That this Cilician war occurred late in the reign of Sennacherib, appears to follow from the absence of any account of it from his general annals. These, it is probable, extend no further than his sixteenth year, B.C. 689, thus leaving blank his last eight years, from B.C. 689 to 681. The defeat of the Greeks, the occupation of Cilicia, and the founding of Tarsus, may well have fallen into this interval. To the same time may have belonged Sennacherib’s conquest of Edom.
There is reason to suspect that these successes of Sennacherib on the western limits of his empire were more than counterbalanced by a contemporaneous loss at the extreme south-east. The Canon of Ptolemy marks the year B.C. 688 as the first of an interregnum at Babylon which continues from that date till the accession of Esar-haddon in B.C. 680. Interregna in this document—[—Greek—] as they are termed—indicate periods of extreme disturbance, when pretender succeeded to pretender, or when the country was split up into a number of petty kingdoms. The Assyrian yoke, in either case, must have been rejected; and Babylonia must have succeeded at this time in maintaining, for the space of eight years, a separate and independent existence, albeit troubled and precarious. The fact that she continued free so long, while she again succumbed at the very commencement of the reign of Esar-haddon, may lead us to suspect that she owed this spell of liberty to the increasing years of the Assyrian monarch, who, as the infirmities of age crept upon him, felt a disinclination towards distant expeditions.
The military glory of Sennacherib was thus in some degree tarnished; first, by the terrible disaster which befell his host on the borders of Egypt; and, secondly, by his failure to maintain the authority which, in the earlier part of his reign, he had estaldished over Babylon. Still, notwithstanding these misfortunes, he must be pronounced one of the most successful of Assyria’s warrior kings, and altogether one of the greatest princes that ever sat on the Assyrian throne. His victories of Eltekeh and Khaluli seem to leave been among the most important battles that Assyria ever gained. By the one Egypt and Ethiopia, by the other Susiana and Babylon, were taught that, even united, they were no match for the Assyrian hosts. Sennacherib thus wholesomely impressed his most formidable enemies with the dread of his arms, while at the same time he enlarged, in various directions, the limits of his dominions. He warred in regions to which no earlier Assyrian monarch had ever penetrated; and he adopted modes of warfare on which none of them had previously ventured. His defeat of a Greek fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean, and his employment of Phoenicians in the Persian Gulf, show an enterprise and versatility which we observe in few Orientals. His selection of Tarsus for the site of a great city indicates a keen appreciation of the merits of a locality, if he was proud, haughty, and self-confident, beyond all former Assyrian kings, it would seem to have been because he felt that he had resources within himself—that he possessed a firm will, a bold heart, and a fertile invention. Most men would have laid aside the sword and given themselves wholly to peaceful pursuits, after such a disaster as that of Pelusium. Sennacherib accepted the judgment as a warning to attempt no further conquests in those parts, but did not allow the calamity to reduce him to inaction. He wisely turned his sword against other enemies, and was rewarded by important successes upon all his other frontiers.
But if, as a warrior, Sennacherib deserves to be placed in the foremost rank of the Assyrian kings, as a builder and a patron of art he is still more eminent. The great palace which he raised at Nineveh surpassed in size and splendor all earlier edifices, and was never excelled in any respect except by one later building. The palace of Asshur-bani-pal, built on the same platform by the grandson of Sennacherib, was, it must be allowed, more exquisite in its ornamentation; but even this edifice did not equal the great work of Sennacherib in the number of its apartments, or the grandeur of its dimensions. Sennacherib’s palace covered an area of above eight acres. It consisted of a number of grand halls and smaller chambers, arranged round at least three courts or quadrangles. These courts were respectively 154 feet by 125, 124 feet by 90, and probably a square of about 90 feet. Round the smallest of the courts were grouped apartments of no great size, which, it may be suspected, belonged to the seraglio of the king. The seraglio seems to have been reached through a single narrow passage, leading out of a long gallery—218 feet by 25—which was approached only through two other passages, one leading from each of the two main courts. The principal halls were immediately within the two chief entrances one on the north-east, the other on the opposite or south-west front of the palace. Neither of these two rooms has been completely explored: but the one appears to have been more than 150 and the other was probably 180 feet in length, while the width of each was a little more than 40 feet. Besides these two great halls and the grand gallery already described, the palace contained about twenty rooms of a considerable size, and at least forty or fifty smaller chambers, mostly square, or nearly so, opening out of some hall or large apartment. The actual number of the rooms explored is about sixty; but as in many parts the examination of the building is still incomplete, we may fairly conjecture that the entire number was not less than seventy or eighty.
The palace of Sennacherib preserved all the main features of Assyrian architecture. It was elevated on a platform, eighty or ninety feet above the plain, artificially constructed, and covered with a pavement of bricks. It had probably three grand facades—one on the north-east, where it was ordinarily approached from the town, and the two others on the south-east and the south-west, where it was carried nearly to the edge of the platform, and overhung the two streams of the Khosr-su and the Tigris. Its principal apartment was that which was first entered by the visitor. All the walls ran in straight lines, and all the angles of the rooms and passages were right angles. There were more passages in the building than usual but still the apartments very frequently opened into one another; and almost one-half of the rooms were passage-rooms. The doorways were mostly placed without any regard to regularity, seldom opposite one another, and generally towards the corners of the apartments. There was the curious feature, common in Assyrian edifices, of a room being entered from a court, or from another room, by two or three doorways, which is best explained by supposing that the rank of the person determined the door by which he might enter. Squared recesses in the sides of the rooms were common. The thickness of the walls was great. The apartments, though wider than in other palaces, were still narrow for their length, never much exceeding forty feet; while the courts were much better proportioned.
