ticles, but it is an extract from the second edition of his work on that book. This version is sometimes paraphrastic, but apparently not intended for severe criticism. It is prettily arranged, but occasionally fanciful. Of the second part of "The Emblems of the Song," we must speak with more reserve and diffidence, because so many of them have no foundation except in conjecture. The author has found a meaning for them, supposing them to be emblems, but since this meaning is to a great degree conjectural, the reader must not fail to exercise his own judgment upon them. For instance, by what right are we told that the "apple-tree" in viii. 5, is "the tree on which Christ was crucified, the only fruitful tree for the human family," etc.? Yet we are told that "the import of the emblems is not vague nor conjectural." Not vague! when the writer says, "although the image is that of birth, the chief reference is to the death and resurrection of Christ," etc. Our opinion is that no man can expound the Canticles on allegorical principles without being both vague and conjectural. Take the seventh chapter, where "feet with shoes" is emblematic of the Church preaching and spreading the Gospel, Eph. vi. 15; "the neck as a tower of ivory," is thus explained, "the tower-like neck is the believer's holy liberty;" "the ivory is the bright holiness of the believer in the eye of inquirers." But we are afraid we should be compelled to animadvert severely, if we continued our allusions, and therefore we close with the expression of our regret, that in our eyes the chief attraction of Mr. Moody Stuart's book is due to the publishers, who have done their part well.

Von Gelübden im Evangelischen Sinn. ("Of Vows in the Evangelical Sense.") By Dr. L. WIESE. Berlin: Wiegandt and Grieben.

A DISCUSSION of the nature and character of vows from a Protestant point of view. The subject is discussed intelligently, and some light is thrown upon a question of practical importance.

MISCELLANIES.

Assyrian Discovery.-In examining the many fragments of the historical tablets of Ashur-bani-pal, the son of Esar-Haddon, which crowd the shelves of the British Museum, with a view of arranging, if possible, one complete copy of the annals for publication, I have, within these few days, lighted upon a passage which had previously escaped my observation, but which I have now found repeated in a more or less perfect state on several of these mutilated terra cotta records. The passage is of great interest, as it furnishes the first point of undoubted contact between Greek and Assyrian history, and I hasten, therefore, to announce the discovery at once through the pages of the Athenæum.

Ashur-bani-pal states as follows:-"Gyges was king of Lydia, a country on the sea-shore, and so far off that the kings, my fathers, who reigned before me, had never even heard the name of it. In obedience to my royal proclamation-[the proclamation is given at length, and invites all people to do homage and offer tribute to Ashur-bani-pal, king of Assyria, on pain of incurring the vengeance of Ashur, king of the gods]-the said Gyges sent his officers to my presence to propitiate me; and they brought with them some Cimmerian slaves whom they had taken in battle when those tribes invaded Lydia, together with a heavy tribute. They brought these things before me at Nineveh, and they kissed my yoke."

This Lydian tribute was brought to Nineveh, it would seem, early in the reign of Ashur-bani-pal, perhaps as early as B.C. 660; but the event could hardly have occurred anterior to that date, and we must either, therefore, reduce by some twenty years the ordinarily received chronology, or we must suppose the Gyges of the Inscriptions to be the Ardys of Herodotus. The Cimmerian invasion favours the latter explanation; but, on the other hand, we must remember that a passage of Dionysius (tom. vi., p. 773, Reiske) does actually fix the commencement of the Lydian kingdom as late as B.C. 698, so that Gyges, who reigned thirtyeight years, would have been still living in B.C. 660. It is further ethnologically interesting to find that the Scythians, who invaded Lydia in the seventh century B.C., and whom Herodotus calls Cimmerians, were really the same people as the Sacæ of later history; the title of Gimirri, which is used in this passage of Ashur-bani-pal's annals (and previously, for the first time, in the annals of Esar-Haddon), being the Assyrian equivalent for the Persian Saca in the trilingual inscriptions of Darius Hystaspes.

Whether this name of Gimirri, however, has any real connexion with the modern Cymri or Celts is, I think, exceedingly doubtful. London, March 4. H. C. RAWLINSON.

