Asshur-bani-pal, then, on the withdrawal of the barbarians, had still an empire to rule, and he may be supposed to have commenced some attempts at re-organizing and re-invigorating the governmental system to which the domination of the Scythe must have given a rude shock.  But he had not time to effect much.  In B.C. 626 he died, after a reign of forty-two years, and was succeeded by his son, Asshur-emid-ilin, whom the Greeks called Saracus.  Of this prince we possess but few native records; and, unless it should be thought that the picture which Ctesias gave of the character and conduct of his last Assyrian king deserves to be regarded as authentic history, and to be attached to this monarch, we must confess to an almost equal dearth of classical notices of his life and actions.  Scarcely anything has come down to us from his time but a few legends on bricks, from which it appears that he was the builder of the south-east edifice at Nimrud, a construction presenting some remarkable but no very interesting features.  The classical notices, apart from the tales which Ctesias originated, are limited to a few sentences in Abydenus, and a word or two in Polyhistor.  Thus nearly the same obscurity which enfolds the earlier portion of the history gathers about the monarch in whose person the empire terminated; and instead of the ample details which have crowded upon us now for many consecutive reigns, we shall be reduced to a meagre outline, partly resting upon conjecture, in our portraiture of this last king.

Saracus, as the monarch may be termed after Abydenus, ascended the throne at a most difficult and dangerous crisis in his country’s history.  Assyria was exhausted; and perhaps half depopulated by the Scythic ravages.  The bands which united the provinces to the sovereign state, though not broken, had been weakened, and rebellion threatened to break out in various quarters.  Ruin had overtaken many of the provincial towns; and it would require a vast outlay to restore their public buildings.  But the treasury was wellnigh empty, and did not allow the new monarch to adopt in his buildings the grand and magnificent style of former kings.  Still Saracus attempted something.  At Calah he began the construction of a building which apparently was intended for a palace, but which contrasts most painfully with the palatial erections of former kings.  The waning glory of the monarchy was made patent both to the nation and to strangers by an edifice where coarse slabs of common limestone, unsculptured and uninscribed, replaced the alabaster bas-reliefs of former times; and where a simple plaster above the slabs was the substitute for the richly-patterned enamelled bricks of Sargon, Sennacherib, and Asshur-bani-pal.  A set of small chambers, of which no one exceeded forty-five feet in length and twenty-five feet in its greatest breadth, sufficed for the last Assyrian king, whose shrunken Court could no longer have filled the vast halls of his ancestors.  The Nimrud palace of Saracus seems