On the 17th and 18th,[1] we went on twenty miles to Palwal,[2] which stands upon an immense mound, in some places a hundred feet high, formed entirely of the debris of old buildings.  There are an immense number of fine brick buildings in ruins, but not one of brick or stone at present inhabited.  The place was once evidently under the former government the seat of some great public establishments, which, with their followers and dependants, constituted almost the entire population.  The occasion which keeps such establishments at a place no sooner passes away than the place is deserted and goes to ruin as a matter of course.  Such is the history of Nineveh, Babylon,[3] and all cities which have owed their origin and support entirely to the public establishments of the sovereign—­any revolution that changed the seat of government depopulated a city.

Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador of James the First of England to the court of Delhi during the reign of Jahangir, passing through some of the old capital cities of Western India, then deserted and in ruins, writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury:  ’I know not by what policy the Emperors seek the ruin of all the ancient cities which were nobly built, but now be desolate and in rubbish.  It must arise from a wish to destroy all the ancient cities in order that there might appear nothing great to have existed before their time.’[4] But these cities, like all which are supported in the same manner, by the residence of a court and its establishments, become deserted as the seat of dominion is changed.  Nineveh, built by Ninus out of the spoils he brought back from the wide range of his conquests, continued to be the residence of the court and the principal seat of its military establishments for thirteen centuries to the reign of Sardanapalus.  During the whole of this time it was the practice of the sovereigns to collect from all the provinces of the empire their respective quotas of troops, and to canton them within the city for one year, at the expiration of which they were relieved by fresh troops.’  In the last years of Sardanapalus, four provinces of the empire, Media, Persia, Babylonia, and Arabia, are said to have furnished a quota of four hundred thousand; and, in the rebellion which closed his reign, these troops were often beaten by those from the other provinces of the empire, which could not have been much less in number.  The successful rebel, Arbaces, transferred the court and his own appendages to its capital, and Nineveh became deserted, and for more than eighteen centuries lost to the civilized world.[5]

Babylon in the same manner; and Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, and Seleucia, all, one after the other, became deserted as sovereigns changed their residence, and with it the seats of their public establishments, which alone supported them.  Thus Thebes became deserted for Memphis, Memphis for Alexandria, and Alexandria for Cairo, as the sovereigns of Egypt changed theirs; and thus it has always been in India, where cities have been almost all founded on the same bases—­the residence of princes, and their public establishments, civil, military, or ecclesiastical.