In the seventh century Sennacherib wrote:  “I passed like a hurricane of desolation.  On the drenched earth the armor and arms swam in the blood of the enemy as in a river.  I heaped up the bodies of their soldiers like trophies and I cut off their extremities.  I mutilated those whom I took alive like blades of straw; as punishment I cut off their hands.”  In a bas-relief which shows the town of Susa surrendering to Assurbanipal one sees the chiefs of the conquered tortured by the Assyrians; some have their ears cut off, the eyes of others are put out, the beard torn out, while some are flayed alive.  Evidently these kings took delight in burnings, massacres, and tortures.

=Ruin of the Assyrian Empire.=—­The Assyrian regime began with the capture of Babylon (about 1270).  From the ninth century the Assyrians, always at war, subjected or ravaged Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt.  The conquered always revolted, and the massacres were repeated.  At last the Assyrians were exhausted.  The Babylonians and Medes made an alliance and destroyed their empire.  In 625 their capital, Nineveh, “the lair of lions, the bloody city, the city gorged with prey,” as the Jewish prophets call it, was taken and destroyed forever.  “Nineveh is laid waste,” says the prophet Nahum, “who will bemoan her?”

THE BABYLONIANS

=The Second Chaldean Empire.=—­In the place of the fallen Assyrian empire there arose a new power—­in ancient Chaldea.  This has received the name Babylonian Empire or the Second Chaldean Empire.  A Jewish prophet makes one say to Jehovah, “I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation which shall march through the breadth of the land to possess dwelling places that are not theirs.  Their horses are swifter than leopards.  Their horsemen spread themselves; (their horsemen) shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.”  They were a people of knights, martial and victorious, like the Assyrians.  They subjected Susiana, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Jordan.  But their regime was short:  founded in 625, the Babylonian Empire was overthrown by the Persians in 538 B.C.

=Babylon.=—­The mightiest of its kings, Nebuchadrezzar (or Nebuchadnezzar), 604-561, who destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Jews into captivity, built many temples and places in Babylon, his capital.  These monuments were in crude brick as the plain of the Euphrates has no supply of stone; in the process of decay they have left only enormous masses of earth and debris.  And yet it has been possible on the site of Babylon to recover some inscriptions and to restore the plan of the city.  The Greek Herodotus who had visited Babylon in the fifth century B.C., describes it in detail.  The city was surrounded by a square wall cut by the Euphrates; it covered about 185 square miles, or seven times the extent of Paris.  This immense space was not filled with houses; much of it was occupied with fields to be cultivated