[Illustration:  423.jpg STELE OF NEBUCHADREZZAR]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Pognon.  The figures have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes the rampant lion by the right paw, and while it raises its left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of the beast.

Nebuchadrezzar, thus defied by three enemies, was at a loss to decide upon which to make his first attack.  Ezekiel, whose place of exile put him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to us as he “stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination:  he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver.”  Judah formed as it were the bridge by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar could succeed in occupying it before their arrival, he could at once break up the coalition into three separate parts incapable of rejoining one another—­Ammon in the desert to the east, Tyre and Sidon on the seaboard, and Pharaoh beyond his isthmus to the south-west.  He therefore established himself in a central position at Eiblah on the Orontes, from whence he could observe the progress of the operations, and hasten with his reserve force to a threatened point in the case of unforeseen difficulties; having done this, he despatched the two divisions of his army against his two principal adversaries.  One of these divisions crossed the Lebanon, seized its fortresses, and, leaving a record of its victories on the rocks of the Wady Brissa, made its way southwards along the coast to blockade Tyre.*

* The account of this Phoenician campaign is contained in one of the inscriptions discovered and commented on by Pognon.  Winckler, the only one to my knowledge who has tried to give a precise chronological position to the events recorded in the inscription, places them at the very beginning of the reign, after the victory of Carchemish, about the time when Nebuchadrezzar heard that his father had just died.  I think that this date is not justified by the study of the inscription, for the king speaks therein of the great works that he had accomplished, the restoration of the temples, the rebuilding of the walls of Babylon, and the digging of canals, all of which take us to the middle or the end of his reign.  We are therefore left to choose between one of two dates, namely, that of 590-587, during the Jewish war, and that from the King’s thirty-seventh year to 568 B.C., during the war against Amasis which will be treated below.  I have chosen the first, because of Nebuchadrezzar’s long sojourn at Riblah, which gave him sufficient time for the engraving of the stelse on Lebanon:  the bas-reliefs of Wady.  Brissa could have been cut before the taking of Jerusalem, for no allusion to the war against the Jews is found in them.  The enemy mentioned in the opening lines is perhaps Apries,