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Meantime the greatness of Nineveh came to an end. The Babylonians and Medes revolted against it, and it was ruined in the year 612. Sardanapalus succeeded his father at Nineveh, but was weak and luxurious. His brother, Saracus, was so like him, that what seems really to have been the end of Saracus, is generally told of Sardanapalus.
Ruin had overtaken many of the provincial towns; and it would require a vast outlay to restore their public buildings. But the treasury was wellnigh empty, and did not allow the new monarch to adopt in his buildings the grand and magnificent style of former kings. Still Saracus attempted something.
By virtue of his wisdom, Sargon calls him 'the clear seer who guides all the gods, and when the last king of Assyria Saracus, as the Greek writers called him invokes Nabu as the 'leader of forces, he appears to have in mind the heavenly troops rather than earthly armies. Such patrons of learning as Sargon and Ashurbanabal were naturally fond of parading their devotion to Nabu.
In B.C. 626 he died, after a reign of forty-two years, and was succeeded by his son, Asshur-emid-ilin, whom the Greeks called Saracus.
Actuated by a feeling which has more than once caused a vanquished monarch to die rather than fall into the power of his enemies, Saracus made a funeral pyre of his ancestral palace, and lighted it with his own hand. One further point in the narrative of Ctesias we may suspect to contain a true representation.
Saracus, as the monarch may be termed after Abydenus, ascended the throne at a most difficult and dangerous crisis in his country's history. Assyria was exhausted; and perhaps half depopulated by the Scythic ravages. The bands which united the provinces to the sovereign state, though not broken, had been weakened, and rebellion threatened to break out in various quarters.
To meet this double danger. Saracus, the Assyrian king, determined on dividing his forces: and, while he entrusted a portion of them to a general, Nabopolassar, who had orders to proceed to Babylon and engage the enemy advancing from the sea, he himself with the remainder made ready to receive the Medes.
The Nimrud palace of Saracus seems to have covered less than one-half of the space occupied by any former palace upon the mound; it had no grand facade, no magnificent gateway; the rooms, curiously misshapen, as if taste had declined with power and wealth, were mostly small and inconvenient, running in suites which opened into one another without any approaches from courts or passages, roughly paved with limestone flags, and composed of sun-dried bricks faced with limestone and plaster.
The exhaustion of Assyria's resources at the time is remarkably illustrated by the poverty and meanness of the palace which the last king, Saracus, built for himself at Calah. She lay, apparently, at the mercy of the first bold assailant, her prestige lost, her army dispirited or disorganized, her defences injured, her high spirit broken and subdued.
They settled upon the bank of the Euphrates, near the ruins of the Tower of Babel, round which a city arose, sometimes free, sometimes under the power of the King of Nineveh. In the time of the weak and luxurious Saracus, Nabopolassar was governor of Babylon.
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