ays and had set
the people of the land under a heavy yoke, I, the weak and humble man
who worshippeth the Lord of Lords (i.e. the god Marduk), through the
mighty power of Nabu and Marduk, my lords, held back their feet from the
land of Akkad and cast off their yoke."

It is not yet certain whether the Babylonians under Nabopolassar
actively assisted Cyaxares and the Medes in the siege and in the
subsequent capture of Nineveh in 606 B.C. but this newly discovered
reference to the Assyrians by Nabopolassar may possibly be taken
to imply that the Babylonians were passive and not active allies of
Cyaxares. If the cylinder were inscribed after the fall of Nineveh we
should have expected Nabopolassar, had he taken an active part in the
capture of the city, to have boasted in more definite terms of his
achievement. On his stele which is preserved at Constantinople,
Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire, who himself
suffered defeat at the hands of Cyrus, King of Persia, ascribed the fall
of Nineveh to the anger of Marduk and the other gods of Babylon because
of the destruction of their city and the spoliation of their temples by
Sennacherib in 689 B.C. We see the irony of fate in the fact that Cyrus
also ascribed the defeat and deposition of Nabonidus and the fall of
Babylon to Marduk's intervention, whose anger he alleges was aroused
by the attempt of Nabonidus to concentrate the worship of the local
city-gods in Babylon.

Thus it will be seen that recent excavation and research have not
yet supplied the data for filling in such gaps as still remain in our
knowledge of the later history of Assyria and Babylon. The closing
years of the Assyrian empire and the military achievements of the great
Neo-Babylonian rulers, Nabopolassar, Nerig-lissar, and Nebuchadnezzar
II, have not yet been found recorded in any published Assyrian or
Babylonian inscription, but it may be expected that at any moment
some text will be discovered that will throw light upon the problems
connected with the history of those periods which still await solution.
Meanwhile, the excavations at Babylon, although they have not added
much to our knowledge of the later history of the country, have been
of immense service in revealing the topography of the city during the
Neo-Babylonian period, as well as the positions, plans, and characters
of the principal buildings erected by the later Babylonian kings. The
discovery of the palaces of Nebuchadnez