If we take the four great mounds of Nimroud, Kouyunjik, Khorsabad, and Karamles, as the corners of an elongated quadrangle (eighteen miles by twelve), it will be found that the form as well as the circumference of the city correspond pretty accurately with the statements of ancient writers. Each quarter of this vast city, says Mr Layard, may have had its peculiar name; hence the palace of Evorita, where Saracus destroyed himself—and the Mespila and Larissa of Xenophon, which names the Greek general applies respectively to the mound-ruins at Kouyunjik and Nimroud. It is certain that large fortified enclosures existed within the outer walls, surrounding the principal buildings or palaces, and capable of defence after the rest of the city was stormed. These four great mounds, the scene of Mr Layard’s excavations, mark the site of the principal public buildings of Nineveh,—apparently at once temples and palaces,—built upon elevated platforms of masonry, like the temples of the ancient Mexicans, and, from their great strength, always placed so as to form part of the external defences of the city. But these were not the only great buildings in Nineveh; for within the quadrangle described by these ruins, many other large mounds are to be seen, and the face of the country is strewed with the remains of pottery, bricks, and other fragments. The space between the great public buildings was doubtless occupied by private houses, standing in the midst of gardens, and built at distances from each other; or forming streets which enclosed gardens of considerable extent, and even arable land. The absence of the remains of these houses, says Mr Layard, is easily accounted for. “They were constructed almost entirely of sun-dried bricks, and, like the houses now built in the country, soon disappeared altogether when once abandoned, and allowed to fall into decay. The largest palaces would probably have remained undiscovered, had not slabs of alabaster marked the walls. There is, however, sufficient to indicate that buildings were once spread over the space above described; for, besides the vast number of small mounds everywhere visible, scarcely a husbandman drives his plough over the soil without exposing the vestiges of former habitations.”