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In several chambers cleared by George Smith at Nimroud, that explorer found horizontal bands of colour, alternately red, green, and yellow, and where the stone casing of the lower walls was not sculptured, these stripes were continued over its surface.
The eleventh and last compartment contains two slabs, on the first of which is a monarch holding two arrows in token of peace. Having fully examined these objects, the visitor has done with the Nimroud room. Of the romantic stories connected with the researches for the invaluable fragments it contains, we should be glad to give the reader a faint sketch. How Mr.
Some day, perhaps, the exact significance of this emblem may be explained, we are content to point out the variety and happy arrangement of the sinuous lines which surround and enframe the richly decorated pilaster that acts as its stem. The astragali, the ibex horns and the volutes, may all be easily recognized here. Ivory plaque found at Nimroud. Actual size.
How when the human-headed bull was disclosed by the pick-axes of the Chaldaeans, the Arabs scampered off, and how all the natives thought that Nimroud himself the mighty hunter was rising grimly from the earth, are points in the discovery of this treasure which all should read.
I never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread before me. The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently at work at the present day.
Expédition scientifique de Mésopotamie, vol. i. pp. 205-209, and plate 8. Homologeitai d' hupsêlon gegenêsthai kath' huperbolên. DIODORUS, ii. 9, 4. See LAYARD'S account of his excavation in the interior of the pyramidal ruin occupying a part of the platform which now surmounts the mound of Nimroud.
Longworth, in a letter, thus graphically describes his visit: "'I took the opportunity, whilst at Mosul, of visiting the excavations of Nimroud. But before I attempt to give a short account of them, I may as well say a few words as to the general impression which these wonderful remains made upon me, on my first visit to them. I should begin by stating, that they are all under ground.
The fable of the twelve labors constituted the sacred records or scriptures of the older forms of Astrolatry, one version of which, written with the cuneiform character upon twelve tablets of burnt clay, exhumed from the ruins of an Assyrian city, and now on exhibition in the British Museum, is ascribed to Nimroud, the prototype of the Grecian Hercules, and of Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of the Old Testament.
Tombs have certainly been found at Nimroud, at Kouyundjik, at Khorsabad, and in all the mounds in the neighbourhood of Mossoul, but never among or below the Assyrian remains. They are always in the mass of earth and various débris that has accumulated over the ruins of the Assyrian palaces, which is enough to show that they date from a time posterior to the fall of the Mesopotamian Empires.
They were not without some knowledge of optics. The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they were not unacquainted with magnifying instruments. In arithmetic they had detected the value of position in the digits, though they missed the grand Indian invention of the cipher. What a spectacle for the conquering Greeks, who, up to this time, had neither experimented nor observed!
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