[254] The authorities are very full. First there is M. Botta’s huge work _Monument de Ninive_, Paris, 5 vols., 1845. Then must be mentioned the work of which we availed ourselves in describing Babylon in _Isaiah xl.—lxvi._, Expositor’s Bible, pp. 52 ff.: “Memoirs by Commander James Felix Jones, I.N.,” in _Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government_, No. XLIII., New Series, 1857. It is good to find that the careful and able observations of Commander Jones, too much neglected in his own country, have had justice done them by the German Colonel Billerbeck in the work about to be cited. Then there is the invaluable _Niniveh and its Remains_, by Layard. There are also the works of Rawlinson and George Smith. And recently Colonel Billerbeck, founding on these and other works, has published an admirable monograph (lavishly illustrated by maps and pictures), not only upon the military state of Assyria proper and of Niniveh at this period, but upon the whole subject of Assyrian fortification and art of besieging, as well as upon the course of the Median invasions. It forms the larger part of an article to which Dr. Alfred Jeremias contributes an introduction, and reconstruction with notes of chaps. ii. and iii. of the Book of Nahum: “Der Untergang Niniveh’s und die Weissagungschrift des Nahum von Elḳosh,” in Vol. III. of _Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft_, edited by Friedrich Delitzsch and Paul Haupt, with the support of Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, U.S.A.: Leipzig, 1895. [255] Pages 20 f. [256] Colonel Billerbeck (p. 115) thinks that the south-east frontier at this time lay more to the north, near the Greater Zab. [257] First excavated by M. Botta, 1842-1845. See also George Smith, _Assyr. Disc._, pp. 98 f. [258] iii. 12. [259] iii. 14. [260] See Jones and Billerbeck. [261] Delitzsch places the עיר רחבות of Gen. x. 11, the “ribit Nina” of the inscriptions, on the north-east of Niniveh. [262] ii. 4 Eng., 5 Heb. [263] ii. 3 Eng., 4 Heb. [264] _Ibid._ LXX. [265] iii. 2. [266] iii. 3. [267] It is the waters of the Tigris that the tradition avers to have broken the wall; but the Tigris itself runs in a bed too low for this: it can only have been the Choser. See both Jones and Billerbeck. [268] ii. 6.