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After a reign of thirteen years, Esar-haddon, "king of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Meroe, and Ethiopia," as he styles himself in his later inscriptions, died, leaving his crown to his eldest son, Asshur-bani-pal, whom he had already associated in the government.
Such, then, are the traditions of the Greeks with respect to this monarch. The stories told by Ctesias of a king, to whom he gives the same name, and repeated from him by later writers, are probably not intended to have any reference to Asshur-bani-pal, the son of Esar-haddon, but rather refer to his successor, the last king.
It could hardly be maintained, for instance, that the Athens of Socrates was not superior to the France of Fulk the black of Anjou, or that the Assyria of Asshur-bani-pal was not quite as civilised as the Germany of the ninth century A.D. Alfred Russel Wallace has shown in his popular book, "The Wonderful Century," that the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a greater advance in man's power over nature than the fifteen hundred years preceding it.
Asshur-bani-pal ascended the throne in B.C. 668, or very early in B.C. 667; and his first act seems to have been to appoint as viceroy of Babylon his younger brother Saul-Mugina, who appears as Sam-mughes in Polyhistor, and as Saosduchinus in the Canon of Ptolemy. The first war in which Asshur-bani-pal engaged was most probably with Egypt.
Asshur-bani-pal simply tells us that, in his third expedition, he proceeded against Baal, king of Tyre, dwelling in the midst of the sea, who his royal will disregarded, and did not listen to the words of his lips. "Towers round him," he says, "I raised, and over his people I strengthened the watch; on sea and land his forts I took; his going out I stopped.
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