Ctesias has simply provided in his Nineveh a good pendant to Babylon. Being quite free to exercise his imagination, he has laid down even a greater circumference than that of the city on the Euphrates. The superiority thus ascribed to the northern city is enough by itself to arouse our suspicions. We cannot point to any particular text, but contemporary history as a whole suggests that Babylon was more populous than Nineveh, just as Bagdad is now more populous than Mossoul. Nineveh, and Calah before it, were the capitals of a soldier nation, they were cities born, like Dour-Saryoukin, of the will of man. Political events called them into life, and other political events caused them to vanish off the face of the earth. Babylon, on the other hand, was born of natural conditions; she was one of the eternal cities of the world. The Turks do their best to make Hither Asia a desert, but so long as they do not entirely succeed, so long as some light of culture and commerce still flickers in the country, it will burn in that part of Mesopotamia which is now called _El-Jezireh_ (_the island_), where the two streams are close together, and canals cut from one to the other can bring all the intermediate tract into cultivation. Sennacherib speaks thus of his capital: “Nineveh, the supreme city, the city beloved of Istar, in which the temples of the gods and goddesses are to be found.”[76] With its kings and their military guards and courts, with the priests that served the sanctuaries of the gods, with the countless workmen who built the great buildings, Nineveh must have been a fine and flourishing city in the days of the Sargonids; but even then its population cannot have equalled that of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The latter was something more than a seat of royalty and a military post; it was the great entrepôt for all the commerce of Western Asia.[77] All the travellers who have visited the neighbourhood of Mossoul are agreed that, on the left bank of the Tigris, there is no trace of any wall but that which forms a rather irregular parallelogram and embraces the two mounds of Nebbi-Yonnas and Kouyundjik (Fig. 18).[78] According to M. Oppert this wall was about ten thousand metres (nearly 6¼ miles) in circumference, which would make it cover about one-eleventh of the ground covered by modern Paris. There is nothing here that is not in accord with our ideas as to the character and importance of Nineveh. If we add to the town inclosed within such a wall suburbs stretching along the right bank of the river on the site of modern Mossoul, we shall have a city capable of holding perhaps two or three hundred thousand people.