Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/310

 294 HISTORY OF GREECE. even to later inquirers, such as Eudoxus and Aristotle. The conception of the revolving celestial sphere, the gnomon, and the division of the da}' into twelve parts, are affirmed by Herodotus 1 to have been first taught to the Greeks by the Babylonians ; and the continuous observation of the heavens both by the Egyptian and Chaldtcan priests, had determined with considerable exact- ness both the duration of the solar year and other longer periods of astronomical recurrence ; thus impressing upon intelligent Greeks the imperfection of their own calendars, and furnishing them with a basis not only for enlarged observations of their own, but also for the discovery and application of those mathematical theories whereby astronomy first became a science. Nor was it only the astronomical acquisitions of the priestly caste which distinguished the early Babylonians. The social condition, the fertility of the country, the dense population, and the persevering industry of the inhabitants, were not less remark- able. Respecting Nineveh, 2 once the greatest of the Assyrian 1 Herodot. ii, 109. Tigris, nearly opposite the modern town of Mousul or Mosul. Herodotus (i, 193) and Strabo (xvi, p. 737) both speak of it as being destroyed : but Ta- citus (Ann. xii, 13) and Ammian. Marcell. (xviii,7) mention it as subsisting. Its ruins had been long remarked (see Thevenot, Voyages, lib. i, cli. xi, p. 176, and Niebuhr, Reisen, vol. ii, p. 360), bat have never been examined carefully until recently by Rich, Ainsworth, and others : see Ritter, "Vest- Asien, b. iii, Abtheil. iii, Abschn. i, 8. 45, pp. 171-221. Ktesias, according to Diodorus (ii, 3), placed Ninus or Nineveh on the Euphrates, which we must presume to be an inadvertence, probably of Di- odorus himself, for Ktesias would be less likely than he to confound the Eu- phrates and the Tigris. Compare Wesseling ad Diodor. ii, 3, and Bahr ad Ktesise Fragm. ii, Assyr. p. 392. Mannert (Geographic der Gr. und Rom. part v, c. 14, pp. 439-448) dis- putes the identity of these ruins with the ancient city of Ninns or Nineveh, because, if this had been the fact, Xenophon and the Ten Thousand Greeks must have passed directly over them in the retreat along the eastern bank of the Tigris upward : and Xenophon, who particularly notices the deserted cities of Larissa and Mespila, says nothing of the great ruin of this onco flourishing Assyrian capital. This argument once appeared to me so forci- ble, that I came to the same negative conclusion as Mannert, though his con- jectures, as to the real site of the city, never appeared to me satisfactory But Ritter has removed the difficulty, by showing that the ruins opposita Mosul exactly correspond to the situation of that deserted city which Xeno-
 * The ancient Ninas or Nineveh w.is situated on the eastern bank of tho