P.S. Since writing the above, I have continued my search among the hitherto unexamined tablets of the British Museum, and have been rewarded by further discoveries. Upon a broken clay tablet belonging to the Biblical Tiglath Pileser, I have found an epitome of the historical

events of this monarch's reign from his first to his seventeenth year. The campaigns described are, 1. In Babylonia; 2. In Media and Armenia ; 3. In Asia Minor, and 4. In Syria; and the narrative is throughout far more detailed than on the slabs with which alone we have been previously acquainted. In the Syrian chapter, for instance, after the usual list of kings who brought their tribute to Tiglath Pileser in his eighth year, and among whom, as is already known, are Menahem of Samaria, Hiram of Tyre and Rezin of Damascus, we have a supplementary list of the tributary kings of Southern Syria, which is entirely new, and which, although unfortunately imperfect owing to a fracture in the tablet, still preserves the names of the kings of Arvad, Beth Ammon, Moab, Ascalon, Judæa, Edom, and Gazah. The name of the Jewish king ought, according to the Scriptural narrative, to be Ahaz; but on the tablet we find Jeho-ahaz (or, as it is written in Assyrian in the oblique case, Yahu-khazi). What are we to suppose from this? Was it really the case that the Assyrians did not know the names of the foreign kings who brought or sent them tribute; mistaking Pekah for his predecessor Menahem, and confounding Ahaz, king of Judah, with Jeho-ahaz, king of Israel, who reigned a century earlier? or has the Hebrew nomenclature come down to us in a corrupted state? There can be no doubt whatever, from the general concurrence of the chronology, as well as from the mention of Rezin of Damascus, that the Tiglath Pileser the second of the Assyrian annals is the same king whose Syrian expedition is described in 2 Kings xiv. ; yet it is equally certain that, instead of the Pekah and Ahaz of the Bible, we have the cuneiform names of Menahem and Jeho-ahaz for the contemporary monarchs of Israel and Judah.

The tablet of Tiglath Pileser which I am now describing is, like all the other monuments of this monarch, entirely silent as to its ancestry, thus affording strong negative evidence that he was an usurper, and initiated the second or lower dynasty of Assyria; and it also points to a very close connexion in time between Tiglath Pileser and Sargon, the names of the tributary kings which it enumerates being for the most part the same as those of the monarchs whose conquest is narrated on the marbles of Khorsabad. If the reign of Shalmaneser did really intervene between that of Tiglath Pileser and that of Sargon, it could have been but of a very short duration. Merodach Baladan, indeed, the son of Yakin,—who is stated at Khorsabad to have ascended the throne of Babylon in the same year that Sargon commenced his reign at Nineveh,— was already in power when Tiglath Pileser, at the very commencement of his career, invaded Babylonia; though at that time, it is true, his dominion seems to have been confined to the territory on the sea-coast and at the mouth of the Euphrates. H. C. R.-Athenæum.

Assyrian Discovery.-Sir Henry Rawlinson's letter in the Athenæum of the eighth instant contains two most valuable discoveries in ancient chronology; and yet it is to be feared that, owing to a slight misapprehension, the full import of the discoveries may not be appreciated, and that the labour and sagacity of the discoverer may in some degree be thrown away. A noble lion was once rescued from the toils of the

66

hunter by the assistance of a very insignificant coadjutor. Will Sir Henry allow me to lend assistance in freeing him from the meshes of a net in which he is also entangled, by too close an adherence to the received scheme of ancient chronology? He places too little reliance upon the facts which he has discovered, and upon the integrity of the text of the inscriptions he deciphers, and also of the Hebrew Scriptures; and too much reliance upon a baseless system of conventional dates, which still defaces and confuses authentic records of ancient history. Nothing can be more distinct than the contents of the broken clay tablet of Tiglath Pileser just deciphered, when read in conjunction with 2 Kings xv., and nothing more completely destructive of the received mode of reckoning. From the inscriptions, we learn that Tiglath Pileser in his eighth year took tribute from Menahem, king of Samaria, and from Yahu-khazi, king of Judah. From the Book of Kings we learn, v. 17, that Menahem came to the throne of Samaria in the thirty-ninth year of Azariah, king of Judah, and reigned ten years-that is, till the forty-ninth year of Azariah, and from v. 19, that Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver to confirm the kingdom in his hand." So that he was contemporary with Pul and Tiglath Pileser. From all which, put together, we collect, that the eighth year of Tiglath Pileser was concurrent with the ninth or tenth of Menahem, and with the forty-eighth or forty-ninth of Azariah, which king must be identified with Yahu-khazi. Here, however, two difficulties occur. First, how can Yahu-khazi represent Azariah? Secondly, Tiglath Pileser began to reign, we are informed, while Merodach Baladan, the son of Yakin, was reigning over dominions" on the seacoast and at the mouth of the Euphrates." The years of this latter king, who is identified with Mardoc Empadus, are fixed with exactness as ending in B.C. 710, by two of the oldest lunar eclipses recorded at Babylon. So that the first year of Tiglath Pileser cannot be placed much earlier than about the year B.C. 746, where Sir Henry places it; and his eighth year falls, therefore, not less than twenty-three years later than the ninth of Menahem and forty-eighth of Azariah. According to Sir Henry's reckoning, the eighth of Tiglath Pileser is concurrent with the reigns of Ahaz, king of Judah, and Pekah, king of Israel; and he asks, therefore, was it really the case that the Assyrians did not know the names of the foreign kings who brought them tribute?"-mistaking Pekah for his predecessor Menahem, and confounding Ahaz, king of Judah, with Jeho-ahaz, king of Israel, who reigned a century earlier :or has the Hebrew nomenclature come down to us in a corrupt state." -Neither one nor the other, I humbly submit. For if, with Demetrius, we place the ninth of Menahem and forty-eighth of Azariah in B.C. 736, that date falls within three years of the very date affixed to the eighth of Tiglath Pileser by Sir Henry himself (see Athenæum, 11th Jan.), thus removing all difficulty under the second head; and with regard to the identification of Yahu-khazi with Azariah, we shall find on examination that there is none at all. Azariah is a name compounded of the words Azar, a helper, and Jah, Jehovah. Now the name Ahaziah, or Ahaz-jah, 2 Chron. xxii. 1, we know was also properly written Jehoa-ahaz, xxi. 17, placing the Jah, or Jehovah, before instead of after Ahaz; of which in

