[Illustration:  327b.jpg STATUE OF MAUSOLUS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph of the original in
     the British Museum.

[Illustration:  327a.jpg COIN OF A LYCIAN KING]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a silver stater in the Cabinet des Medailles. The king in question was named Deneveles, and is only known by the coins bearing his superscription.  He flourished about 395 B.C.

Their kings minted coins many of which are reckoned among the masterpieces of antique engraving; and if we pass from Lycia to the petty states of Caria, we come upon one of the greatest triumphs of Greek art—­that huge mausoleum in which the inconsolable Artemisia enclosed the ashes and erected the statue of her husband.  The Asia Minor of Egyptian times, with its old-world dynasties, its old-world names, and old-world races, had come to be nothing more than an historic memory; even that martial world, in which the Assyrian conquerors fought so many battles from the Euphrates to the Black Sea, was now no more, and its neighbours and enemies of former days had, for the most part, disappeared from the land of the living.

[Illustration:  328.jpg LYCIAN SARCOPHAGUS DECORATED WITH GREEK CARVINGS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photogravure published by
     Hamdy-Beg and Th.  Reinach.

The Lotanu were gone, the Khati were gone, and gone, too, were Carchemish, Arpad, and Qodshu, much of thSec.ir domain having been swallowed up again by the desert for want of hands to water and till it; even Assyria itself seemed but a shadow half shrouded in the mists of oblivion.  Sangara, Nisibis, Resaina, and Edessa still showed some signs of vigour, but on quitting the slopes of the Masios and proceeding southwards, piles of ruins alone marked the sites of those wealthy cities through which the Ninevite monarchs had passed in their journeyings towards Syria.  Here wide tracts of arid and treeless country were now to be seen covered with aromatic herbage, where the Scenite Arabs were wont to pursue the lion, wild ass, ostrich, bustard, antelope, and gazelle; a few abandoned forts, such as Korsorte, Anatho, and Is (Hit) marked the halting-places of armies on the banks of the Euphrates.  In the region of the Tigris, the descendants of Assyrian captives who, like the Jews, had been set free by Cyrus, had rebuilt Assur, and had there grown wealthy by husbandry and commerce,* but in the district of the Zab solitude reigned supreme.** Calah and Nineveh were alike deserted, and though their ruins still littered the sites where they had stood, their names were unknown in the neighbouring villages.  Xenophon, relying on his guides, calls the former place Larissa, the second Mespila.***