Note 360 — Chapter XIV · NINEVEH AND ITS WONDERS

Arabian writers, it is true, had agreed “during nine hundred years, in identifying the mounds on the east bank of the Tigris opposite Mosul with the ruins of Nineveh” but their views were so far from meeting with general acceptance that so late as 1843 the great French explorer, Botta, was convinced when he uncovered the wonderful palace of Sargon II, King of Assyria, B. C. 721–705, that the site of Nineveh was occupied by the ruins of Khorsabad. But the noted English investigator, Layard, “contrary to the teachings of Arabian and Syrian historians and local tradition,” was equally positive that “the ruins of Nineveh were buried under the mound of Nimroud,” which is twenty miles to the south of the actual site of the famous Assyrian capital which was so long the rival and eventually the conqueror of Babylon. Cf. By Nile and Tigris, Vol. II, p. 8 et seq., 15, 16 (by E. A. Wallis Budge, London, 1920).