:

have

version numerous instances are given by Lord Arthur Hervey, in his admirable work entitled Genealogies of our Lord, p. 116: and so likewise would Jeho-azar, or Jeho-khazar with a strong guttural aspirate, be properly synonymous with Azar-jah. Yahu-khazi, therefore, of the inscription expresses almost exactly the name of Azariah, king of Judah, as it may sounded, when transposed, in the ears of the officers of Tiglath Pileser. Again, Sir Henry Rawlinson has discovered that Gyges, king of Lydia, gave tribute to Ashur-bani-pal, king of Assyria, who was son of Esar Haddon, or Asaradinus of the Canon of Ptolemy, who died in B.C. 668. Gyges, therefore, must have been on the throne as late as the year B.C. 667, the first year of Ashur-bani-pal, or possibly later; 667 accordingly will be found the last year of Gyges in my table of Lydian kings; Athenæum, 10th Aug. 1861. "We must therefore," writes Sir Henry, "either reduce by some twenty years the ordinarily received chronology, or we must suppose the Gyges of the Inscriptions to be the Ardys of Herodotus" The reduction of the chronology is, no doubt, the correct course. I have proposed that the Lydian reigns should be lowered. fourteen years, by which the date of the first year of Alyattes will coincide with the date of his accession in the Parian Chronicle.

The tendency of these two important discoveries is, therefore, to lower Assyrian chronology to the extent of twenty-three years, and Lydian to the extent of fourteen or twenty years. Sir Gardiner Wilkinson has already shewn from the Apis monuments, that Egyptian chronology must be lowered upwards of twenty years. I myself have pointed out that the date of the final destruction of Nineveh must be lowered more than twenty years, from B.C. 606 to some years after the eclipse of B.C. 585, and that many in ancient times lowered Median chronology to the same extent. It now only remains to rectify the manifest confusion introduced by Herodotus into Persian chronology, by lowering the reign of Cyrus, who conquered Babylon, to the extent of more than the same number of years, thereby producing harmony between sacred and profane writers, both as regards names and events, and also replacing the Book of Daniel, now so rudely condemned as unworthy of credit, in its true position of pre-eminence as the most wonderful and most exact chronicle of events, both past and to come, which has ever been written for the instruction of mankind. I. W. BOSANQUET.-Athenæum.

The Rev. T. H. Horne.-It is with much concern that we announce the death of the Rev. Thomas Hartwell Horne, which took place at his residence in Bloomsbury Square, on Monday, January 27th. Mr. Horne was born in London, of obscure parents, on the 20th of October, 1780, and was consequently in the 82nd year of his age at the time of his death. In 1789 he was admitted a scholar of Christ's Hospital, by the presentation, we have heard him say, of Arthur Murphy. In that school, where he was contemporary for two years with Coleridge, he attained the rank of Deputy-Grecian; and, having been diligent in his studies, acquired a fair knowledge of classical literature. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, "the eldest of six orphans, small of stature and not robust, he was unfitted for any employment requiring physical strength." He consequently