ound
in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds; for he hath laid
bare the cedar-work. This is the joyous city that dwelt carelessly, that
said in her heart, 'I am, and there is none besides 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."

Thus fell Nineveh, amid the universal rejoicing of the nations, and
thus, seventy years later, fell Babylon also, which, in the short
interval, Nebuchadnezzar had made more magnificent than even Nineveh had
been, beautified for its capture by Cyrus. But before Babylon was the
capital of Chaldea, or Nineveh the capital of Assyria, the city of Calah
had been the seat of its kings, and a mighty mound--they call it Nimroud
now--"as high as St. Paul's steeple," old travellers loved to say--marks
the place on the east bank of the Tigris, twenty miles south of Nineveh;
and, before Calah, Assyria had an earlier capital forty miles still
nearer the Babylonian border, at Asshur, now Kalah-Shergat, on the west
of the Tigris; and each capital had its palaces and records, and all are
now equally buried in clay and utter oblivion. And before the Babylon of
Nebuchadnezzar, and long centuries before Nineveh or Calah or Asshur,
there had been mighty kingdoms in Babylonia, of which the world had
quite forgot the names, only vague rumors remaining in song or legend of
Nimrod and Chedorlaomer and Ur of the Chaldees,--only what was preserved
in the dimmest records of the Hebrew Scriptures. Empires were lost,
buried in chiliads of forgetfulness; would they ever be recovered?

And how much else was lost, what kingdoms, what empires buried before
Hebrew or Greek history began to take notice of the world outside and
put them in books, no one knew, no one knows even yet, although so much
has been found. The fame of Egypt was never quite forgotten, nor all its
history, for Egypt was the world's granary, and closely accessible to
the ships of Corinth and Rome; and Egypt never lost her civilization in
all her long succession of enslavement. But what memory had been kept of
the Ionia and Greece of the days before Homer? What of the early
civilization of Cyprus and Crete? Only the name of Minos, a judge in
Hell. What of Persia and Elam? Were they uninhabited before the times of
Xerxes and Cyrus? And who were these kings, Cyrus and Xerxes, whose
names burst upon us with dim light out of a black antiquity? Even they
were