Note 556 — Chapter XIX · ASSYRIANS. — BABYLON.

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.)