Sidon and Jerusalem to rebel had been easily suppressed. True to his
policy of conciliation, Esar-haddon had dealt leniently with Manasseh of
Judah. He had been brought in fetters before his lord at Babylon, and
there pardoned and restored to his kingdom. It was a lesson which
neither he nor his successors forgot, like the similar lesson impressed
a few years later upon the Egyptian prince Necho.

The Assyrian conquest of Egypt has been already described. The first
campaign of Esar-haddon against it was undertaken in B.C. 674; and it
was while on the march to put down a revolt in B.C. 668 that he fell ill
and died, on the 10th of Marchesvan, or October. The empire was divided
between his two sons. Assur-bani-pal had already been named as his
successor, and now took Assyria, while Saul-sum-yukin became king of
Babylonia, subject, however, to his brother at Nineveh. It was an
attempt to flatter the Babylonians by giving them a king of their own,
while at the same time keeping the supreme power in Assyrian hands.

The first few years of Assur-bani-pal's reign were spent in
tranquillising Egypt by means of the sword, in suppressing
insurrections, and in expelling Ethiopian invaders. After the
destruction of Thebes in B.C. 661 the country sullenly submitted to the
foreign rule; its strength was exhausted, and its leaders and priesthood
were scattered and bankrupt. Elam was now almost the only civilised
kingdom of western Asia which remained independent. It was, moreover, a
perpetual thorn in the side of the Assyrians. It was always ready to
give the same help to the disaffected in Babylonia that Egypt was to the
rebels in Palestine, with the difference that whereas the Egyptians were
an unwarlike race, the Elamites were a nation of warriors.
Assur-bani-pal was not a soldier himself, and he would have preferred
remaining at peace with his warlike neighbour. But Elamite raids made