3. _The Lion Weights_ (fig. 54). Several examples of these were found by the late Sir Austin Layard in his first excavations at Nineveh. They are bilingual, the names of the Assyrian kings being usually in cuneiform writing, while the weights are indicated in Phœnician characters. Of course this evidences intimate trading relations between Assyria and Phœnicia, and the commercial dominance of the latter in the adoption of its weights and measures as the metrical standard of the former, and in the general use of the Phœnician alphabet for business purposes. The action of time has largely obliterated the inscriptions, but among the names of Assyrian kings which have been identified are Tiglath-Peser, Shalmaneser IV., Sargon II., and Sennacherib. The similarity between the Phœnician and Assyrian characters is shown in the inscription here reproduced, which is to scale of the original. It is on the eleventh lion, which weighs a little over twenty ounces, and therefore represents a maneh, a Hebrew weight used in estimating gold and silver, and believed to contain one hundred shekels of the former and sixty of the latter. The reading is M_a_N_e_H M_e_L_e_K, "a maneh of the king." The name is not very legible, but is read by Professor Sayce as Shalmaneser, who reigned in the seventh century B.C. [Illustration: Fig. 54.--Maneh Weight] 4. _The Siloam Inscription._--The tunnel in which this was found was doubtless constructed to secure the water supply of Jerusalem in the event of a siege, the Virgin's Pool being outside the city walls, while the Pool of Siloam is inside the boundaries of the old rampart. Encrustations of carbonate of lime made the decipherment of the letters very difficult on their first discovery in 1880, but enough was seen to prove their high importance for the study of the development of the Hebrew alphabet in its passage from the Phœnician to the Aramean type, whence the modern characters are derived. "It was recognised at once that a Hebrew inscription of a date prior to the Captivity had at last been discovered, and that the uncertainties as to the nature of the alphabet of Israel would now be set at rest." The letters were carefully cleared of their accretion; squeezes, tracings, and casts were obtained, and the Hebrew record, engraved in Phœnician characters nearly resembling those on the Moabite Stone, thus Englished, of course more or less conjecturally in detail, by Professor Sayce:-- (1) (Behold the) excavation! Now this is the history of the tunnel. While the excavators (were lifting up) (2) the pick each to his neighbour, and while there were yet three cubits (to be broken through) ... the voice of one call- (3)-ed to his neighbour, for there was (an excess?) in the rock on the right. They rose up ... they struck on the west of the (4) excavation, the excavators struck each to meet his neighbour pick to pick, and there flowed