Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/78

 6o À History of Art in Ciialo.ka and Assyria. yards), in length, so that the total circumference was 480 stades (55 miles 240 yards). 1 The whole of this space was inclosed by a wall 100 Greek feet (103 feet English) high, and with towers of twice that height, It is hardly necessary to show that all this is pure invention. To find room for such a Nineveh we should have to take all the space between the ruins opposite Mossoul and those of Ximroud. But all the Assyrian texts that "refer to Nineveh and Calah speak of them as two distinct cities, each with an independent life and period of supremacy of its own, while between the two sites there are no traces of a great urban population. The 1,500 towers on the walls were the offspring of the same brain that imagined the tower of Ninus nine stades FiG. 23. — Siege of a city ; from Layarcl. (5458 feet) high. We can scent an arbitrary assertion in the proportion of two to one given to the heights of the towers over that of the wall. In the fortified walls of the bas-reliefs the curtain is never greatly excelled in height by its flanking towers (see Vol. I. Figs. 51, 60, 76, and 158, and above, Fig. 23). Ctesias has simply provided in his Nineveh a good pendant to Babylon. Being quite free to exercise his imagination, he has laid down even a greater circumference than that of the city on the Euphrates. The superiority thus ascribed to the northern city is enough by itself to arouse our suspicions. We cannot point to any particular text,- but contemporary history as a whole suggests that Babylon was more populous than Nineveh, just as Bagdad is now more populous than Mossoul. Nineveh, 1 Diouorus, ii. iii. 2, 3.