hose who are about to be executed first
struck on the face by the executioner's fist. Altogether we seem to have
evidence, not of mere severity, which may sometimes be a necessary or
even a merciful policy, but of a barbarous cruelty, such as could not
fail to harden and brutalize alike those who witnessed and those who
inflicted it. Nineveh, it is plain, still deserved the epithet of "a
bloody city," or "a city of bloods." Asshur-bani-pal was harsh,
vindictive, unsparing, careless of human suffering--nay, glorying in his
shame, he not merely practised cruelties, but handed the record of them
down to posterity by representing them in all their horrors upon his
palace walls.

It has been generally supposed that Asshur-bani-pal died about B.C. 648
or 647, in which case he would have continued to the end of his life a
prosperous and mighty king. But recent discoveries render it probable
that his reign was extended to a much greater length--that, in fact, he
is to be identified with the Cinneladanus of Ptolemy's Canon, who held
the throne of Babylon from B.C. 647 to 626. If this be so, we must place
in the later years of the reign of Asshur-bani-pal the commencement of
Assyria's decline--the change whereby she passed from the assailer to
the assailed, from the undisputed primacy of Western Asia to a doubtful
and precarious position.

This change was owing, in the first instance, to the rise upon her
borders of an important military power in the centralized monarchy,
established, about B.C. 640, in the neighboring territory of Media.

The Medes had, it is probable, been for some time growing in strength,
owing to the recent arrival in their country of fresh immigrants from
the far East. Discarding the old system of separate government and
village autonomy, they had joined together and placed themselves under a
single monarch; and about the year B.C. 634, when Asshur-bani-pal had
been king for thirty-four years, they felt themselves sufficiently
strong to undertake an expedition against Nineveh. Their first attack,
however, failed utterly. Phraortes, or whoever may have been the real
leader of the invading army, was completely defeated by the Assyrians;
his forces were cut to pieces, and he himself was among the slain.
Still, the very fact that the Medes could now take the offensive and
attack Assyria was novel and alarming; it showed a new condition of
things in these parts, and foreboded no good to the power which was
ev