widely in character. Saracus became a bye-word among the nations, on account of his effeminate disposition; entirely abstaining from war and the chase, the proper occupations of his station, he shut himself up in his

harem, and joined with his wives in the feminine employment of spinning wool. To complete his female character, he is said to have painted his face with white lead and other cosmetics. Near Tarsus, in Cilicia, there was a bas-relief, which remained there till the time of Alexander, representing an Assyrian king, probably

Sennacherib, the conqueror of that country; it seems to have been one of the monuments so frequently found, in which the monarch stands erect, with one hand raised in an attitude of command, and an inscription relates the exploits of his reign. This was explained by the Greek ciceroni as the effigy of the last King of Assyria in the act of expressing his views on the value of life:

"Stranger, go thy way, eat, drink, and be merry; for the rest of human life is not worth a snap of the fingers!"

Such was the reputation of the last successor of Sargon and Shalmaneser, the final ruler of the oldest empire of the world. During the long siege he had sat confidently in his palace, relying on the strength of the ramparts, and, it is said, on a prophecy, handed down from his ancestors, which ran :—

"None shall take Nineveh by force until the river itself declares war upon the city."

But the time was come for this prediction, which probably embodied former experiences of the destructive power of floods, to be fulfilled; the Tigris, or the Khosr, rose to an unusual height above the stone basement of the walls, and broke down part of the mud rampart faced with burnt brick that was erected upon it, so that the Medes and Babylonians were able to enter through the breach. In the words of the prophet Nahum

"The gates of the rivers shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved."

Saracus, in despair, collected his wives and much of his treasure in one of the great courtyards of his house, set fire to the whole, and perished in the conflagration. The gold and silver that could be saved from the fire was seized and sent away to Ecbatana, the capital of Media; so Nahum exclaims:

*

"Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold for there is none end of the store and glory out of all the pleasant furniture.”

The conquerors now had their revenge for the long resistance made by the ill-fated capital; they rased the whole city to the ground, and dispersed the inhabitants among the neighbouring towns.† Zephaniah poetically describes the desolation which now reigned on the scene of so much vanished splendour:

"He will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilder

ness.

"And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations: both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds: for he shall uncover the cedar work.

"This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me how is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand."+

The rivers of Mesopotamia, swollen every spring and autumn by the melted snows of the Armenian mountains, and by the rains, are subject to annual overflows.

The ancient monarchs, by a system of canalization, averted the dangers arising from this phenomenon, and turned the excess of waters to good account in fertilizing the dry lands at a distance from the stream; so that it was an exceptional event, perhaps caused by the stopping up of the canals, which led to the downfall of the ramparts of Nineveh. But when the system of canals fell into disorder, the districts near the rivers would be periodically flooded; and at the present day the Khosr, a branch of the Tigris which flowed under the walls of Nineveh, sometimes turns the plain into a swamp.* In this way we must explain the almost total disappearance of the vast city; the mud houses, dissolved by the waters, soon return as earth to earth. Only the walls, with their brick facing and their stone basement, can still in part be traced; and the gigantic palaces, raised on immense platforms, and constructed of the finest bricks, were not easily to be destroyed. They were partly burnt by the king himself, and partly, no doubt, thrown down by the battering-ram, so constantly used in the sieges of that period, until they formed immense heaps of ruined brick-work. Then they were buried under the decomposing material of the massive clay vaultings with which the chambers were roofed, and of the unbaked bricks which were mixed with the better material. In this way they came to form the huge mounds or artificial hills which Amyntas † described in his geographical work, and which the modern tra

* F. Jones: "Topography of Nineveh,” p. 22.
+ See Athenaeus, xii. 39.

veller still sees on the eastern shore of the Tigris, opposite Mosul.

It is to these circumstances that we owe the preservation of the sculptures and inscribed tablets which, unseen and untouched from the downfall of Assyria to the present time, have allowed us in these latter days to

study the history of the ancient empire. The mounds which cover the palaces of the Assyrian kings now form three heaps of ruins overgrown with grass, which break the outline of the city walls. Kouyunjik, or the "Citadel of Nineveh," as it is often called, the largest of the mounds, covers a space of one hundred acres, and forms a mass of fourteen millions and a half of tons of earth and brick-work; the second in size, Nebi Yunus,