and held out as long as he could; but when all his resources were exhausted—­ammunitions of war, men and food supplies—­he met his fate as a king, and burnt himself alive in his palace with his children and his wives, rather than fall alive into the hands of his conquerors (608 B.C.).  The Babylonians would take no part in pillaging the temples, out of respect for the gods, who were practically identical with their own, but the Medes felt no such scruples.  “Their king, the intrepid one, entirely destroyed the sanctuaries of the gods of Assur, and the cities of Accad which had shown themselves hostile to the lord of Accad, and had not rendered him assistance.  He destroyed their holy places, and left not one remaining; he devastated their cities, and laid them waste as it were with a hurricane.”  Nineveh laid low, Assyria no longer existed.  After the lapse of a few years, she was named only among the legends of mythical days:  two centuries later, her very site was forgotten, and a Greek army passed almost under the shadow of her dismantled towers, without a suspicion that there lay before it all that remained of the city where Semiramis had reigned in her glory.**

* It was to oppose the march of Necho against the King of Assyria that Josiah fought the battle of Megiddo (2 Kings xxiii. 29, 30; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-24, where the mention of the King of Assyria is suppressed).

** This is what the Ten Thousand did when they passed before Larissa and Mespila.  The name remained famous, and later on the town which bore it attained a relative importance.

It is true that Egypt, Chaldaea, and the other military nations of the East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued.  But the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at least, accomplished a work of civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of reprisal.  It was from Egypt and Chaldaea that the knowledge and the arts of antiquity—­astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural sciences—­spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though Chaldaea yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts of the sculptor and the architect.  But on turning to Assyria, if, after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not borrowed from extraneous sources.  She received all her inspirations from Chaldaea—­her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature:  one thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals and the excellence of her soldiery.  From the day when Assyria first realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished, and she passed away.