of Cilicis, by the Assyrians may have appeared to the Cyprian Greeks to endanger their independence, it is conceivable that they lent some assistance to the natives of the country, who were a hardy race, fond of freedom, and never very easily brought into subjection.  The admission af a double defeat makes it evident that the tale is not the invention of Greek national vanity.  Abydenus and Polyhistor probably derive it from Berosus, who must also have made the statement that Tarsus was now founded by Sennacherib, and constructed, after the pattern of Babylon.  The occupation 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.