Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/79

Towns and their Defences. 6i and Calah" before it, were the capitals of a soldier nation, they were cities born, like Dour-Saryoukin, of the will of man. Political events called them into life, and other political events caused them to vanish off the face of the earth. Babylon, on the other hand, was born of natural conditions; she was one of the eternal cities of the world. The Turks do their best to make Hither Asia a desert, but so long as they do not entirely succeed, so lone as some lio-ht of culture and commerce still nickers in the country, it will burn in that part of Mesopotamia which is now called El-Jezireh (the island), where the two streams are close together, and canals cut from one to the other can bring all the intermediate tract into cultivation. Sennacherib speaks thus of his capital : " Nineveh, the supreme city, the city beloved of Istar, in which the temples of the gods and goddesses are to be found." 1 With its kings and their military guards and courts, with the priests that served the sanctuaries of the gods, with the countless workmen who built the great buildings, Nineveh must have been a fine and flourishing city in the days of the Sargonids ; but even then its population cannot have equalled that of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The latter was something more than a seat of royalty and a military post ; it was the great entrepôt for all the commerce of Western Asia. 2 1 Line 35 of the Cylinder of Bellino, after Pongnon {l'Inscription de B avian, p. 25, in the Bibliothèque de V École des Hantes-Etudes). 2 M. Oppert also considers the evidence of Ctesias as worthless {Expédition scientifique, vol. i. p. 292). Sir Henry Layard on the other hand believes in the great Nineveh of that writer {Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 243). He is chiefly influenced by the often quoted verses of the Book of Jonah, in which it is declared : " Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey/' and that there were in it "more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand," which, with the ordinary proportion of children to adults, would give a total population of about 800,000. We shall not waste time in explaining that all these expressions are but poetic ways of saying that Nineveh was a great city. It is a singular idea to look for topographical and statistical information in a book which makes a prophet sail from Joppa for Spain and, immediately afterwards, without any preparation, speaks of him as preaching in the streets of Nineveh. Add to this that, according to the most recent criticism, the Book of Jonah is not older than the sixth century before our era, so that it must have been written long after the fall of Nineveh, and when its power was no more than a memory (see Nœldeke, Histoire littéraire de P Ancien Testament, p. 116). [In Sir H. Layard's latest published remarks on the extent of Nineveh, he rejects the statements of Diodorus for much the same reasons as those given by M. Perrot (article on Nineveh in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, 1863 edition). — Ed.]