ondemned itself to much repetition
and to a uniformity not far removed from sameness; but its very silences
are eloquent upon the inhuman originality of a system to which Assyria owed
both the splendour of her military successes and the finality of her fall.
The great entrenched camp, of which Nineveh was the centre, once forced;
the veteran ranks, in which constant war, and war without quarter, had made
such wide gaps, once broken, nothing remained of the true Assyria but the
ignorant masses of a second-class state to whom a change of masters had
little meaning, and a few vast buildings doomed soon to disappear under
their own ruins.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.]

When we have completed our examination of Assyrian sculpture, so rich in
some respects, so poor in others, we shall understand the rapidity with
which silence and oblivion overtook so much glory and power; we shall
understand how some two centuries after the victory of Nabopolassar and the
final triumph of Babylon and her allies, Xenophon and his Greeks could
mount the Tigris and gaze upon the still formidable walls of the deserted
cities of Mespila and Larissa without even hearing the name of Nineveh
pronounced. Eager for knowledge as they were, they passed over the ground
without suspecting that the dust thrown up by their feet had once been a
city famous and feared over all Asia, and that the capital of an empire
hardly less great than that of the Artaxerxes whom they had faced at
Cunaxa, had once covered the ground where they stood.

NOTES:

[117] DIODORUS, ii. 29.

[118] Fr. LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne de l'Orient_, vol. ii.
p. 252.

[119] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana_, p. 309. The
Greeks gave the appropriate name of klimakes to those stepped roads that
lead from the valley and the sea coast to the high plains of Persia.

[120] HERODOTUS, i. 200. A similar article of food is in extensive use at
the present day in the western islands of Scotland, and upon other distant
coasts where the soil is poor.--ED.

[121] Upon the subject of this cylinder, in which George Smith wished to
recognize a representation of Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, see M.
JOACHIM MENANT'S paper entitled, _La Bible et les Cylindres Chaldeens_
(Paris, 1880, Maisonneuve, 8vo). M. Menant makes short work of this forced
interpretation and of several similar delusions which were beginning to