ns, B.C. 680.

His son Esar-Haddon succeeded him, a warlike monarch, who fought the
Egyptians, and colonized Samaria with Babylonian settlers. He also built
the palace of Nimrod, and cultivated art.

(M167) The civilization of the Assyrians shows a laborious and patient
people. Its chief glory was in architecture. Sculpture was imitated from
nature, but had neither the grace nor the ideality of the Greeks. War was
the grand business of kings, and hunting their pleasure. The people were
ground down by the double tyranny of kings and priests. There is little of
interest in the Assyrian annals, and what little we know of their life and
manners is chiefly drawn by inductions from the monuments excavated by
Botta and Layard. The learned treatise of Rawlinson sheds a light on the
annals of the monarchy, which, before the discoveries of Layard, were
exceedingly obscure, and this treatise has been most judiciously abridged,
by Smith, whom I have followed. It would be interesting to consider the
mythology of the Assyrians, but it is too complicated for a work like
this.

(M168) Under his successors, the empire rapidly declined. Though it
nominally included the whole of Western Asia, from the Mediterranean to
the desert of Iran, and from the Caspian Sea and the mountains of Armenia
to the Persian Gulf, it was wanting in unity. It embraced various
kingdoms, and cities, and tribes, which simply paid tribute, limited by
the power of the king to enforce it. The Assyrian armies, which committed
so great devastations, did not occupy the country they chastised, as the
Romans and Greeks did. Their conquests were like those of Tamerlane. As
the monarchs became effeminated, new powers sprung up, especially Media,
which ultimately completed the ruin of Assyria, under Cyaxares. The last
of the monarchs was probably the Sardanapalus of the Greeks.

(M169) The decline of this great monarchy was so rapid and complete, that
even Nineveh, the capital city, was blotted out of existence. No traces of
it remained in the time of Herodotus, and it is only from recent
excavations that its site is known. Still, it must have been a great city.
The eastern wall of it, as it now appears from the excavations, is fifteen
thousand nine hundred feet (about three miles); but the city probably
included vast suburbs, with fortified towers, so as to have been equal to
four hundred and eighty stadias in circumference, or sixty miles--the three
days' journey of J