L. 8. from below. Kallima-Sin is now read Kadašman-Ḫarbe (or Muruš).
P. [381], foot-note. According to Prof. W. Max Müller, Orientalische Literaturzeitung, Nov., 1902, Mer-en-Ptah and “the great sorcerer and high-priest of Memphis” were brothers, and the incident of the vision took place before Mer-en-Ptah's battle with the Libyans, when, as he himself states, he saw in a dream a figure like that of Ptah, who said to him “Take,” giving him the sword, and “Put away from thee thy faintheartedness.” Max Müller attributes the chronological error neither to Herodotus nor to the Egyptian scribes who supplied him with information, but to Hecataeus of Miletus, whose work Herodotus used—“an Egyptian would not have made such a chronological blunder.” This, naturally, much diminishes the value of the extract as a parallel to the account of the destruction of Sennacherib's army before Jerusalem.
P. [384], l. 1 ff. The following is Nabonidus's account of the murder of Sennacherib and the events which led up to it, from [pg 558] the inscription published by the Rev. V. Scheil in the Recueil des Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l'Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes, vol. XVIII., pp. 1 ff.:—
“He (this must be Sennacherib) went to Babylon, he laid its sanctuaries in ruin, he destroyed the reliefs,[342] the statues he overthrew. He took the hands of the prince, Merodach, and caused him to enter within Aššur[343]—according to the anger of the god then he treated the land. The prince, Merodach, did not cease from his wrath—for 21 years he set up his seat within Aššur. (In) later days a time arrived, the anger of the king of the gods, the lords, was then appeased. He remembered E-sagila and Babylon, the seat of his dominion. The king of Mesopotamia,[344] who during the anger of Merodach had accomplished the ruin of the land, the son born of his body slew him with the sword.”
For the Babylonians, the Assyrian king was the instrument of Merodach's wrath.
P. [385]. The British Museum “black stone” mentions Esarhaddon's elder brothers: “I, Esarhaddon, whom thou (O Merodach) hast called, in the assembly of my elder brothers, to restore those buildings” (i.e. the temples, etc., damaged by floods).
P. [393]. Nabopolassar, father of Nebuchadnezzar the Great, in an inscription found by the German expedition, and published by Dr. Weissbach in his Babylonische Miscellen, refers to the downfall of Assyria in the following words:—
“The Assyrian, who from remote days ruled all people, and with his heavy yoke oppressed the people of the land,[345] I, the weak, the humble, the worshipper of the lord of lords, by the mighty force of Nebo and Merodach, my lords, cut off their feet from the land of Akkad, and caused their yoke to be thrown off.”
As the text is not of any great length, Nabopolassar could not give details, but notwithstanding his humility, it is noteworthy that he takes all the credit to himself. The inscription is written on four cylinders from Ê-ḫatta-tila, the temple of Ninip in Šu-anna.
P. [399], l. 8. The spelling of the name of Nebuchadnezzar differs somewhat in the various inscriptions, but the meaning is always practically the same—“Nebo, protect the boundary” or “my boundary,” according as the second component ends in a or i. In Nabium (p. [398], l. 7 from below) we have an old form fully spelt out.