After exploring the ruins of Nimroud, we returned to our kelek which, with much creaking and quivering, was soon wrestling with the boiling waters of the Zikr ul Aawaze. This is a dam or dyke built across the river and during low water rises a foot or more above the surface. It produces quite a cataract but our kelekgi conducted our frail craft over its seething waters without any difficulty. Like other remarkable works in this neighborhood this dam--some say it was a bridge--is attributed by the inhabitants to Nimrod. The noted French traveler, Tavernier, tells us that when he passed down the Tigris, the Zikr ul Aawaze formed a waterfall twenty-six feet high. He assures us, however, that his kelek went over this waterfall without mishap.[384] One may be permitted to suspect that in this statement he was striving, in recounting travelers’ tales, to emulate his mythical predecessor, Sir John Mandeville. About fifty miles to the south of Nimroud, on the right bank of the Tigris, is the great mound of Kalah Sherghat over which, until a few years ago, hung as deep a mystery as that which so long enveloped the imposing tells of Nimroud and Khorsabad. To the Turks, in their ignorance, it was but a fort made of clay--_Toprak Kale_. Even so late as 1900 a distinguished German traveler was unaware that the wonderful tell of Kalah Sherghat, which so excited his admiration, covered the remains of one of the most noted cities of Assyria.[385] It was indeed only after Dr. Robert Koldewey and Dr. Walter Andræ, the eminent explorers of the German Orient Society, had, in 1903, begun their exhaustive excavations at Kalah Sherghat that it was demonstrated that its imposing ruins were none other than those of Assur, the first capital of ancient Assyria. It was here that Asur, the national god of Assyria, had his favorite sanctuary--a god that was not only supreme over all the gods of the Babylonian pantheon but was also their lord and master, “the King above all gods.”[386] King Sennacherib addresses him as King of the totality of the gods, his own creation, father of the gods. Whose power is unfolded in the deep, king of heaven and earth, lord of all gods.[387] As the national deity of the greatest military power of the ancient world, Asur was preëminently a martial god. For, as is evinced by cuneiform inscriptions, it is “by the might of Asur” that the nation’s enemies are vanquished, that towns and cities are razed, that other lands are brought under the dominion of the invincible Kings of Assyria.