Attractive, however, as this theory is from its grandeur, and harmonious as it must be allowed to be with the reports of the Greeks, we have nevertheless to reject it on two grounds, the one historical and the other topographical.  The ruins of Khorsabad, Keremles, Nimrud, and Koyunjik bear on their bricks distinct local titles; and these titles are found attaching to distinct cities in the historical inscriptions.  Nimrud, as already observed, is Calah; and Khorsabad is Dur-Sargina, or “the city of Sargon.”  Keremles has also its own appellation Dur-* * *, “the city of the God [—­].”  Now the Assyrian writers do not consider these places to be parts of Nineveh, but speak of them as distinct and separate cities.  Calah for a long time is the capital, while Nineveh is mentioned as a provincial town.  Dur-Sargina is built by Sargon, not at Nineveh, but “near to Nineveh.”  Scripture, it must be remembered, similarly distinguishes Calah as a place separate from Nineveh, and so far from it that there was room for “a great city” between them.  And the geographers, while they give the name of Aturia or Assyria Proper to the country about the one town, call the region which surrounds the other by a distinct name, Calachene.  Again, when the country is closely examined, it is found, not only that there are no signs of any continuous town over the space included within the four sites of Nimrud, Keremles.  Khorsabad, and Koyunjik, nor any remains of walls or ditches connecting them, but that the four sites themselves are as carefully fortified on what, by the theory we are examining, would be the inside of the city as in other directions.  It perhaps need scarcely be added, unless to meet the argument drawn from Diodorus, that the four sites in question are not so placed as to form the “oblong square” of his description, but mark the angles of a rhombus very munch slanted from the perpendicular.

The argument derived from the book of Jonah deserves more attention than that which rests upon the authority of Diodorus and Ctesias.  Unlike Ctesias, Jonah saw Nineveh while it still stood; and though the writer of the prophetical book may not have been Jonah himself, he probably lived not very many years later.  Thus his evidence is that of a contemporary, though (it may be) not that of an eye-witness; and, even apart from the inspiration which guided his pen, he is entitled to be heard with the utmost respect.  Now the statements of this writer, which have a bearing on the size of Nineveh, are two.  He tells us, in one place, that it was “an exceeding great city, of three days’ journey;” in another, that “in it were more than 120,000 persons who could not discern between their right hand and their left.”  These passages are clearly intended to describe a city of a size unusual at the time; but both of them are to such an extent vague and indistinct, that it is impossible to draw front either separately, or even from the two combined, an exact definite notion.