* This seems to be indicated by a mutilated passage in the Cylinder of Gyrus, where Assur is mentioned in the list of towns and countries whose inhabitants were sent back to their homes by Cyrus after the capture of Babylon.  Xenophon calls it Esense, this being, possibly, a translation of the name given to it by its inhabitants.  Nothing could be more natural than for exiles to call the villages founded by them on their return “new.”  The town seems to have been a large and wealthy one.

     ** Xenophon calls this country Media, a desert region which
     the Ten Thousand took six days to cross.

*** The name Larissa is, possibly, a corruption of some name similar to that of the city of Larsam in Chaldaea; Mespila may be a generic term. [Mespila is Muspula, “the low ground” at the foot of Kouyunjik; Larissa probably Al Resen or Res-eni, between Kouyunjik and Nebi Yunus.—­Ed.]

Already there were historians who took the ziggurat at Nineveh to be the burial-place of Sardanapalus.  They declared that Cyrus had pulled it down in order to strengthen his camp during the siege of the town, and that formerly it had borne an epitaph afterwards put into verse by the poet Choerilus of Iassus:  “I reigned, and so long as I beheld the light of the sun, I ate, I drank, I loved, well knowing how brief is the life of man, and to how many vicissitudes it is liable.”  Many writers, remembering the Assyrian monument at Anchiale in Cilicia, were inclined to place the king’s tomb there.  It was surmounted by the statue of a man—­according to one account, with his hands crossed upon his breast, according to another, in the act of snapping his fingers—­and bore the following inscription in Chaldaic letters:  “I, Sardanapalus, son of Anakyndaraxes, founded Anchiale and Tarsus in one day, but now am dead.”  Thus ten centuries of conquests and massacre had passed away like a vapour, leaving nothing but a meagre residue of old men’s tales and moral axioms.

In one respect only does the civilisation of the Euphrates seem to have fairly held its own.  Cossaea, though it had lost its independence, had lost but little of its wealth; its former rebellions had done it no great injury, and its ancient cities were still left standing, though shorn of their early splendour.  Uru, it is true, numbered but few citizens round its tottering sanctuaries, but Uruk maintained a school of theologians and astronomers no less famous throughout the East than those of Borsippa.  The swamps, however, which surrounded it possessed few attractions, and Greek travellers rarely ventured thither.  They generally stopped at Babylon, or if they ventured off the beaten track, it was only to visit the monuments of Nebuchadrezzar, or the tombs of the early kings in its immediate neighbourhood.  Babylon was, indeed, one of the capitals of the empire—­nay, for more than half a century, during the closing years of Artaxerxes I., in the reign of Darius II., and