to the Mushku,* and the loss on the one side fully balanced the advantage gained on the other.
* Hommel has proved, by a very simple calculation, that
Assurdân must have been the king in whose reign the Mushku
made the inroad into the basin of the Upper Tigris and of
the Balikh, which is mentioned in the Annals of Tiglath-
pileser I. These Annals are our authority for stating
that Assurdân was on the throne for a long period, though
the exact length of his reign is not known.
His son Mutakkilnusku lived in Assur at peace,* but his grandson, Assurîshishî, was a mighty king, conqueror of a score of countries, and the terror of all rebels: he scattered the hordes of the Akhlamê and broke up their forces; then Ninip, the champion of the gods, permitted him to crush the Lulumê and the G-uti in their valleys and on their mountains covered with forests. He made his way up to the frontiers of Elam,** and his encroachments on territories claimed by Babylon stirred up the anger of the Chaldæans against him; Nebuchadrezzar made ready to dispute their ownership with him.
* Annals of Tiglath-pileser I. Mutakkilnusku himself has
only left us one inscription, in which he declares that he
had built a palace in the city of Assyria.
** Smith discovered certain fragments of Annals, which he
attributed to Assurîshishî. The longest of these tell of a
campaign against Elam. Lotz attributed them to Tiglath-
pileser I., and is supported in this by most Assyriologists
of the day.
The earlier engagements went against the Assyrians; they were driven back in disorder, but the victor lost time before one of their strongholds, and, winter coming on before he could take it, he burnt his engines of war, set fire to his camp, and returned home. Next year, a rapid march carried him right under the walls of Assur; then Assurîshishî came to the rescue, totally routed his opponent, captured forty of his chariots, and drove him flying across the frontier. The war died out of itself, its end being marked by no treaty: each side kept its traditional position and supremacy over the tribes inhabiting the basins of the Turnât and Eadanu. The same names reappear in line after line of these mutilated Annals, and the same definite enumerations of rebellious tribes who have been humbled or punished. These kings of the plain, both Ninevite and Babylonian, were continually raiding the country up and down for centuries without ever arriving at any decisive result, and a detailed account of their various campaigns would be as tedious reading as that of the ceaseless struggle between the Latins and Sabines which fills the opening pages of Roman history. Posterity soon grew weary of them, and, misled by the splendid position which Assyria attained when at the zenith of its glory, set itself to fabricate splendid antecedents for the majestic empire established by the latter dynasties. The legend ran that, at the dawn of time, a chief named Ninos had reduced to subjection one after the other—Babylonia, Media, Armenia, and all the provinces between the Indies and the Mediterranean. He built a capital for himself on the banks of the Tigris, in the form of a parallelogram, measuring a hundred and fifty stadia in length, ninety stadia in width; altogether, the walls were four hundred and eighty stadia in circumference. In addition to the Assyrians who formed the bulk of the population, he attracted many foreigners to Nineveh, so that in a few years it became the most flourishing town in the whole world. An inroad of the tribes of the Oxus interrupted his labours; Ninos repulsed the invasion, and, driving the barbarians back into Bactria, laid siege to it; here, in the tent of one of his captains, he came upon Semiramis, a woman whose past was shrouded in mystery. She was said to be the daughter of an ordinary mortal by a goddess, the Ascalonian Derketô. Exposed immediately after her birth, she was found and adopted by a shepherd named Simas, and later on her beauty aroused the passion of Oannes, governor of Syria. Ninos, amazed at the courage displayed by her on more than one occasion, carried her off, made her his favourite wife, and finally met his death at her hands. No sooner did she become queen, than she founded Babylon on a far more extensive scale than that of Nineveh. Its walls were three hundred and sixty stadia in length, with two hundred and fifty lofty towers, placed here and there on its circuit, the roadway round the top of the ramparts being wide enough for six chariots to drive abreast. She made a kind of harbour in the Euphrates, threw a bridge across it, and built quays one hundred and sixty stadia in length along its course; in the midst of the town she raised a temple to Bel. This great work was scarcely finished when disturbances broke out in Media; these she promptly repressed, and set out on a tour of inspection through the whole of her provinces, with a view to preventing the recurrence of similar outbreaks by her presence. Wherever she went she left records of her passage behind her, cutting her way through mountains, quarrying a pathway through the solid rock, making broad highways for herself, bringing rebellious tribes beneath her yoke, and raising tumuli to mark the tombs of such of her satraps as fell beneath the blows of the enemy. She built Ecbatana in Media, Semiramocarta on Lake Van in Armenia, and Tarsus in Cilicia; then, having reached the confines of Syria, she crossed the isthmus, and conquered Egypt and Ethiopia. The far-famed wealth of India recalled her from the banks of the Nile to those of the Euphrates, en route for the remote east, but at this point her good fortune forsook her: she was defeated by King Stratobates, and returned to her own dominions, never again to leave them. She had set up triumphal stelae on the boundaries of the habitable globe, in the very midst of Scythia, not far from the Iaxartes, where, centuries afterwards, Alexander of Macedon read the panegyric of herself which she had caused to be engraved there. “Nature,” she writes, “gave me the body of a woman, but my deeds have put me on a level with the greatest of men. I ruled over the dominion of Ninos, which extends eastwards to the river Hinaman, southwards to the countries of Incense and Myrrh, and northwards as far as the Sacaa and Sogdiani. Before my time no Assyrian had ever set eyes on the sea: I have seen four oceans to which no mariner has ever sailed, so far remote are they. I have made rivers to flow where I would have them, in the places where they were needed; thus did I render fertile the barren soil by watering it with my rivers. I raised up impregnable fortresses, and cut roadways through the solid rock with the pick. I opened a way for the wheels of my chariots in places to which even the feet of wild beasts had never penetrated. And, amidst all these labours, I yet found time for my pleasures and for the society of my friends.” On discovering that her son Ninyas was plotting her assassination, she at once abdicated in his favour, in order to save him from committing a crime, and then transformed herself into a dove; this last incident betrays the goddess to us. Ninos and Semiramis are purely mythical, and their mighty deeds, like those ascribed to Ishtar and Gilgames, must be placed in the same category as those other fables with which the Babylonian legends strive to fill up the blank of the prehistoric period.*
* The legend of Ninos and Semiramis is taken from Diodorus
Siculus, who reproduces, often word for word, the version of
Ctesias.
Drawn by Boudier, from the sketch published in Longpérier.