But the reader--who has no doubt visited the British Museum and looked at all these things--may perhaps ask why we repeat the familiar story. It is in order to give completeness to the picture, and also to induce young visitors to the Museum to look _into_ things as well as look at them. Where did the antiquities come from? How have the inscriptions been deciphered? What do they say? Although many of them were brought to the Museum years ago, the writing was not immediately read; the process of decipherment is still going on, and hardly a year passes without startling discoveries being made in the Museum itself. In the year 1872 Mr George Smith there, taking up a clay tablet that had been neglected, deciphered the inscription, and found it to be the Chaldean story of the Flood. In 1873, going out to Assyria for the purpose, he actually discovered the missing portion of the tablet. Such facts are intensely interesting to the student of the Scriptures, and they attract us to give a portion of our attention to the legends and the literature of the Assyrians and the Chaldeans. Nineveh, we read, was a city of three days’ journey. It actually extended 20 miles in length by 10 miles in breadth, and was surrounded by a great wall upon which three chariots could be driven abreast.[52] Within this circumference great mounds exist, as those referred to at Nimroud, Khorsabad, and Kouyunjik. Within these mounds have been discovered six palaces and three temples; although only one of these buildings--the palace of Sennacherib, at Kouyunjik--is in a decent state of preservation. The restoration of this structure by Mr J. Ferguson, the architect, prefixed as an illustration to Layard’s “Nineveh,” shows it to have been a very magnificent pile. A second palace found at Kouyunjik belonged to Assurbanipal, the grandson of Sennacherib. [Illustration: SENNACHERIB BEFORE LACHISH.] Sennacherib himself we are familiar with through the Bible. He was that monarch who so terrified the good king Hezekiah, when he sent him a blasphemous message and threatened to come and destroy Jerusalem. What the Jews of Jerusalem had to fear if he should come they knew too well; and we know now, for Sennacherib had been besieging Lachish (2 Kings xviii.; Isaiah xxxvi.) in Palestine, and we have recovered the record of that siege. It is inscribed on one of the bulls discovered at the largest of the royal buildings, and shows the monarch seated on his throne, while the writing around him says, “I, Sennacherib, the great king, the king of Assyria, seated on the throne of judgment before Lachish, I give permission for the slaughter.” Before him are the miserable captives, having rings fixed into their noses or lips, with bridles attached, so that their heads may be held facing forward while the king puts out their eyes with a pointed instrument. Captives are there having their tongues torn out, others being stripped naked and flayed alive, while human heads are piled up into pyramids.