Assyria was so wholly a military power, that the destruction of Nineveh not only destroyed the Assyrian Empire but blotted out the Assyrian nation itself. When 'the gates of the rivers' of Nineveh—the Tigris and Khusur—were opened, and 'the palace dissolved,' Assyria ceased to exist. In the Sassanian period the mounds which covered the ruins of the old city were for a short time occupied by the houses of a village, but these, too, disappeared after a while, and the very site of Nineveh remained for centuries unknown. Rich, in 1818, conjectured that the mounds of Kouyunjik, opposite the modern town of Mosul, concealed its ruins beneath them, but it was not until the excavations of the Frenchman Botta, in 1842, and the Englishman Layard, in 1845, that the remains first of Dur-Sargon, and then of Nineveh itself, were revealed to the eyes of a wondering world. The capital of the Assyrian Empire was recovered, and with it the sculptured monuments of its kings, and the relics of its clay-inscribed library. The discovery came at an opportune moment. The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had at last yielded up their secrets to the patient sagacity of European scholars, and had furnished the key to other inscriptions,—also in cuneiform characters, but of a wholly different kind, and expressing a wholly different language—which now proved to be the long-lost records of the Assyrian people. Little by little the records were deciphered; fresh expeditions to the buried cities of Assyria and Babylonia returned to Europe with fresh spoils, and it is now possible to describe the history and even the daily life and thoughts of a people who but half a century ago were but a mere name. The following pages are intended to give a picture of that history and life. * * * * * CHAPTER II. ASSYRIAN HISTORY.