Hezekiah obeyed the summons and paid a heavy tribute. Space does not permit us to speak of the wars of Sennacherib against Elam and other countries. It would seem that after Tirhakah ascended the throne of Egypt in 688 B. C., he persuaded the kingdoms of Palestine to rebel. The Assyrian came west again and threatened to invade Egypt and to destroy Jerusalem. Isaiah then predicted that Jerusalem would be delivered (Isa. 31:5), a prediction which was fulfilled. Sennacherib’s army was attacked by bubonic plague and was compelled to retire.[15] Sennacherib was assassinated in 681 and was succeeded by his son, Esarhaddon, who ruled till 668. Esarhaddon rebuilt Babylon, which his father had destroyed, and two years before his death conquered all of Lower Egypt and made it an Assyrian province. During his reign a great horde of Scythians poured into Asia through the Caucasus region from southern Russia. The Assyrian army prevented Assyria from being overwhelmed by this horde. The stream of invaders was divided, one part flowing east to Media, the other part westward to Asia Minor. Esarhaddon’s son and successor, Ashurbanipal, ruled from 668 to 626. His reign was the Augustan age of Assyria. At the beginning he was called upon to put down a rebellion in Egypt, and as trouble there recurred several times, trouble which was fomented by emissaries from Thebes and Nubia, he finally in 661 pushed up the Nile and conquered Thebes and gave it over to plunder. (See Nahum 3:8.) Space does not permit us to follow Ashurbanipal’s wars. About the middle of his reign his brother, Shamash-shumukin, who was ruling Babylon, rebelled along with many other vassals, and although the rebels were finally put down, the seeds of the decay of Assyria’s power were sown. Manasseh, King of Judah, as long as he lived was a faithful vassal of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. (Cf. 2 Kings 19:37; 2 Chron. 33.) The great work of Ashurbanipal was the collection of his library at Nineveh. He sent to all the old temples of Babylonia and had copies made of their incantations, hymns, and epics. These, together with chronicles, medical tablets, dictionaries, etc., he collected in his palace, where they were found by Layard and Rassam, and form the basis of our knowledge of the Assyrian and Babylonian language, literature, and history. With the death of Ashurbanipal, the last Assyrian period had really closed. Though the kingdom continued for twenty years more, they were but the years of a lingering death.