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Now he wished to go further south, beyond Nimroud to Kalah Shergat, the yet earlier capital of Assyria; and yet further to Babylon, that he might see and test the multitude of mounds of ancient Chaldea, the real land of Nimrod, the seat of Eden, and the Tower of Babel, far more ancient than any one of the three capitals of Assyria.
It is evident that the story of the Tower of Babal was borrowed by the Jehovist author of this part of Genesis from the tradition of the famous unfinished Temple of Belus, one of the wonders of antiquity. "Birs Nimroud" is thus described by Kalisch:
It is said that Nimroud did not place his iron hoof on this sacred spot. The daughters of the Saint marry away, only the sons remain in the oasis, and some of these emigrate, which accounts for the smallness of the Saint's offspring.
But before Babylon was the capital of Chaldea, or Nineveh the capital of Assyria, the city of Calah had been the seat of its kings, and a mighty mound they call it Nimroud now "as high as St.
Bricks from Birs Nimroud would have been a good material for the walks. Perhaps, order being the great end, anything savoring of confusion was thought out of place. Fire is an invader of peace and property, defence against whose destructive forays is one of the first and most constant cares of American cities, old and new, great and small.
On the eastern face of the palace of Sennacherib, he says, the remains of the wide slopes by which the palace communicated with the plain were quite visible to him. One of these staircases is figured in a bas-relief from Nimroud; it seems to rise to a line of battlements that form, no doubt, the parapet to a flat terrace behind.
Each reign added to the series of royal dwellings in which every chamber was filled with inscriptions and living figures. Some of these structures were raised in Nineveh itself, some in the neighbouring cities. At the south-east angle of the mound at Nimroud, the remains of a palace begun by Assuredilani have been excavated.
Layard struggled against all kinds of difficulties; slept in hovels not sheltered from the rain; used his table as his roof by night; rode backwards and forwards from Nimroud to Mosul to expostulate with the vexatious interferences of a tyrannical old pasha; cheered the labours of his superstitious workmen; celebrated the discovery of certain remains with substantial feastings and music: made peace with a wandering Arab who threatened to rob him: these, and a thousand other adventures, recorded in his narrative of his discoveries, give an additional zest to the curiosity with which visitors enter this Nimroud room.
Thus Layard found at Nimroud the remains of a decoration in which the painter had apparently attempted to rival the sculptor: he had represented a battle scene analogous to those we find in such plenty in the bas-reliefs.
The first slabs to which the visitor will direct his attention in the compartment , are from the north-west edifice, excavated from the Nimroud Mound, which Mr. Layard conjectures to be the most ancient of all the Assyrian ruins, dating, as we have stated, so far back as nineteen centuries before our era.
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