The subject for a long time seemed to yield no results at all commensurate to the labour and ability lavished upon it. Its interest seemed to be limited to the arid domains of philology, or at best to throw a sidelight upon a few matters of no great importance in ancient history. Some scholars were gratified to find that their old and greatly maligned friend Herodotus was ascertained to be much more trustworthy than was long supposed; but these were matters that could only affect a small and comparatively worthless class of _dilettanti_. At length, however, there came the great Assyrian discoveries and the apparition in the cuneiform records of ‘Jehu, the son of Omri,’ and a host of other notabilities of sacred history. The study was raised at once, especially in England, to an entirely different plane of interest. Lectures began to be delivered upon it throughout the provinces; books were written by Vaux, Bonomi, Fergusson, and many others, to explain the subject to the public. The great work of Layard was quickly followed by a popular edition, and was translated into German. Curiosity was stimulated by the appearance, in 1853, of an account of the results of farther explorations. Whether the new learning would tend to confirm the ancient records or whether it would compel a revision of cherished beliefs began to be debated in many quarters, far beyond the circle of learned societies. An account of the progress subsequently made in the knowledge of the Assyrian language lies beyond the scope of our present work. It was indeed a happy accident that the power of reading Assyrian should have been acquired just as a countless number of inscriptions in that language were brought to light. Excavations continued at Nineveh and elsewhere under the direction of Mr. Layard during the winters of 1849 and 1850; and in the autumn of 1851, Colonel Rawlinson returned to Bagdad. He was charged with the general supervision of the work, while Mr. Hormuzd Rassam assumed the practical direction in the field. Parliament sanctioned a grant of three thousand pounds, and many large sums were contributed by private individuals, including five hundred pounds from Lord John Russell.[862] Soon after, Rassam discovered the famous inscription of Tiglath Peleser, which afforded the earliest glimpse into a long-forgotten history. In it the genealogy of the Assyrian kings was traced back to the fourteenth century B.C., and the names of no less than twenty-five sovereigns were recorded.[863] The inscription itself was written at a time when Assur was still the capital of the kingdom and Nineveh was too unimportant to be mentioned. Rawlinson was surprised to find that the language was more polished then than at a later time, and he was obliged to admit that the discovery ‘annihilates all my theories about the modernicity of Assyrian civilisation.’[864] Shortly after, he was able to announce that ‘all the Assyrian kings mentioned in the Bible