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Such being the state of the case, let the pupil never trouble her memory for one moment with so idle an effort as that of minutely fixing or retaining dates that, after all, are more doubtful, and for us irrecoverable, than the path of some obscure trading ship in some past generation through the Atlantic Ocean. Generally, it will be quite near enough to the truth if she places upon the meridian of 1000 years B.C. the three Romances–Argonautic, Theban, Trojan; and she will then have the satisfaction of finding that, as at the opening of authentic history, she found the Roman, the Greek, and the Asiatic inaugural events coinciding in the same exact focus, so in these semi-fabulous or ante-Olympian events, she finds that one and the same effort of memory serves to register them, and also the most splendid of the Jewish eras–that of David and Solomon. The round sum of 1000 years B.C., so easily remembered, without distinction, without modification, ‘sans phrase‘ (to quote a brutal regicide), serves alike for the Seven-gated Thebes,[20] for Troy, and for Jerusalem in its most palmy days.

V. A Perplexity Cleared Up.–Before passing onward here, it is highly important to notice a sort of episode in history, which fills up the interval between 777 and 555, but which is constantly confounded and perplexed with what took place before 777.

The word Assyria is that by which the perplexity is maintained. The Assyrian empire, as the pupil is told, was destroyed in the person of Sardanapalus. Yet, in her Bible, she reads of Sennacherib, King of Assyria. ‘Was Sennacherib, then, before Sardanapalus?’ she will ask; and her teacher will inform her that he was not.

Such things puzzle her. They seem palpable contradictions. But now let her understand that out of the Assyrian empire split off three separate kingdoms, of which one was called the Assyrian, not empire, but kingdom; there lurks the secret of the error. And to this kingdom of Assyria it was that Sennacherib belonged. Or, in order to represent by a sensible image this derivation of kingdoms from the stock of the old superannuated Assyrian empire (to which belonged Nimrod, Ninus, and Semiramis–those mighty phantoms, with their incredible armies); let her figure to herself some vast river, like the Nile or the Ganges, with the form assumed by its mouths. Often it will happen, where such a river is not hemmed in between rocks, or confined to the bed of a particular valley, that, perhaps, a hundred or two of miles before reaching the sea, upon coming into a soft, alluvial soil, it will force several different channels for itself. As these must make angles to each other, in order to form different roads, the land towards the disemboguing of the river will take the arrangement of a triangle. And as that happens to be the form of a Greek capital D (in the Greek alphabet called Delta), it has been usual to call such an arrangement of a great river’s mouth a Delta.

Now, then, let her think of the Assyrian empire under the notion of the Nile, descending from far distant regions, and from fountains that were concealed for ages, if even now discovered. Then, when it approaches the sea, and splits up its streams, so as to form a Delta, let her regard that Delta as the final state of the Assyrian power, the kingdom state lasting for about two centuries until swallowed up altogether, and remoulded into unity by the Persian empire.

The Delta, therefore, or the Nile dividing into three streams, will represent the three kingdoms formed out of the ruins of the Assyrian empire, when falling to pieces by the death of Sardanapalus. One of these three kingdoms is often called the Median; one the Chaldaean; and the third is called the Assyrian kingdom. But the most rememberable shape in which they can be recalled is, perhaps, by the names of their capitals. The capital cities were as follows: of the first, Ecbatana, which is the modern Hamadan; of the second, Babylon, on the Euphrates, of which the ruins have been fully ascertained in our own times; at present, nothing remains but ruins, and these ruins are dangerous to visit, both from human marauders prowling in that neighbourhood, and from wild beasts of the most formidable class, which are so little disturbed in their awful lairs, that they bask at noon-day amongst the huge hills of half-vitrified bricks. Finally, of the third kingdom, which still retained the name of Assyria, the metropolis was Nineveh, on the Tigris, revealed by Layard.