ought with Israel. These were the kings whose wars are told
in the Jewish records; and the annals of these kings were found in their
palaces, and they gave full accounts of wars of which the Bible had
given the outline. Piety and learning joined to give extraordinary
interest to these discoveries and to this report of them. Mr. Layard
found himself famous, and the monuments he was bringing to the British
Museum were, and still are, the most extraordinary and fascinating in
all its corridors.

Of course, a new grant was made in behalf of the British Museum, and of
course he went back to continue and extend his researches. Now he wished
to go further south, beyond Nimroud to Kalah Shergat, the yet earlier
capital of Assyria; and yet further to Babylon, that he might see and
test the multitude of mounds of ancient Chaldea, the real land of
Nimrod, the seat of Eden, and the Tower of Babel, far more ancient than
any one of the three capitals of Assyria. While he did scarce more than
to visit and report on the Babylonian mounds, his diggings in Nineveh
itself were of vast importance, for there he found the library of
Asshurbanabal, on clay tablets, which has given us our chief knowledge
of the literature and learning of the ancient East. In 1852 he returned
to England to publish his "Monuments of Nineveh," and left the further
exploration to his able lieutenant, Mr. Rassam, and to a noble
succession of explorers who should follow, and to a no less noble line
of scholars who should interpret the inscriptions and recover the
history of the nations; so that we now know more exactly the history of
Babylonian and Assyrian kings, and from more authentic records, and more
completely the social condition and business life of the countries, than
we do the history of Greece, or the life of the Greeks even of the time
of Pericles, and that, too, for a period of three thousand years.

To illustrate this fact, let us take the black obelisk of Shalmaneser
II., found by Layard at Nimroud. It is a column of basalt seven feet
high and about two feet wide at the base, from which it narrows
slightly, until near the top it is reduced by three steps. On the four
sides is engraved in five rows of bas-reliefs, twenty in all, the
pictured history of the royal conquests, the submission of kings, and
the presentation of tribute. Above and below, and between, in two
hundred and ten lines, was cut an inscription which explained the
figures, and gave a