cupation of newly
conquered countries, by the establishnient in them of large cities in
which foreign colonists were placed by the conquerors, was practice
commenced by Sargon, which his son is not unlikely to have followed.
Tarsus was always regarded by the Greeks as an Assyrian town; and
although they gave different accounts of the time of its foundation,
their disagreement in this respect does not invalidate their evidence as
to the main fact itself, which is intrinsically probable. The evidence
of Polyhistor and Abydenus as to the date of the foundation,
representing, as it must, the testimony of Berosus upon the point, is to
be preferred; and we may accept it as a fact, beyond all reasonable
doubt, that the native city of St. Paul derived, if not its origin, yet,
at any rate, its later splendor and magnificence, from the antagonist of
Hezekiah.

That this Cilician war occurred late in the reign of Sennacherib,
appears to follow from the absence of any account of it from his general
annals. These, it is probable, extend no further than his sixteenth
year, B.C. 689, thus leaving blank his last eight years, from B.C. 689
to 681. The defeat of the Greeks, the occupation of Cilicia, and the
founding of Tarsus, may well have fallen into this interval. To the same
time may have belonged Sennacherib's conquest of Edom.

There is reason to suspect that these successes of Sennacherib on the
western limits of his empire were more than counterbalanced by a
contemporaneous loss at the extreme south-east. The Canon of Ptolemy
marks the year B.C. 688 as the first of an interregnum at Babylon which
continues from that date till the accession of Esar-haddon in B.C. 680.
Interregna in this document--[--Greek--] as they are termed--indicate
periods of extreme disturbance, when pretender succeeded to pretender,
or when the country was split up into a number of petty kingdoms. The
Assyrian yoke, in either case, must have been rejected; and Babylonia
must have succeeded at this time in maintaining, for the space of eight
years, a separate and independent existence, albeit troubled and
precarious. The fact that she continued free so long, while she again
succumbed at the very commencement of the reign of Esar-haddon, may lead
us to suspect that she owed this spell of liberty to the increasing
years of the Assyrian monarch, who, as the infirmities of age crept upon
him, felt a disinclination towards distant expeditions.

The military g