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Near this place was a stone pyramid, 100 feet in breadth, and 200 feet high; the summit of which was crowded with fugitives out of the neighboring villages. Another day's march up the course of the Tigris brought the army to a second deserted city called Mespila, nearly opposite to the modern city of Mosul.
Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. When we have completed our examination of Assyrian sculpture, so rich in some respects, so poor in others, we shall understand the rapidity with which silence and oblivion overtook so much glory and power; we shall understand how some two centuries after the victory of Nabopolassar and the final triumph of Babylon and her allies, Xenophon and his Greeks could mount the Tigris and gaze upon the still formidable walls of the deserted cities of Mespila and Larissa without even hearing the name of Nineveh pronounced.
They passed by the ruined cities of Larissa and Mespila on the Tigris, in the neighbourhood of the ancient Nineveh. The march from Mespila to the mountainous country of the Carduchi occupied several days in which the Greeks suffered much from the attacks of the enemy. Their future route was now a matter of serious perplexity.
When Xenophon crossed Assyria with the "ten thousand," he noticed this method of constructing city walls, but in all the enceintes that attracted his attention, the height of the plinth was much greater than that of Khorsabad. At Larissa it was twenty, and at Mespila fifty feet, or respectively a fifth and a third of the total height of the walls.
PLACE, Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol i. p. 64. XENOPHON, Anabasis, iii. 4, 7-11. The identity of Larissa and Mespila has been much discussed. Oppert thinks they were Resen and Dour-Saryoukin; others that they were Calech and Nineveh. The question is without importance to our inquiry. See the History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. i. p. 113.
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