Memphis was then besieged, taken, and given up to pillage. The statues of the gods, the gold and silver, the turquoise and lapis lazuli, the vases, censers, jars, goblets, amphorae, the stores of ivory, ebony, cinnamon, frankincense, fine linen, crystal, jasper, alabaster, embroidery, with which the piety of kings had enriched the temples--especially the Great Temple of Phthah--during fifteen or twenty centuries, were ruthlessly carried off by the conquerors, who destined them either for the adornment of the Ninevite shrines or for their own private advantage. Tehrak's wife and concubines, together with several of his children and numerous officers of his court, left behind in consequence of his hurried flight, fell into the enemy's hands. Tehrak himself escaped, and fled first to Thebes, and then to Napata; while the army of Esarhaddon, following closely on his footsteps, advanced up the valley of the Nile, scoured the open country with their cavalry, stormed the smaller towns, and after a siege of some duration took "populous No," or Thebes, "that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it, whose rampart was the great deep" (Nahum iii. 8). All Egypt was overrun from the Mediterranean to the First Cataract; thousands of prisoners were taken and carried away captive; the Assyrian monarch was undisputed master of the entire land of Mizraïm from Migdol to Syene and from Pelusium to the City of Crocodiles. Upon conquest followed organization. The great Assyrian was not content merely to overrun Egypt; he was bent upon holding it. Acting on the Roman principle, "_Divide et impera_," he broke up the country into twenty distinct principalities, over each of which he placed a governor, while in the capital of each he put an Assyrian garrison. Of the governors, by far the greater number were native Egyptians; but in one or two instances the command was given to an Assyrian. For the most part, the old divisions of the nomes were kept, but sometimes two or more nomes were thrown together and united under a single governor. Neco, an ancestor of the great Pharaoh who bore the same name (2 Kings xxiii. 29-35), had Saïs, Memphis, and the nomes that lay between them; Mentu-em-ankh had Thebes and southern Egypt as far as Elephantine. Satisfied with these arrangements, the conqueror returned to Nineveh, having first, however, sculptured on the rocks at the mouth of the Nahr-el-Kelb a representation of his person and an account of his conquests. [Illustration: FIGURE OF ESAR-HADDON AT THE NAHR-EL-KELB.]