forty-two years, and his son Assur-etililani had assumed the double crown of Assyria and Babylon without opposition.** * Herodotus speaks of these Scythians as having lived at first on good terms with Cyaxares. ** The date of Assur-bani-pal's death is not furnished by any Assyrian monument, but is inferred from the Canon of Ptolemy, where Saosduchin or Shamash-shumukin and Chinaladan or Assur-bani-pal each reigns forty-two years, from 668 or 667 to 626 or 625 B.C. The order of succession of the last Assyrian kings was for a long time doubtful, and Sin-shar- ishkun was placed before Assur-etililani; the inverse order seems to be now conclusively proved. The documents which seemed at one time to prove the existence of a last king of Assyria named Esarhaddon, identical with the Saracos of classical writers, really belong to Esarhaddon, the father of Assur-bani-pal. [Another king, Sin-sum-lisir, is mentioned in a contract dated at Nippur in his accession year. He may have been the immediate predecessor of Sarakos.--? Ed.] Nineveh had been saved from pillage by the strength of her ramparts, but the other fortresses, Assur, Calah, and Dur-Sharrukin, had been destroyed during the late troubles; the enemy, whether Medes or Scythians, had taken them by storm or reduced them by famine, and they were now mere heaps of ruin, deserted save for a few wretched remnants of their population. Assur-etililani made some feeble attempts to restore to them a semblance of their ancient splendour. He erected at Calah, on the site of the palaces which had been destroyed by fire, a kind of castle rudely built, and still more rudely decorated, the rooms of which were small and low, and the walls of sun-dried brick were panelled only to the height of about a yard with slabs of limestone roughly squared, and without sculpture or inscription: the upper part of the walls was covered with a coating of uneven plaster. We do not know how long the inglorious reign of Assur-etililani lasted, nor whether he was assassinated or died a natural death. His brother, Sin-shar-ishkun,* who succeeded him about 620 B.C., at first exercised authority, as he had done, over Babylon as well as Nineveh,** and laboured, like his predecessor, to repair the edifices which had suffered by the invasion, making war on his neighbours, perhaps even on the Medes, without incurring serious losses.