We need not dwell upon the back reckonings of the Chaldæans for periods of 720,000, 490,000, 470,000 years, mentioned by Cicero, Diodorus, and Pliny (Cicero, De Divin. ii, 46; Diod. ii, 31; Pliny, H. N. vii, 57), and seemingly presented by Berosus and others as the preface of Babylonian history.
It is to be noted that Ptolemy always cited the Chaldæan observations as made by “the Chaldæans,” never naming any individual; though in all the other observations to which he alludes, he is very scrupulous in particularizing the name of the observer. Doubtless he found the Chaldæan observations registered just in this manner; a point which illustrates what is said in the text respecting the collective character of their civilization, and the want of individual development or prominent genius.
The superiority of the Chaldæan priests to the Egyptian, as astronomical observers, is shown by the fact that Ptolemy, though living at Alexandria, never mentions the latter as astronomers, and cites no Egyptian observations while he cites thirteen Chaldæan observations in the years B. C. 721, 720, 523, 502, 491, 383, 382, 245, 237, 229: the first ten being observations of lunar eclipses; the last three, of conjunctions of planets and fixed stars (Ideler, Handbuch der Chronologie, vol. i, Ab. ii, pp. 195-199).
[555] Herodot. ii, 109.
[556] The ancient Ninus or Nineveh was situated on the eastern bank of the 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 Tacitus (Ann. xii, 13) and Ammian. Marcell. (xviii, 7) mention it as subsisting. Its ruins had been long remarked (see Thevenot, Voyages, lib. i, ch. xi, p. 176, and Niebuhr, Reisen, vol. ii, p. 360), but have never been examined carefully until recently by Rich, Ainsworth, and others: see Ritter, West-Asien, b. iii, Abtheil. iii, Abschn. i, s. 45, pp. 171-221.
Ktêsias, according to Diodorus (ii, 3), placed Ninus or Nineveh on the Euphrates, which we must presume to be an inadvertence,—probably of Diodorus himself, for Ktêsias would be less likely than he to confound the Euphrates and the Tigris. Compare Wesseling ad Diodor. ii, 3, and Bähr ad Ktesiæ Fragm. ii, Assyr. p. 392.
Mannert (Geographie der Gr. und Röm. part v, c. 14, pp. 439-448) disputes the identity of these ruins with the ancient city of Ninus 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 once flourishing Assyrian capital. This argument once appeared to me so forcible, that I came to the same negative conclusion as Mannert, though his conjectures, as to the real site of the city, never appeared to me satisfactory. But Ritter has removed the difficulty, by showing that the ruins opposite Mosul exactly correspond to the situation of that deserted city which Xenophon calls Mespila: the difference of name in this case is not of very great importance (Ritter, ut sup. p. 175). Consult also Forbiger, Handbuch der alten Geographie, sect. 96, p. 612.
The situation of Nineveh here pointed out is exactly what we should expect in reference to the conquests of the Median kings: it lies in that part of Assyria bordering on Media, and in the course of the conquests which the king Kyaxarês afterwards extended farther on to the Halys. (See [Appendix] at the end of this chapter.)
[557] Herodot. i, 193. Ἡ γῆ τῶν Ἀσσυρίων ὕεται μὲν ὀλίγῳ—while he speaks of rain falling at Thebes in Egypt as a prodigy, which never happened except just at the moment when the country was conquered by Cambysês,—οὐ γὰρ δὴ ὕεται τὰ ἄνω τῆς Αἰγύπτου τὸ παράπαν (iii, 10). It is not unimportant to notice this distinction between the little rain of Babylonia, and the no rain of Upper Egypt,—as a mark of measured assertion in the historian from whom so much of our knowledge of Grecian history is derived.
It chanced to rain hard during the four days which the traveller Niebuhr spent in going from the ruins of Babylon to Bagdad, at the end of November 1763 (Reisen, vol. ii, p. 292).