It was in the size and the number of his rooms, in his use of passages, and in certain features of his ornamentation, that Sennacherib chiefly differed from former builders. He increased the width of the principal state apartments by one-third, which seems to imply the employment of some new mode or material for roofing. In their length he made less alteration, only advancing from 150 to 180 feet, evidently because he aimed, not merely at increasing the size of his rooms, but at improving their proportions. In one instance alone—that of a gallery or passage-room, leading (apparently) from the more public part of the palace to the hareem or private apartments—did he exceed this length, uniting the two portions of the palace by a noble corridor, 218 feet long by 25 feet wide. Into this corridor he brought passages from the two public courts, which he also united together by a third passage, thus greatly facilitating communication between the various blocks of buildings which composed his vast palatial edifice.
The most striking characteristic of Sennacherib’s ornamentation is its strong and marked realism. It was under Sennacherib that the practice first obtained of completing each scene by a background, such as actually existed as the time and place of its occurrence. Mountains, rocks, trees, roads, rivers, lakes, were regularly portrayed, an attempt being made to represent the locality, whatever it might be, as truthfully as the artist’s skill and the character of his material rendered possible. Nor was this endeavor limited to the broad and general features of the scene only. The wish evidently was to include all the little accessories which the observant eye of an artist might have noted if he had made his drawing with the scene before him. The species of trees is distinguished, in Sennacherib’s bas-reliefs; gardens, fields, ponds, reeds, are carefully represented; wild animals are introduced, as stags, boars, and antelopes; birds fly from tree to tree, or stand over their nests feeding the young who stretch up to them; fish disport themselves in the waters; fishermen ply their craft; boatmen and agricultural laborers pursue their avocations; the scene is, as it were, photographed, with all its features—the least and the most important—equally marked, and without any attempt at selection, or any effort after artistic unity.
In the same spirit of realism Sennacherib chooses for artistic representation scenes of a commonplace and everyday character. The trains of attendants who daily enter his palace with game and locusts for his dinner, and cakes and fruit for his dessert, appear on the walls of his passages, exactly as they walked through his courts, bearing the delicacies in which he delighted. Elsewhere he puts before us the entire process of carving and transporting a colossal bull, from the first removal of the huge stone in its rough state from the quarry, to its final elevation on a palace mound as part of the great gateway of a royal residence. We see the trackers dragging the rough block, supported on a low flat-bottomed boat, along the course of a river, disposed in gangs, and working under taskmasters who use their rods upon the slightest provocation. The whole scene must be represented, and so the trackers are all there, to the number of three hundred, costumed according to their nations, and each delineated with as much care as it he were not the exact image of ninety-nine others. We then observe the block transferred to land, and carved into the rough semblance of a bull, in which form it is placed on a rude sledge and conveyed along level ground by gangs of laborers, arranged nearly as before, to the foot of the mound at whose top it has to be placed. The construction of the mound is most elaborately represented. Brickmakers are seen moulding the bricks at its base, while workmen, with baskets at their backs, full of earth, bricks, stones, or rubbish, toil up the ascent—for the mound is already half raised—and empty their burdens out upon the summit. The bull, still lying on its sledge, is then drawn up an inclined plane to the top by four gangs of laborers, in the presence of the monarch and his attendants. After this the carving is completed, and the colossus, having been raised into an upright position, is conveyed along the surface of the platform to the exact site which it is to occupy. This portion of the operation has been represented in one of the illustrations in an earlier part of this volume. From the representation there given the reader may form a notion of the minuteness and elaboration of this entire series of bas-reliefs.
Besides constructing this new palace at Nineveh, Sennacherib seems also to have restored the ancient residence of the kings at the sane place, a building which will probably be found whenever the mound of Nebbi-Yunus is submitted to careful examination. He confined the Tigris to its channel by an embankment of bricks. He constructed a number of canals or aqueducts for the purpose of bringing good water to the capital. He improved the defences of Nineveh, erecting towers of a vast size at some of the gates. And, finally, he built a temple to the god Nergal at Tarbisi (now Sherif khan), about three miles from Nineveh up the Tigris.
In the construction of these great works he made use chiefly, of the forced labor with which his triumphant expeditions into foreign countries had so abundantly supplied him. Chaldaeans, Aramaeans, Armenians, Cilicianns and probably also Egyptians, Ethiopians, Elamites, and Jews, were employed by thousands in the formation of the vast mounds, in the transport and elevation of the colossal bulls, in the moulding of the bricks, and the erection of the walls of the various edifices, in the excavation of the canals, and the construction of the embankments. They wrought in gangs, each gang having a costume peculiar to it, which probably marked its nation. Over each was placed a number of taskmasters, armed with staves, who urged on the work with blows, and severely punished any neglect or remissness. Assyrian foremen had the general direction of the works, and were entrusted with all such portions as required skill or judgment. The forced laborers often worked in fetters, which were sometimes supported by a bar fastened to the waist, while sometimes they consisted merely of shackles round the ankles. The king himself often witnessed the labors, standing in his chariot, which on these occasions was drawn by some of his attendants.