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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.
Here, Calah means 'Sankalpa'. The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Translated into English Prose from the Original Sanskrit Text by Kisari Mohan Ganguli Scanned at sacred-texts.com, January 2004. Proofed by John Bruno Hare. OM! HAVING BOWED down unto Narayana, and Nara the foremost of male beings, and unto the goddess Saraswati, must the word Jaya be uttered.
The exhaustion of Assyria's resources at the time is remarkably illustrated by the poverty and meanness of the palace which the last king, Saracus, built for himself at Calah. She lay, apparently, at the mercy of the first bold assailant, her prestige lost, her army dispirited or disorganized, her defences injured, her high spirit broken and subdued.
It was perhaps for the ornamentation of this edifice that he cut "great trees" in Amanus and elsewhere during his Syrian expedition, and had them conveyed across Mesopotamia to Assyria. It is expressly stated that these beams were carried, not to Calah, where Asshur-izir-pal usually resided, but to Nineveh.
We learn of a temple at Calah, and of no less than eight statues of the god being erected in the days of Ramman-nirari III., and the terms in which the god is addressed might lead one to believe that an attempt was made to concentrate the cult in Assyria on him. This, however, was an impossibility.
Its court was fixed securely in midmost Assyria, away from priest-ridden Asshur, which seems to have been always anti-imperial and pro-Babylonian; for Ashurnatsirpal had restored Calah to the capital rank which it had held under Shalmaneser I but lost under Tiglath Pileser, and there the kings of the Middle Empire kept their throne.
This city has been supposed to represent the Biblical Resen; but the description of that place as lying "between Nineveh and Calah" seems to render the identification worse than uncertain. The ruins at Kileh-Sherghat are the last of any extent towards the south, possessing a decidedly Assyrian character.
One of these was at Asshur, where she was worshipped in combination with ten other deities, of whom one only, Ishtar, was of high rank. The other was at Calah, where her husband had also a temple. She is perhaps to be identified with Bilat-Ili, "the mistress of the gods," to whom Sargon dedicated one of his gates in conjunction with Hoa. NINIP, or NIN.
The principal temples known to have been dedicated to Nin in Assyria were at Calah, the modern Nimrud. There the vast structure at the north-western angle of the great mound, including the pyramidical eminence which is the most striking feature of the ruins, was a temple dedicated to the honor of Nin by Asshur-izir-pal, the builder of the North-West Palace.
They built the great cities of Antioch, Rehoboth, Calah and Resen. Their empire was the oldest in the world—that established by a Cushite dynasty on the plains of Babylon, and in the highlands of Persia. They cast off the patriarchal law, and indulged in a restless passion for dominion. And they were the most civilized of the ancient nations in arts and material life.
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