The grand figure thus produced imposed upon the uncritical ancients, and was accepted even by the moderns for many centuries.

At length the school of Heeren and Niebuhr, calling common sense to their aid, pronounced the figure a myth.

It remained for the patient explorers of the field of Assyrian antiquity in our own day to discover the slight basis of fact on which the myth was founded, and to substitute for the shadowy marvel of Ctesias a very prosaic and commonplace princess, who, like Atossa or Elizabeth of York, strengthened her husband's title to his crown, but who never really made herself conspicuous by either great works or by exploits.
With Vul-lush III., the glories of the Nimrud line of monarchs come to a close, and Assyrian history is once more shrouded in a partial darkness for a space of nearly forty years, from B.C.781 to B.C.745.

The Assyrian Canon shows us that three monarchs bore sway during this interval--Shalmaneser III., who reigned from B.C.78l to B.C.

771, Asshur-dayan III., who reigned from B.C.771 to B.C.753, and Asshur-lush, who held the throne from the last-mentioned date to B.C..
745, when he was succeeded by the second Tiglatli-Pileser.