SARGON II AND HIS MONUMENTS. "In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod (when Sargon, the king of Assyria. sent him) and fought against Ashdod and took it" (Is. xx :1).
This is the only instance in which Sargon is mentioned by name in the Scriptures, and we arc largely dependent upon the tablets and newly dis covered inscriptions for supplementary informa tion concerning him.
Professor A. II. Sayce says: "Those who would learn how marvelously the monuments of Assyria illustrate and corroborate the pages of sacred his tory need only compare the records they contain with the narratives of the Books of Kings, which relate to the same period. The one complements and supplies the missing chapters of the other.
"The Bible informs us why Sennacherib left Hezekiah unpunished, and never despatched an other army to Palestine ; .the cuneiform annals explain the causes of his murder, and the reason the flight of his sons to Ararat or Armenia. The single passage in Scripture in which the name of Sargon is mentioned no longer remains isolated and unintelligible ; we now know that he was of the most powerful of Assyrian conquerors, and we have his own independent testimony to the siege and capture of Ashdod, which is the occasion of the mention of his name in Scripture.
"Between the history of the monuments and the history in the Bible there is perpetual con tact ; and the voice of the monuments is found to be in strict harmony with that of the Old Testa ments" (Pref. Assyria).
Dr. J. F. McCurdy says: "The name Sargon is the Massoretic or traditional Jewish pronuncia tion of the current Assyrian Sarken(u). All the modes of writing it which have come down to us are ideographic, and the g in the Hebrew word may confirm the supposition that 'Sargon' is the same name as Sargani, the famous old king of Accad.
"To call Sargon a usurper, as it has been the fashion to do, is to use a misleading term. \Vinck ler ('li.cilschrifttc.rtc Sargon's,' vol. 1, p. 13), with others, cites in support of this contention, that neither Sargon himself, nor his son Sen nacherib, makes mention of his ancestry, and maintains, what is probable enough, that the ge nealogy found in inscriptions of Esar-haddon, in which descent is claimed from very ancient kings, otherwise unknown, is an invention of the court historians. All this, however, would only prove
that Sargon was not of the kingly line. If Shal maneser IV, as is most likely, was childless, he would be bound to name some one as his suc cessor, and he may very well have named a dis tinguished young general like Sargon" (history, Prophecy and the Monuments, vol. 1. p. 423)• Sargon had hardly established himself on the throne when Samaria fell (B. C. 722), it having been besieged by Shalmaneser (2 Kings xviii :9).
(See SAMARIA AND THE MONUMENTS.) Sargon was a rough but able soldier, and under him the Assyrian army became irresistible. His reign witnessed the consolidation of the empire, and the fulfillment to a great extent of the de signs of Tiglath-pileser. (See TIGLATII-PILESER III.) The main object of his policy and military cam paigns were twofold. On the one side, he aimed at turning the whole of Western Asia into an in tegral part of the Assyrian dominion, and thus diverting the maritime trade of Phoenicia and the inland trade of the Hittites into Assyrian hands. On the other, he desired to consecrate and legiti mize his power by the possession of Babylonia.
Tiglath-pileser III had made himself master of Babylonia immediately after his conquest of Da mascus, and a year or two before his death had "taken the hand of Bel," a ceremony which an nounced to the world that the chief god of Baby lon had accepted him as the lawful defender of the city. For the time tieing, however, the claim could only be asserted—it could not he made good. Sargon busied himself for a time in strengthening his northern and eastern frontiers against the wild tribes of Kurdistan, and in com pleting the subjugation of Western Asia.