when Layard and Rawlinson gave them over to the British Museum.  The reconstruction of these tablets was undertaken by George Smith, an English Assyriologist of the British Museum, who displayed great skill and earnest application in the deciphering of the cuneiform text.

In each reign the history of the king and his acts was written by a poet or historian detailed to that office.  The “books” were collected and kept in great libraries, the largest of these being made by Sardanapalus.

The greater part of the expeditions of Shalmaneser IV, succeeding each other year after year, were directed, like those of his father, sometimes to the north, into Armenia and Pontus; sometimes to the east, into Media, never completely subdued; sometimes to the south, into Chaldaea, where revolts were of constant occurrence; and finally westward, toward Syria and the region of Amanus.  In this direction he advanced farther than his predecessors, and came into contact with some personages mentioned in Bible history.  The part of his annals relating to the campaigns that brought him into collision with the kings of Damascus and Israel possesses peculiar interest for us, much greater than that attaching to the narrative of any other wars.

The sixteenth campaign of Shalmaneser IV (B.C. 890) commenced a new series of wars; the King crossed the Zab, or Zabat; to make war on the mountain people of Upper Media, and afterward on the Scythian tribes around the Caspian Sea.  He did not, however, abandon the western countries, where he soon found himself opposed by the new King whom the revolution arising from the influence of Elisha the prophet had placed on the throne of Damascus in the room of Benhidai.

“In my eighteenth campaign” (886), we read on the Nimrud obelisk, “I crossed the Euphrates for the sixteenth time.  Hazael, king of Damascus, came toward me to give battle.  I took from him eleven hundred and twenty-one chariots and four hundred and seventy horsemen, with his camp.

“In my nineteenth campaign (885) I crossed the Euphrates for the eighteenth time.  I marched toward Mount Amanus, and there cut beams of cedar.

“In my twenty-first campaign (883) I crossed the Euphrates for the twenty-second time.  I marched to the cities of Hazael of Damascus.  I received tribute from Tyre, Sidon, and Byblus.”

It evidently was at the end of this campaign that Jehu, king of Israel, whose territory Hazael had ravaged, appealed to Shalmaneser for help against his powerful enemy.  The inscription on the obelisk says that the Assyrian King received tribute from Jehu, whom it names “son of Omri,” for the great renown of the founder of Samaria had made the Assyrians consider all the kings of Israel as his descendants.  One of the bas-reliefs of the same monument represents Jehu prostrating himself before Shalmaneser, as if acknowledging himself a vassal.