The Buried City of the East Nineveh Author:Austen Henry Layard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BIRS NIBiROCD, (SUPPOSED TOWER OF BABEL). CHAPTER II. The Nineveh Of The Bible. A Glance backwards—more than two thousand years—becomes necessary, ... more »when we ask what Nineveh was understood to be before the excavations of Botta and Layard. We have two sources of information on the subject; the sacred writers and the ancient Greek and Roman historians. Let us examine first, then, the Nineveh of the Bible. From the sacred writings we learn that the long forborne vengeance of Heaven, overtaking the impious pride of the antediluvian world, had swept from the face of the earth the numerous tribes of Adam, reserving only the family of Noah, to make him the second progenitor of the human race. The three sons of the Patriarch, conscious of the dignity of their relation to the new world, had gone forth to assume other new sovereignties and people the earth. At this period, within a century after the flood, and while Noah was in the full vigour of his power, his great grandson, the founder of the earliest post-deluvian cities, is introduced on the historic page. " And Cush begat Nimrod; be began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; wherefore it is said, 'Even as Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord.' And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur (Assyria) and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah, the same is a great city."1 The position of this passage, a circumstantial personal narrative interposed between two portions of a dry genealogical list, and especially the allusion to a colloquial proverb, are remarkable. Moses, the writer 1 Geneiis i 8-12. of the book of Genesis, is believed t...« less