s
secondary and dependent upon hers. The exaggeration in which Orientals
indulge, with a freedom that astonishes the sober nations of the West,
would seize upon the unusual circumstance of a female having possessed a
conjoint sovereignty, and would gradually group round the name a host of
mythic details, which at last accumulated to such an extent that, to
prevent the fiction from becoming glaring, the queen had to be thrown
back into mythic times, with which such details were in harmony. The
Babylonian wife of Vul-lush III., who gave him his title to the regions
of the south, and reigned conjointly with him both in Babylonia and
Assyria, became first a queen of Babylon, ruling independently and
alone, and then an Assyrian empress, the conqueror of Egypt and
Ethiopia, the invader of the distant India, the builder of Babylon, and
the constructor of all the great works which were anywhere to be found
in Western Asia. The grand figure thus produced imposed upon the
uncritical ancients, and was accepted even by the moderns for many
centuries. At length the school of Heeren and Niebuhr, calling common
sense to their aid, pronounced the figure a myth. It remained for the
patient explorers of the field of Assyrian antiquity in our own day to
discover the slight basis of fact on which the myth was founded, and to
substitute for the shadowy marvel of Ctesias a very prosaic and
commonplace princess, who, like Atossa or Elizabeth of York,
strengthened her husband's title to his crown, but who never really made
herself conspicuous by either great works or by exploits.

With Vul-lush III., the glories of the Nimrud line of monarchs come to a
close, and Assyrian history is once more shrouded in a partial darkness
for a space of nearly forty years, from B.C. 781 to B.C. 745. The
Assyrian Canon shows us that three monarchs bore sway during this
interval--Shalmaneser III., who reigned from B.C. 78l to B.C. 771,
Asshur-dayan III., who reigned from B. C. 771 to B.C. 753, and
Asshur-lush, who held the throne from the last-mentioned date to B.C..
745, when he was succeeded by the second Tiglatli-Pileser. The brevity
of these reigns, which average only twelve years apiece, is indicative
of troublous times, and of a disputed, or, at any rate, a disturbed
succession. The fact that none of the three monarchs left buildings of
any importance, or, so far as appears, memorials of any kind, marks a
period of comparative decline, during which there