A Loan-tablet dated in the Seventh Year of Saracos

Extract

As historical inscriptions of this, the last king of Assyria, are wanting, any additional light on his reign, however meagre that light may be, will probably be regarded as welcome, and this must be my excuse for the publication of this interesting but comparatively unimportant inscription.

Like his predecessors, Saracos (Sin-šar-iškun) called himself “the great king, the powerful king, the king of the world, the king of Assyria”. He was also “the favourite of Aššur, Enlil, and Ninlil; the beloved of Merodach, and Zēr-panîtu^m, the choice of the heart's desire of Nebo and Merodach”, etc. From the phrasing of this cylinder-inscription, it is clear that he regarded himself as much king of Babylon as of Assyria, and from the fact that the text came from.Nineveh, it might be supposed that his sympathies were as much with the one country as with the other—indeed, as neighbouring nations, speaking the same language, this feeling would in no wise be unreasonable. Less than sixty years, however, had passed since the death of the somewhat ruthless Sennacherib, and this was probably too short a time to allow the Babylonians to forget what had happened during the earlier years of his reign and in the time of Aššur-bani-âpli—the “great and noble Asnapper”, when the latter was in conflict with Šamaš-šum-ukîn (Saosduchinos), his brother. That they had the right to resist the Assyrian claim to over-lordship there is no doubt, and it is therefore certain that the action of the armies of Aššur-bani-apli, king of Assyria, aroused again Babylonian resentment against the dominion of the more northerly power.