tries that aspired to independence; and they all formed the
resolution of overthrowing Sardanapalus. Arbaces engaged to raise the
Medes and Persians, while Balazu set on foot the insurrection in Babylon
and Chaldaea. At the end of a year the chiefs assembled their soldiers,
to the number of forty thousand, in Assyria, under the pretext of
relieving, according to custom, the troops who had served the former
year.

When once there, the soldiers broke into open rebellion. The tablet in
the British Museum tells us that the insurrection commenced at Calah in
B.C. 792. Immediately after this the confusion became so great that from
this year there was no nomination of an eponyme.

Sardanapalus, rudely interrupted in his debaucheries by a danger he had
not been able to foresee, showed himself suddenly inspired with activity
and courage; he put himself at the head of the native Assyrian troops
who remained faithful to him, met the rebels, and gained three complete
victories over them.

The confederates already began to despair of success, when Phul, calling
in the aid of superstition to a cause that seemed lost, declared to them
that if they would hold together for five days more, the gods, whose
will he had ascertained by consulting the stars, would undoubtedly give
them the victory.

In fact, some days afterward a large body of troops, whom the King had
summoned to his assistance from the provinces near the Caspian Sea, went
over, on their arrival, to the side of the insurgents and gained them a
victory. Sardanapalus then shut himself up in Nineveh, and determined to
defend himself to the last. The siege continued two years, for the walls
of the city were too strong for the battering machines of the enemy,
who were compelled to trust to reducing it by famine. Sardanapalus was
under no apprehension, confiding in an oracle declaring that Nineveh
should never be taken until the river became its enemy.

But, in the third year, rain fell in such abundance that the waters of
the Tigris inundated part of the city and overturned one of its walls
for a distance of twenty _stades_. Then the King, convinced that the
oracle was accomplished and despairing of any means of escape, to avoid
falling alive into the enemy's hands constructed in his palace an
immense funeral pyre, placed on it his gold and silver and his royal
robes, and then, shutting himself up with his wives and eunuchs in a
chamber formed in the midst of the pile, disap