served.
For many years had travellers to modern Mosul looked with wondering
eyes at gigantic mounds of earth that lay opposite the city. The first
traveller who did more than take a cursory view of these mysterious
hillocks was Mr. Rich, who, on his way from Kurdistan to Baghdad in
1820, crossed the river, and arrived at the mounds; visited what the
inhabitants asserted to be Jonah's tomb on the summit of one of them;
saw inscribed relics in the houses of the adjacent village. Among the
fragments on the largest mound he picked up some bricks with
cuneiform[8] characters upon them, and fragments of pottery; and on a
subsequent occasion he found a small stone chair. He left these mounds
without suspecting that he had been treading above the palaces of the
ancient Assyrian monarchs--that he had been over ancient Nineveh. But
the ground was too fruitful in remote traditions to remain altogether
unexplored in this century. The lands watered by the Tigris and the
Euphrates, where the early Asiatic colonies of Scripture were founded,
and where Nimrod, the grandson of Ham, flourished and founded Babel,
and whence, according to Scripture, Asshur went forth to build
Nineveh, are interesting ground. Of these great Assyrian towns it was
natural to seek some ruins. Of all these cities, however, founded so
far back before authentic history begins, only Nineveh, which
flourished many centuries later, and of which we have always had more
authentic histories than those of any other Assyrian city, attained to
a comparatively modern prosperity and renown. The records of this
magnificent city, from which historians have derived their
information, describe its walls as reaching no less than two hundred
feet in height, and broad enough to be a chariot-way. These walls were
sixty miles in circumference, and guarded by fifteen hundred towers;
and in the eighth century before the Christian era the city is
estimated to have included a population of more than half a million
souls. But many centuries before this, Nineveh was a wonderful city,
of which the great monarch Ninus was king, and of which his celebrated
wife, Semiramis, was afterwards queen. Ninus is the reputed founder of
the Assyrian empire, and to him the magnificence of the capital is
chiefly attributed. He is the Sesostris of Assyrian history, and is
supposed to have flourished about twelve centuries before our era. The
names of many Assyrian monarchs occur in the Sacred Writings:
Se