A belief in a future life is expressed in the Poem on the Descent of Istar, the moon-god’s daughter, to Hades, “the land whence none return,” where “the dead outnumber the living;” and further in the so-called Nimrod-Epic, the most ancient approach to epic poetry known to exist, embodying the Babylonian story of Izdubar (identified with Nimrod)—his rejection of the suit of the goddess Istar, and his victory over the human-headed bull sent to revenge the slight. Nimrod is ferried across the waters of the dead to the shores of the regions of the blessed, where he recognizes his ancestor, Samas-napistim, and exclaims: “Thy appearance is not changed; like me art thou. And thou thyself art not changed; like me art thou.” =Chambers of Records at Nineveh.=—The Semites who, as the sacred historian informs us, left the land of Shinar to found Nineveh and the neighboring cities, carried with them the civilization and literary culture of the Chaldeans. The earliest permanent seat of letters was Ca’lah (see Map, p. 105), where, during the reign of Shalmane’ser II. (860-824 B.C.) many clay tablets borrowed from the Babylonians were copied by Assyrian scribes. This same king erected at Calah an obelisk of black marble—one of the few Assyrian monuments of its kind commemorative of national triumphs. The library thus begun at Calah was enlarged under succeeding kings. Removed at length to Nineveh, it there attained vast proportions through the efforts of that munificent patron of letters, Sardanapa’lus (Assur-bani-pal), (668-626 B.C.). The number of engraved tablets reached ten thousand. Here were grammars[12] and lexicons, law-books and scientific treatises, histories, astronomical and arithmetical works, songs, prayers, hymns sometimes approaching the Hebrew sacred lyrics in sublimity, books of charms and omens, natural histories, botanies, and geographies—a complete encyclopædia of ancient literature. The books of this curious collection were carefully arranged according to their subjects, numbered, catalogued, and placed in charge of librarians. They were public property, intended for the instruction of the people. Such was the library of Sardanapalus—principally copied from Babylonian texts; such, it was buried beneath the ruins of the palace when “the gates of the rivers were opened and Nineveh became a desolation;” such, it lay amid the débris for centuries, “while the cormorant and the bittern lodged in the upper lintels.”