given by the late
Mr. G. Smith, of the Archaeological Department of the British Museum.

Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, one of the kings known to the Greeks by
the name of Sardanapalus, reigned at Nineveh about B.C. 673. He was a
grandson of the Biblical Sennacherib, and son of Esarhaddon, and it
seems that he had inherited from his fathers a library of Chaldean and
Assyrian literature, written not on perishable paper or parchment, but
on tablets of clay, and containing much ancient lore of the nations
inhabiting the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Assurbanipal,
living when the Assyrian empire had attained to the acme of its
greatness, had leisure to become a greater patron of learning than any
preceding king. His scribes ransacked the record chambers of the
oldest temples in the world; and Babel, Erech, Accad, and Ur had to
yield up their treasures of history and theology to diligent copyists,
who transcribed them in beautiful arrow-head characters on new clay
tablets, and deposited them in the library of the great king. It
would appear that, at the same time, these documents were edited,
archaic forms of expression translated, and lacunae caused by decay or
fracture repaired. They were also inscribed with legends stating the
sources whence they had been derived.

The empire of Assyria went down in blood, and its palaces were
destroyed with fire, but the imperishable clay tablets which had
formed the treasure of their libraries remained, more or less broken
it is true, among the ruins. Exhumed by Layard and Smith, they are now
among the collections of the British Museum, and their decipherment is
throwing a new and strange light on the cosmogony and religions of the
early East. Though the date of the writing of these tablets is
comparatively modern, being about the time of the later kings of
Judah, the original records from which they were transcribed profess
to have been very ancient--some of them about 1600 years before the
time of Assurbanipal, so that they go back to a time anterior to that
of the early Hebrew patriarchs. Their genuineness has been endorsed,
in one case, by the discovery by Mr. Loftus, in the city of Senkereh,
of an apparent original, bearing date about 1600 years before Christ,
and other inscriptions of equal or greater antiquity have been found
in the ruins of Ur, on the Euphrates. Nor does there seem any reason
to doubt that the scribes of Assurbanipal faithfully transcribed the
oldest re