Nebuchadrezzar had a long reign of nearly forty-three years. His son and successor, Evil-Merodach (“the man of the god Merodach”), lived hardly three years after his accession, and then was murdered by his brother-in-law, Nergal-sharezer, who seized the crown. The latter calls himself the son of “Bel-suma-iskun, king of Babylon”—a title to which his father could have had no right—and he seems to have been the Rab-Mag (a word of unknown signification) who is mentioned by Jeremiah (xxxix. 3) as among the princes of Babylon at the time of the capture of Jerusalem. The chief event of his short reign of four years and four months was the construction of a new palace. His son, who succeeded him, was but a mere boy, and was murdered after a brief reign of four months. The throne was then usurped by Nabu-nahid, the Nabonidos of the Greeks, who does not seem to have belonged to the royal family, and calls his father, “Nabu-balatsu-ikbi, the _Rubu-emga_,” which may possibly be the Rab-Mag of the Old Testament. Nabonidos reigned for seventeen years, and witnessed the rise of a new power in the east. This was the empire of Cyrus, about whom the cuneiform records have recently given us information of a most startling kind. Among the clay documents lately discovered in Babylonia by Mr. Rassam are three inscriptions, which have been published and translated by Sir Henry Rawlinson and Mr. Pinches. The first of these is a cylinder, inscribed by order of Cyrus, the second a tablet which describes the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus and the causes which led up to it, while the third is an account given by Nabonidos of his restoration of the temple of the Moon-god at Haran, and of the temples of the Sun-god and of Anunit at Sepharvaim. Haran, we are told in the last-mentioned record, had been taken and destroyed by the _Manda_, or “barbarians,” of Ekbatana, and the temple of the Moon-god had shared in the general ruin of the city. “Then,” says Nabonidos, “at the beginning of my long reign, Merodach, the great lord, and Sin (the Moon-god), the illuminator of heaven and earth, the strong one of the universe, revealed unto me a dream. Merodach spake with me (thus): ‘O Nabonidos, king of Babylon, go up with the horse of thy chariot; make bricks for the Temple of Rejoicing, and let the seat of Sin, the great lord, enter within it.’ Reverently I spake to Merodach, the lords of the gods: ‘I will build this house whereof thou hast spoken. The barbarians went about it, and their forces were terrible.’ Merodach answered me: ‘The barbarians of whom thou hast spoken shall not exist, neither they nor their lands, nor the kings their allies.’ In the third year when it came, when they (_i.e._, the barbarians) had caused Cyrus, the king of Elam, his young servant, to march amongst his army, they provoked him (to battle); the wide-spread barbarians he overthrew; he captured Astyages, king of the barbarians, and seized his treasures; to