, would thus be a kind of
holy-land where those Semites whose earliest traditions were connected with
its soil would think themselves assured of a more tranquil repose and of
protection from more benignant deities. The soil of Assyria itself would
receive none but the corpses of those slaves and paupers who, counting for
nothing in their lives, would be buried when dead in the first convenient
corner, without epitaph or sepulchral furnishing.

This hypothesis would explain two things that need explanation--the absence
from Assyria of such tombs as are found in every other country of the
Ancient World, and the great size of the Chaldaean cemeteries. Both Loftus
and Taylor received the same impression, that the assemblages of coffins,
still huge in spite of the numbers that have been destroyed during the last
twenty centuries, can never have been due entirely to the second and third
rate cities in whose neighbourhood they occur. Piled one upon another they
form mounds covering wide spaces of ground, and so high that they may be
seen for many miles across the plain.[427] This district must have been the
common cemetery of Chaldaea and perhaps of Assyria; the dead of Babylon must
have been conveyed there. Is it too much to suppose that by means of rivers
and canals those of Nineveh may have been taken there too? Was it not in
exactly that fashion that mummies were carried by thousands from one end of
the Nile valley to the other, to the places where they had to rejoin there
ancestors?[428]

But we need not go back to Ancient Egypt to find examples of corpses making
long journeys in order to reach some great national burying-place. Loftus
received the first hint of his suggestion from what he himself saw at
Nedjef and at Kerbela, where he met funeral processions more than once on
the roads of Irak-Arabi. From every town in Persia the bodies of Shiite
Mussulmans, who desire to repose near the mortal remains of Ali and his
son, are transported after death into Mesopotamia.[429] According to Loftus
the cemetery of Nedjef alone, that by which the mosque known as
_Meched-Ali_ is surrounded, receives the bodies of from five to eight
thousand Persians every year. Now the journey between Nineveh and Calah and
the plains of Lower Chaldaea was far easier than it is now--considering
especially the state of the roads--between Tauris, Ispahan, and Teheran, on
the one hand and Nedjef on the other. The transit from Assyria to Chaldaea
coul