iver their
eyes fell on a bare and lofty hill. They did not know, they never
suspected,--Xenophon wrote no word of it,--that under that hill lay
buried the ruins of one of the mightiest conquering cities that had ever
ruled the world. From the palaces of that hill, Ninus and Semiramis and
Sardanapalus had led their conquering armies, all now covered
with silence.

Two centuries earlier, in 606 B.C., there had occurred one of the most
tremendous catastrophes recorded in all the grim annals of war. After a
thousand years of primacy in the East, but twenty years after the death
of Sardanapalus (the Greek name of Asshurbanapal), who had carried his
armies to Egypt and had made his capital the centre of the world's
culture and magnificence, as it was of its cruel and hated power,
Nineveh was captured, buried, and utterly desolated by a horde of savage
Scythians from the mountains of the north and east, such people as we
now call the Kurds. Its palaces had no lofty Greek columns to stand for
memorials, as at Palmyra or Persepolis; and when the outer casings of
brick and alabaster were cracked away, and the ashes of the upper
stories and the clay of the inner constructions, soaked by the rains,
covered the ruins of temple and palace, nothing was left to mark the
site but the grass-covered hill. No wonder that the learned scholar of
Socrates saw nothing, knew nothing of the city, most glorious and most
detested of all the cities of the earth. But in its day the overthrow of
Nineveh and the destruction of the Assyrian Empire had been the most
terrible event in the world's history. How the Hebrew prophets gloated
over it! "Where now is the den of the lions, and the feeding-place of
the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, the lion's
whelp, and none made them afraid? Wo to the bloody city; it is all full
of lies and rapine; the prey departeth not. The noise of the whip, and
the noise of the rattling of wheels, and prancing horses, and bounding
chariots, the horsemen mounting, and the flashing sword, and the
glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses,
and there is no end of the bodies. There is no assuaging of the hurt;
thy wound is grievous; all that hear the report of thee clap their hands
over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?"
And another prophet had uttered the curse: "The pelican and the
porcupine shall lodge in the capitals thereof; their voice shall s