Among these early records we also find tablets[29] which have been exhumed, placed in the British Museum and translated, bearing the old Assyrian record of the flood, which is marvelously like the account found in Genesis, even to the “building of the ship,” which contained “the seed of all life,” and the raven and the dove which were sent forth from its windows after the waters began to recede. Another tablet[30] describes the building of some great tower or “stronghold,” apparently by command of the king, but the gods are represented as being angry, for it is stated that “Babylon corruptly to sin went, and small and great mingled on the mound.... To their stronghold in the night he made an end. In anger also the secret counsel he poured out—to scatter (them abroad) his face he set. He gave a command to make strange their speech.... Violently they wept—very much they wept.” There is a fragment of a tablet,[31] on which was written an Accadian poem; on being translated it was found to contain a description of certain cities, of which the names were not given. It was recorded, however, that they were destroyed by a rain of fire, and the legend gives an account of a person who escaped the general destruction. The inscriptions of ancient kings reveal to a certain extent the times and the facts connected with their reigns, but in discussing the tablets and monuments, the pillars and palace walls of these royal historians, it must be borne in mind that these heathen kings were far from infallible, and whatever resulted in their own aggrandizement was most eagerly recorded, while their military defeats and political humiliations were either passed over in silence or qualified to such an extent as to virtually lose their force. This is especially true of Sennacherib, who has the reputation among Assyriologists of being “the least trustworthy of the royal historians of Assyria.” Nevertheless, these records are of inestimable value as giving an account of their own wars and achievements by interested participants. A hexagonal prism of clay, which was found at Nineveh and carried to the British Museum[32] contains an account of the first eight years of the reign of Sennacherib and of his siege of Jerusalem under the reign of King Hezekiah, when, according to the tablets, the king of Jerusalem “had given command to strengthen the bulwarks of the great gate of the city,” when it was found to be so strong that the Assyrian king refrained from assaulting it.[33] The strange libraries of Assyria and Babylon abounded also in astronomical and astrological reports, the records of lawsuits, contract tablets and other inscriptions, also a number of official dispatches sent by the king of Jerusalem and other potentates to foreign courts.