indicative of the haughty pride of these sovereigns that they carried with them in their distant expeditions the cumbrous thrones whereon they were wont to sit when they dispensed justice or received homage.  On these thrones they sat, in or near their fortified camps, when the battle or the siege was ended, and thus sitting they received in state the spoil and the prisoners.  Behind them on such occasions were the two fan-bearers, while near at hand were guards, scribes, grooms, and other attendants.  In their palace halls undoubtedly the ceremonial used was stricter, grander, and more imposing.  The sculptures, however, furnish no direct evidence on this point, for there is nothing to mark the scene of the great processional pieces.

In the pseudo-history of Ctesias, the Assyrian kings were represented as voluptuaries of the extremest kind, who passed their whole lives within the palace, in the company of their concubines and their eunuchs, indulging themselves in perpetual ease, pleasure, and luxury.  We have already seen how the warlike character of so many monarchs gives the lie to these statements, so far as they tax the Assyrian kings with sloth and idleness.  It remains to examine the charge of over-addiction to sensual delights, especially to those of the lowest and grossest description.  Now it is at least remarkable that, so far as we have any real evidence, the Assyrian kings appear as monogamists.  In the inscription on the god Nebo, the artist dedicates his statue to his “lord Vol-lush (?) and his lady, Sammuramit.”  In the solitary sculptured representation of the private life of the king, he is seen in the company of one female only.  Even in the very narrative of Ctesias, Ninus has but one wife, Semiramis; and Sardanapalus, notwithstanding his many concubines, has but five children, three sons and two daughters.  It is not intended to press these arguments to an extreme, or to assume, on the strength of them, that the Assyrian monarchs were really faithful to one woman.  They may have had—­nay, it is probable that they had—­a certain number of concubines; but there is really not the least ground for believing that they carried concubinage to an excess, or over-stepped in this respect the practice of the best Eastern sovereigns.  At any rate they were not the voluptuaries which Ctesias represented them.  A considerable portion of their lives was passed in the toils and dangers of war; and their peaceful hours, instead of being devoted to sloth and luxury in the retirement of the palace, were chiefly employed, as we shall presently see, in active and manly exercises in the field, which involved much exertion and no small personal peril.