NINEVEH OF THE BIBLE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19000, 24 October 1923, Page 4

NINEVEH OF THE BIBLE.

(From the Times correspondent, lately in the Near East. There is a great deal in the name of a city; especially if it is ancient, sonorous, and Biblical, and it is hard to understand why the British Government has not renamed Mosul “Nineveh,” The name is historically accurate; Mosul stands where stood Nineveh’s western suburbs, and the site of the ‘‘bloody city” which Jonah saved and Nahum cursed lies only a mile or so away across the Tigris. And “Mosul” means very little to the British public; a few of us who rememoer our grammar connect tho name with “muslin,” but that is all, whereas had Lord Ourzon spoken of “Nineveh” at Lausanne, many of those who now ask what there is in Mosul to make it worth retaining would display considerable anxiety were there any prospect of its loss. The 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 b.c., and many Assyrian rulers reigned there before Sennacherib, quitting his father Sargon’s capital at Calab, built perhaps the most magnificent of Assyrian palaces at. Nineveh. Lsarhaddon, though he did not reside there, added temples to the many built in honour of the national deities by his forerunneis, and Assur-bani-pal, his son, conqueror, voluptuary, and patron of the arts, wnom the ancients called Sardanapnlus, built the last of the great palaces by the Tigris. After him came the deluge, and not only metaphorically. The Chaldean ruler ot Babylon and his famous son Nebuchadnezzar, allied with or vassals of a great northern king, Cyaxeres, tho lord of the Modes, assailed the city. The besiegers seem to have diverted the Tigris against the ramparts; the walls were breached, and, amid flood • and fire, 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. Yet the tradition survived ; in medieval times the local Arabs called the town of Mosul (Al-Mausil, the place of meeting) Ninawa; Niebuhr, in 1780, found no difficulty in identifying the mounds covering three square miles on the left bank of the Tigris with the city founded, men said, by Nimrod. ’ When Mosul was founded is unknown, but the town was flourishing in the later days of the Abbossid 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 Baghdad. 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, ivurd, Armenian, and Crusader. Hulagu’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 in holding it against the Persians, whose last great attack under Nadir Shah was repulsed in 1743. To-day the majority of the Moslem inhabitants are still Arabsi ■ followed in numbers by Kurds, with the-'Tuiks a bad third. There are a considerable number 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 George) 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 which many Jews still make pilgrimage, for all that the prophet rests in a Moslem shrine. Within an hour of the eastern gates are the rums of Nineyon, first excavated and explored by an Englishman, Sir Henry Layard, in 1845-51. We occupied the town, as we were entitled to do, a few davs after the armistice of October 31, 1918, and after jhe complete defeat and destruction of a Turkish Army Corps by the 17th and 18th Indian Divisions and two independent cavalry columns, which crossed the Tigris in the enemy's rear and forced the greater part of his armv to surrender at. Kalah Shergat on October 30. It was a brilliant pieced work bv Sir A. Cobbe, v .C., and is not as widely known as it deserves.