small river Kausar. On the northern hill, about 45 feet high and 7,800 in circuit, and greatly surpassing the other in both extent and depth, stands the village of Koyunjik, and on the other, called from its being the reputed site of the grave of the prophet Jonah, Nebbi Yunus, the village of Ninuah. Some fourteen miles northeast of Mosul lies on a like mound the village of Korsabad; and nearly eighteen miles directly south, just above the confluence of the great Zab, the ancient Lycus, with the Tigris, rises a pyrmidal hill, overlooking a terraced plateau on which is the village of Nimroud. These four points, lying nearly in a direct line from north to south, Korsabad, Koyunjik, Nebbi Yunus, and Nimroud, are the principal sites at which recent excavations have brought to light the palaces and temples of the great Assyrian capital. The city stretched along the eastern shore of the river, in the form probably of an irregular parallelogram. Its dimensions, given at 480 stadia, or 60 English miles, in circuit, are more likely to be under than over stated. Korsabad was perhaps the seat of a large suburban palace and town, reared like the villa of Hadrian, or the structures of Versailles and St. Cloud, to gratify the munificent tastes of Assyrian sovereigns; while Koyunjik and Nimroud may have been encircled within one vast enclosure. The career of discovery was opened by M. Botta in 1843, by the exploring of the palace of Sargon at Korsabad. Layard commenced in 1845 the disinterment of the vast palace of Sennacherib at Koyunjik, and about the same period proceeded to draw forth at Nimroud the ruins of four palaces, the earliest and the latest structures of Assyrian royalty. The oldest of these, that occupying the northwest corner of the terrace, was in ruins when Nineveh was captured, and had furnished material for subsequent palaces in its neighborhood. This alone bears no marks of that fiery deluge that swept over its sister structures in the last grand catastrophe. This remarkable pyramid of Nimroud and the ruinous fortresses of Koyunjik, attracted the attention of Xenophon, who passed them with his Ten Thousand without dreaming of the surging life and imperial splendors which scarcely two centuries earlier had revelled in these seats of desolation.

These brilliant discoveries could not but kindle a fresh interest in the fortunes of those mighty empires, which, in the gray dawn of human history, planted their seats on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Babylon and Nineveh loom up before our imagination indistinct, shadowy, terrible, as the image in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, now emerging into the substantial majesty of real power, then retreating behind their veil of cloud, at once challenging and mocking our curiosity, and seeming rather gigantic phantoms, shaped out of the mists of a hoary tradition, than a part of the real flesh and blood kingdoms whose successive rise and fall have made up the drama of authentic history. It has been reserved to be the triumph of our day to dissipate in part the shadows that have flitted over these wide realms of empire, to unsepulchre the long buried monuments of their greatness, and to spell out that mysterious record of their achievements which was traced by the order, and under the eye, of their hero monarchs. By a remarkable coincidence, in which only a purblind skepticism can refuse to recognize a Providence, these magnificent remains were brought to light just as the all-conquering methods of comparative philology had mastered the obscurities of the Persian arrow-headed writing, and thus placed it in a position, through the tri-lingual inscriptions by which the Persian monarchs reached all the great classes of population in their empire, to grapple with the far more complicated and abstruse alphabets of Babylon and Assyria. Thus at one and the same moment the munificence and enterprise of Europe were crowding the museums of London and Paris with the gigantic creations of Assyrian art, and the skill and industry of European scholars were deciphering its enigmatical characters, and carrying the torch of their discoveries into the dark chambers of its history. True, the sanguine hopes of those who expected to leap with a bound into the inmost heart of· Assyrian antiquity-to resolve at once its numberless difficulties have been doomed to inevitable disappointment. And in the repeated baffling of oft-repeated endeavor, in the sudden snapping of many a fancied clue of discovery, some have become at times skeptical in regard to well-authenticated results, and

despaired of any adequate aid from the monuments in unravelling the intricacies of Assyrian history. Yet these persons. have not sufficiently considered the magnitude of the problems, nor the slow and baffling processes that have attended all the great achievements of science-the dreary vanderings and the desert sojourn which always precede the promised land. On the whole, all has been accomplished which lay within the scope of rational expectation, and enough to justify the hope of a far more complete success. To sum up in full the results thus far attained is not our present purpose-an attempt, even for those best qualified, doubtless premature. Our object is much huinbler. We propose rather to survey (with Brandis' tract as our general guide) our principal sources of Assyrian history, and the state of the historical question independently of the monuments, and then to indicate by a few specimens the way in which these latter have affected the historical evidence. To the student of Assyrian history the first question is, what are the sources and extent of our previous knowledge of that history? and then, how far has this been confirmed, contradicted, or enlarged by the exhumed monuments and inscriptions? If we can aid in disentangling a subject which lies in the general mind in great confusion, and in showing that the bricks of Babylon and the sculptured slabs of Nineveh promise yet to be built up into a structure of historical knowledge which no material convulsion can overthrow, our purpose will be accomplished. We shall summon, therefore, to the stand the several witnesses whose testimony may be regarded as having an independent value.

