over thee:  for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?” And another prophet had uttered the curse:  “The pelican and the porcupine shall lodge in the capitals thereof; their voice shall sound in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds; for he hath laid bare the cedar-work.  This is the joyous city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, ‘I am, and there is none besides me!’ How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!  Every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.”

Thus fell Nineveh, amid the universal rejoicing of the nations, and thus, seventy years later, fell Babylon also, which, in the short interval, Nebuchadnezzar had made more magnificent than even Nineveh had been, beautified for its capture by Cyrus.  But before Babylon was the capital of Chaldea, or Nineveh the capital of Assyria, the city of Calah had been the seat of its kings, and a mighty mound—­they call it Nimroud now—­“as high as St. Paul’s steeple,” old travellers loved to say—­marks the place on the east bank of the Tigris, twenty miles south of Nineveh; and, before Calah, Assyria had an earlier capital forty miles still nearer the Babylonian border, at Asshur, now Kalah-Shergat, on the west of the Tigris; and each capital had its palaces and records, and all are now equally buried in clay and utter oblivion.  And before the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and long centuries before Nineveh or Calah or Asshur, there had been mighty kingdoms in Babylonia, of which the world had quite forgot the names, only vague rumors remaining in song or legend of Nimrod and Chedorlaomer and Ur of the Chaldees,—­only what was preserved in the dimmest records of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Empires were lost, buried in chiliads of forgetfulness; would they ever be recovered?

And how much else was lost, what kingdoms, what empires buried before Hebrew or Greek history began to take notice of the world outside and put them in books, no one knew, no one knows even yet, although so much has been found.  The fame of Egypt was never quite forgotten, nor all its history, for Egypt was the world’s granary, and closely accessible to the ships of Corinth and Rome; and Egypt never lost her civilization in all her long succession of enslavement.  But what memory had been kept of the Ionia and Greece of the days before Homer?  What of the early civilization of Cyprus and Crete?  Only the name of Minos, a judge in Hell.  What of Persia and Elam?  Were they uninhabited before the times of Xerxes and Cyrus?  And who were these kings, Cyrus and Xerxes, whose names burst upon us with dim light out of a black antiquity?  Even they were but shadows on a screen, just seen and disappearing.  What kings and kingdoms came before them and passed away?  Has history no record?  Not a word.  Only black vacuity has been left behind them.  And there was that other empire of the East, that of the Hittites, which we now know ruled Asia Minor and Syria and contested