WHERE NINEVEH STOOD

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 24

WHERE NINEVEH STOOD

MOSUL AN ARAB TOWN

SAID TO BE THE FIRST CITY

!.;. There is a great deal in the name of a City, especially y j t j s ancient, eonorous, and' Biblical, and it is hard to understand why the' British Government has iioi renamed .Mosul "Nineveh," writes • Near East correspondent - of "The Times." The name is historically accu-rate;-Mosul "stands' where stood Nine. yeh's western suburbs, and the site of the "bloody, city" which Jonah saved and Nahum cursed lies only "a mile or co across the Tigris. And "Mosul" means very little .to the. British public; a few of us who remember our grammar, connect-the name -with "muslin," but,that is. all, whereas had lord-Cur-zon spoken of "Nineveh", at Lausanne, many of those who now ask what there is m Mosul to make it worth retaining ■ ■would display, considerable anxiety Jtfere there any prospect of its loss. ;,. ■ ■ Ihe Assyrians averred - that Nineveh ■was the first city built by men. This ■was _a patriotic boast, but Hammurabi mentioned it in an inscription which appears; to date from circa 2280 8.C., and many Assyrian rulers reigned there before Sennacherib, quitting his father Jargons-capital at Calah',. built perhaps the most magnificent of Assyrian palaces at Nineveh. Esarhaddon, though he did _not. reside there, added temples to the many built in. honour of the national deities by his forerunners, and Assur-bam-pal, his son, conqueror, voluptuary and patron of'the arts, whom the ancients called. Sardanapalus, built the last of the great palaces by the Tigris. • DESTRUCTION. After him. came the deluge, -and not only metaphorically. The Chaldean ruler of Babylon and his famous son I Nebuchadnezzar, allied with or vassals pf,a great northern king, Cyaxares, the Jord-of the Medes, assailed the city The besiegers -seem to have diverted the | Tigris against the ramparts; the walls! ■were.breached, and, amid flood and fire. I vengeful Babylonian and wild northerner wiped out their old enemies in a comprehensive- massacre. When Xenophon's ten thousand Greeks marched past the site nearly three centuries later Nineveh was not. - . ' YetTthe tradition' survived ; in medie••val times the local Arabs called the town of,MpE.nl;.(Al-Mausil, .the place of meet-rog)-Ninawa,~ Niebuhr, in 1780, found no difficulty in identifying the'mound* covering three square miles "on the left bank'of the Tigris with the city founded, men said,.by Nimrod. The pointed ■ Chaldean" cap, the "kelleks," those raftß of inflated skins which carry men and-goods-down the Tigris, the pointed toots of the peasants, the mud walk i built ; at.a.slight.'angle" to ensure sta- ! W'ty... the .practice of encasing brickwork in slabs ,of limestone—all these may be seen alike on the reliefs twenty-five centuries old and in Mosul town today.;; ■ _.•■' ■ • - . .. When -Mosul was founded is unknown, but the town was flourishing in the later j days of the Abbassid Caliphs. It commanded, and still commands, the trade routes leading east from Diarbekir- and Mardin and south from Bitlis at a point ■where the Tigris, is easily crossed and where the corn of the rich plains of Northern Mesopotamia could be stored under the.protection of an easily defended city and rafted down to Bagdad. Arab dynasties continued to rule it after the decline, of the Beni-Abbas, and Turks only appeared in the twelfth century, when soldiers of fortune, of whom Zengi -was the most famous, established the Atabeg" rule and fought Arab, Kurd, Armenian, and Crusader. Hula- : gu s Mongols wiped them out, and it was not till the sixteenth century that the Osmanli Turks were firmly established there, and even then they had-some difficulty m holding it against the Persians whose last great attack under Nadir ohah was repulsed in 1743. ST. GEOEGE AND JONAH. Karsten Niebuhr and Olivier, who ■visited the city in'the later years of the eighteenth century, have given a favourable account of its government by the hereditary, "two-tailed" Pashas of the Arab house of Abd-el-Jelil. „T.°-.d ay the majority of the Moslem inhabitants are still Arabs, followed in numbers, by Kurds, with the Turks a bad third. There are a considerable Dumber of Christians. The ramparts of the town are now in ruins, but its eight gates survive. Its great mosque, the Djami-el-Kir, with its leaning minaret, is .its chief building, and in the mosque known as Nebi Jirjis (the Prophet teorge) is buried—so the, inhabitants aver—our patron saint, George of England, though other cities dispute Mosul's claim._ Near the town is a mosque wherein is shown the tomb of Jonah to w.luch many Jews still make pilgrimage, lor all that the. prophet rests in a Moslem shrine. -.Within an hour of the eastern gates are the ruins of Nineveh, first excavated and explored by an Englishman, Sir Henry Layard,- in 1945-517 . We occupied the town, as we were entitled to do, a few days after th"c Armistice of 31st October, 1918, and after the complete defeat and destruction of a ID'S y^Amy Corps: by the 17th and IHth Indian Divisions and two independent cavalry columns, which crossed the Tigris' in the enemy's rear and forced the greater part, of his army to surrender at Kalah Shergat on 30th October. It was a brilliant piece of work by Sir A. Cobbe, V.C., and is not as widely Jinown as it deserves.. Since .we have been in Mosul trade, security,: and sanitation have improved, antiquities have been protected, and the great families of ttie city are no longer permitted to indulge in" private warfare. Whatever our policy in Mesopotamia, one may hope that we shall not surrender 3 most interesting town and a district which has great commercial possibilities to the rule of the Turks.