Thus the successful rebellion of one viceroy converted Southern India into an independent kingdom; and the successful rebellion, of his lieutenant-governors in time divided it into four independent kingdoms, each with a standing army of a hundred thousand men, and adorned with towns and cities of great strength and magnificence.[13] But they continued to depend upon the causes in which they originated—­the public establishments of the sovereign; and when the Emperor Akbar and his successors, aided by their own [sic] intestine wars, had conquered these sovereigns, and again reduced their kingdoms to tributary provinces, almost all these cities and towns became depopulated as the necessary consequence.  The public establishments were again moving about with the courts and camps of the emperor and his viceroys; and drawing in their train all those who found employment and subsistence in contributing to their efficiency and enjoyment.  It was not, as our ambassador in the simplicity of his heart supposed, the disinclination of the emperors to see any other towns magnificent, save those in which they resided, which destroyed them, but their ambition to reduce all independent kingdoms to tributary provinces.

Notes: 

1.  January, 1836.

2.  A small town, thirty-six miles south of Delhi, situated in the Gurgaon district, now included in the Panjab, but in the author’s time attached to the North-Western Provinces.  The town is the chief place in the ‘pargana’ of the same name.

3.  Nineveh is not a well-chosen example, inasmuch as its decay was due to deliberate destruction, and not to mere desertion by a sovereign.  It was deliberately burned and ruined by Nabopolassar, viceroy of Babylon, and his allies, about 606 B.C.  The decay of Babylon was gradual.  See note post, note 5.

4.  Extract from a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, dated from Ajmer, January 29, 1616.  The words immediately following ‘rubbish’ are ’His own [i.e. the King’s] houses are of stone, handsome and uniform.  His great men build not, for want of inheritance; but, as far as I have yet seen, live in tents, or in houses worse than our cottages.  Yet, when the King likes, as at Agra, because it is a city erected by him, the buildings, as is reported, are fair and of carved stone.’ (Pinkerton’s Collection, vol. viii, p. 45.) The passage is not reprinted in the Hakluyt Society edition (vol. i, p. 122), where only extracts from the letter are given.

5.  The site of Nineveh was forgotten for a period even longer than that stated by the author.  Mr. Claudius Rich, the Resident at Baghdad, was the first European to make a tentative identification of Nineveh with the mounds opposite Mosal, in 1818.  Real knowledge of the site and its history dates from the excavations of Botta begun in 1843, and those of Layard begun two years later. (Bonomi, Nineveh and its Palaces, 2nd ed., 1853; Layard, Nineveh and