Musing thus on problems of municipal reform we cross the bridge and ride over the mile or so of flat foreshore, that now separates the river from the walls of Nineveh. Once the Tigris washed the base of Koyunjik, the site of Sennacherib’s palace, and formed an impregnable barrier against all assaults from that side, but the day dawned at last of which an old prophecy had spoken, when the river joined the besiegers, and betrayed the city to its foes. A great flood swept away the walls, leaving wide breaches all along the frontage; and as the waters subsided, lo the river had cut a new channel, and the whole of the side which it had guarded lay completely open to attack.
Wherefore King Sardanapalus (who was not Assurbanipal, but a successor of his named Sinsariskun) gathered together all his treasure and his wives and his children, and died as a king should die, in the flames of his own palace.
Nineveh fell in the year 608 B.C., overthrown by Cyaxares, the king of the Medes, and his better known ally, Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. She had been hard pressed more than once before, but had triumphed eventually over each successive peril. The ultimate explanation of this final overthrow was indeed nothing more or less than the exhaustion caused by generations of conquest. There were no true Assyrians left—[{84}]only a half-bred race, the fruit of incessant inter-marriages; and when they succumbed, they had no power of recuperation. “Nineveh is laid waste, who shall bemoan her? Her people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them.”
There is but little above ground at Nineveh now. The long walls remain, looking much like derelict railway embankments; and the great moat, fifty yards in width, and twenty feet deep, into which the waters of the river Khozr could be turned at will, still girdles the city round. Sunk as it is in conglomerate rock, this moat is a monument of patient labour. Of the two great mounds where the King’s palaces stood, Koyunjik and Nebi Yunus, the former and larger has probably yielded the last of its important secrets to the British Museum. It is well, however, to remember that the same was said of Karnak, in Egypt, and the richest of all finds have come to light there since then. You can never be sure that you have got all that is in a mound, till, more fossorum Germanicorum, you have passed the whole of it through a fine sieve.
Still, the search has been fairly thorough. The excavators however, left one of the great human-headed bulls above ground; and it may be of interest to record that this monument (which was presumably the property of the British Museum) first generously parted with its head to mend a mill; and was subsequently sold for the sum of three shillings and six pence by the Vali of Mosul (not worthy old Tahir Pasha, but his predecessor), and burnt into lime by its purchaser.
The second mound, Nebi Yunus—alas, one can but gnash one’s teeth in envy and anger when one knows that the favourite palace of Esarhaddon lies beneath it—that king whose smaller house elsewhere has yielded the finest specimens of Assyrian art yet known. And this, his chef d’œuvre, cannot be examined, because of the mosque of Nebi Yunus (Jonah the Prophet) that stands in the midst of the Turkoman village that crowns it. The Prophet will be very angry if you disturb him, say the Mussulmans,[{85}] and will take vengeance dire![40] If it were indeed Jonah that lies there, there might be something in the argument; for the Prophet is known to have had a temper. But it is not he. After all, seeing that his prophecy of the destruction of Nineveh was not fulfilled, the top of the mound that covers the ruins of the city is perhaps the one spot of earth where it is quite impossible for him to be buried! As a matter of fact, the mosque is an old Nestorian church, once the cathedral of that body in the days when their independent patriarchate was in Mosul; and the occupant of the tomb is John the Lame, a worthy Patriarch of the thirteenth century, who now gets compensation for a life of hardship in his posthumous honours as Jewish Prophet and Mussulman Saint.
Mar John the Lame was a friend to knowledge and learning in his life; and it must be a real annoyance to the good old man to think that his corpse has been made into an obstacle to both of them now that he has done with it!
Only one of the treasures of the palace has ever come to light, viz. a pair of bronze oxen, found in the process of cleaning out the well in the court of the mosque. These “idols” were promptly melted down; and they now, in the form of a window grating, keep thieves from a gentleman’s house in Mosul.
The old order is changing in Mosul as elsewhere; or will change when the Baghdad Railway comes and brings light and sanitation into its picturesque corruption. The domination of the present governing clique will go, and one hopes that something better will take its place. Will whatever happens to come be a real improvement on the open bribery of Sabonji, and the humorous tolerance of Tahir Pasha? Some things will mend. The small merchant, for instance, will no longer be made to buy his stock from the local member of the administrative council; and warned that if he dares to import for himself from Aleppo, that caravan, at any rate, will not pass the Shammar Arabs. The youthful[{86}] heroes of that tribe will no longer be told by the old men “in the good old days of our fathers, a young fellow had to kill his lion before he thought himself man enough to take a wife. Now you must, at any rate, rob a caravan.” All that will be to the good. Still, the experience of towns like Beyrout and Smyrna suggests that, after all, the known evils of the East may be preferable to the unknown crop that will spring from a confusion of East and West.[{87}]