Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/116

78 additional "New" was prefixed to its name. In the Index of Syrian authors drawn up by Mar Abd Yeshua, 1298, a translation of which is given in Vol. II. Appendix B., the word "Noo Ardasheer" occurs twice as the title of a place, and the seat of a Nestorian Bishop. In many other Syriac MSS. Mosul is styled "Athoor," and it is not an uncommon practice with ecclesiastical writers of the present day to use the same phraseology: "Mosul, which is Athoor;" but this must be regarded rather as a traditional commemoration of the title of one of the oldest dioceses in these parts, (which was also called "Nineveh" long after that name had ceased to denote the capital of the Assyrian Kings,) than as the common appellative of a particular town then existing.

The destruction of Nineveh by the Medes is thus described in an old Syriac work which I met with at Mosul in 1850: "Nineveh is of old like a pool of water. &#91;Nahum ii. 8.] This was literally accomplished as the fact fully testifies; for Adorbahan the Mede, from whom Aderbijan takes its name, destroyed Nineveh by water, when he came from Media with a great army against Sardanapalus the King of Athoor. The two rivers which ran through the meadows and united in Nineveh he joined with two other rivers, one of which he brought from the Tigris, and the other ran through Nineveh itself. After he had united all four together he brought the force of the water to bear against the city, and destroyed it with a flood according to the prediction of the prophet. After this it was taken by stratagem from Esarhaddon by the Babylonians." The same author writes in another place: "Arbaces the Persian when he took possession of Nineveh, cut a canal from the Tigris, above the city, and flooded it."

The four rivers spoken of in the above extract puzzled me exceedingly, as the Khoser is the only rivulet which now flows through the mounds of Nineveh; but Mr. Layard informed me that he could discover the beds of two other smaller streams, which, with the water turned off from the Tigris, make up the four "rivers" mentioned in the manuscript. The fact here