To the north, near the head of the great Mesopotamian valley, on the banks of the Tigris, stood the sister or rival city of Nineveh—Babylon and it forming, as it were, the foci of the Assyrian realm, which spread out like an ellipse around them. Nineveh, “that great city,” against which Jonah of old uttered his prophetic warnings—from whose gates Sennacherib, Sargon, and Holofernes successively set forth, with their spearmen, and horses, and chariots against Damascus and Israel, and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon,—and around whose walls the combined armies of Persia and Babylonia encamped for three years in vain, fell at last by a doom as sudden and overwhelming as that which overtook Babylon—perishing so utterly, that when Xenophon and the Ten Thousand passed that way, even its name was forgotten, and he notices its mounds of ruins simply as having been those of “an ancient city,” which he calls Larissa. As Xenophon left those ruins Layard found them. Riding, in company with a friend as daring and enthusiastic as himself, down the right bank of the Tigris, in April 1840, he rested for the night at a small Arab village, around which are still the vestiges of an ancient town; and here he got his first look of the buried city whose discovery was to immortalise his name. “From the summit of an artificial eminence,” he says, “I looked down upon a broad plain, separated from us by the river. A line of lofty mounds bounded it on the east, and one of a pyramidal form rose high above the rest. Beyond it could be faintly traced the waters of the Zab. Its position rendered its identification easy. This was the pyramid which Xenophon had described, and near which the Ten Thousand had encamped; the ruins around it were those which the Greek general saw twenty-two centuries before, and which were even then the remains of an _ancient_ city.”