We must pay our tribute in this, as in almost every question of antiquarian research, to the restless curiosity and the comprehensive literature of Greece. Greece early, no doubt, and in many ways, through commerce, war, and travel, came into contact with Assyria. But her prose records scarcely begun until a century after Nineveh had been laid in ashes, and when the former greatness of the empire lived only in tradition. Our first Greek witness, whose spirit and opportunities of research entitle him to a hearing, is the fable-loving, and still more eminently, the truth-loving Herodotus. Born in B.

C. 484, Herodotus wrote somewhat after the middle of the fifth century before Christ. He visited Babylon, which he beheld with admiring wonder, and as the result of his personal observations and of his researches in the Babylonian archives, wrote or planned a special history of Assyria and Babylon. The notices regarding Assyria in his extant work, are extremely brief. Their substance is, that Assyria held the dominion of Upper Asia for 520 years, when her power was weakened by the defection, first of the Medes and soon after of her other dependencies; that, after a period of anarchy, whose length is not defined, Deioces obtained the sovereignty of the Medes in as a sure reckoning fixes the date-709; that, after a reign of 53 years, he was succeeded by his son Phraortes, who reduced the revolted provinces of Assyria to the Median sway, but was defeated in an attack on Nineveh, and perished with nearly all his army. His son Cyaxares succeeded to the throne in 634. He renewed the attack on Nineveh, but the siege was suspended by an irruption of the Scythians, who held Asia in servitude during 28 years. At the end of this time Cyaxares shook off the Assyrian yoke, recovered his former possessions, and laid siege to and captured Nineveh, though how, or under what Assyrian monarch, Herodotus does not inform us. The date of this event must be fixed, according to Herodotus, at about 606 B. C. It could not have been earlier, as the twenty-eight years of the Scythian dominion come down to this point. It could scarcely have been later, as Nabopolassar, king of Babylon, was, as we learn from Berosus, Cyaxares' confederate in arms, and he died in 604, and in 605 he yielded up to his son Nebuchadnezzar the command of the army. It is safe, then, for us to fix Herodotus' date for the destruction of Nineveh at 606 before Christ. But when commenced this 520 years of Assyrian supremacy? This remains somewhat uncertain, as Herodotus does not give the interval which elapsed between the revolt of the Medes and the accession of Deioces in 709. It must have commenced certainly more than 520 years before 709, i. e, earlier than 1229, and somewhere probably in the thirteenth century before Christ. But we may approximate the date

more nearly. The Heracleid dynasty of Lydia Herodotus makes to commence with Agron, son of Ninus, in 1221. The Ninus here mentioned is beyond question the Ninus to whom tradition ascribed the founding of the Assyrian empire, and as Herodotus followed this tradition, he also probably followed the current tradition regarding the length of Ninus' reign. This was 52 years, which, assuming that Agron came to the throne of Lydia on the death of his father, would place the commencement of the Assyrian sovereignty at 1273.

This reckoning would fix the Median revolt (the close of that period of 524 years) in 753, and leave an interval of 44 years between this and the accession of Deioces. Without vouching for the perfect exactness of these dates, we may be justified in fixing the commencement of the Assyrian rule in Upper Asia early in the thirteenth century, and its decline about the middle of the eighth. The leading points, then, of the deposition of Herodotus, are, that Assyria swayed the empire of Upper Asia for 524 years, from the early part of the thirteenth ante-Christian century to nearly the middle of the eighth; that her dominion was then broken, first, by the falling off of the Medes, and then of other subject provinces; that she nevertheless still remained powerful, as she nearly a century afterward routed and destroyed the army of the Median prince; but finally sunk under the Median arms in about 606, when the supremacy of Asia was divided between Media and Babylon.

We here dismiss the Halicarnassian, and call, as our next Greek authority, Ctesias to the stand. He was a native of Cnidos in Caria, and spent seventeen years at the court of Persia, as private physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon, and healed the wound which that prince received from his brother, the younger Cyrus, at the battle of Cunaxa. He returned to his country in 398; he must thus have written early in the fourth century, and been a younger contemporary of Herodotus. His long residence and high position at the Persian court, gave him access, it would seem, to the Persian archives, whence he drew, he says, the materials for an extensive history of Persia, comprised in 23 books, written for the express