From this time forward the succession of Assyrian kings is recorded more or less accurately in the Bible. Tiglath-Pileser accepted vassalage and a large tribute from Ahaz to come to his assistance against Rezin King of Syria, and Pekah King of Israel, who were besieging Jerusalem, and Tiglath-Pileser came to his aid and captured and sacked Damascus. Shalmaneser came up against Hoshea King of Judah, who submitted, but was deposed for intriguing with Egypt, and Shalmaneser then took Samaria and carried the ten tribes of Israel away into Assyria, placing them in the cities of the Medes. Sennacherib, in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, took all the fenced cities of Judah, and his general, Rab-shakeh, besieged Jerusalem, which was saved by the repulse of the main army under the king when marching to invade Egypt. The murder of Sennacherib by his two sons and the succession of Esarhaddon are next mentioned. Nineveh then disappears from the scene, and the great Babylonian conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, puts an end to the kingdom of Judæa, by taking Jerusalem and carrying the people captive to Babylon. This historical retrospect carries us back a very short distance, and little can be gathered in the way of accurate chronology from the few vague references prior to this date. So stood the question until the date of Chaldæan history and civilization was unexpectedly carried back at least 3000 years by the discovery of its monuments. When the first Assyrian sculptures were found by Botta and Layard not fifty years ago in the mounds of rubbish which covered the ruins of Nineveh, and brought home to Europe, it was seen that they were covered with inscriptions in an unknown character. It was called the cuneiform, because it was made up of combinations of a single sign, resembling a thin wedge or arrow-head. This sign was made in three fundamental ways, _i.e._ either horizontal [symbol], vertical [symbol], or angular [symbol], and all the characters were made up of combinations of these primary forms, which were obviously produced by impressing a style with a triangular head on moist clay. They resembled, in fact, very much the strokes and dashes used in spelling out the words conveyed by the electric telegraph, in which letters are formed by oscillations of the needle. [Illustration} This mode of writing had apparently been developed from picture-writing, for several, of the groups of characters bore an unmistakable resemblance to natural objects. In the very oldest inscriptions which have been discovered the writing, is hardly yet cuneiform, and the primitive pictorial character of the signs is apparent. But the bulk of the cuneiform inscriptions not being pictorial, there could be little doubt that they were phonetic, or represented sounds. The question was, what sounds these characters signified, and when translated into sounds, what words and what language did the groups of signs represent?