Letter from Rev. Dr. Smith on the Ruins of Nineveh. 117 
about four hundred and fifty feet wide, six hundred feet long, and 
. varies from twenty to forty feet in heighth. Its area is nearly 
oval, but its surface is somewhat uneven, and its outlines are cor- 
respondingly irregular. It is situated in one side of what appears 
to have been a fortified town, (or suburb ?) there being still in ex- 
istence the remains of a mud wall, enclosing a space a mile square. 
This ruined wall is in few places,—and those apparently towers, 
—more than ten feet high, but as there is evidence that it was 
‘originally faced with hewn stone, no doubt can exist but that it 
was built for purposes of defence, and once enclosed a thriving, 
busy population. But to return to the mound referred to, and 
which forms, by one of its faces, a part of the northeastern boun- 
dary of this enclosure. It has been occupied as far back as 
modern inquiry can extend, by an Arab village of about a hundred 
houses, called by the natives Khorsabad. In digging vaults or 
cisterns for the safe deposit of straw and grain, these people had 
repeatedly found remains of ancient sculpture, but their value not 
being known, no account of the discovery was made public. 
In 1843, while Mons. Botta was making excavations in one of 
the mounds near the Tigris, one of the villagers of Khorsabad 
inquired of him why he did not come and dig in their village, 
“for,” said he, “it is built on a mound like this, which contains 
more beautiful stones than any you can find here.” In due time 
the work of excavation was transferred according to the villager’s 
recommendation, and the step resulted in one of the most inter- 
esting discoveries, if we may not say the most interesting dis- 
covery of modern times. The whole upper part of the mound 
has been found to be threaded with walls running at right angles 
to each other, and enclosing rooms varying from thirty to a 
hundred and thirty feet in length, and pretty uniformly about 
thirty feet in breadth.. The whole seems to have been buta 
part of one building, and perhaps but a small part, for the walls 
are broken off in several places by the edge of the mound in a 
manner which indicates that its area was once much more ex- 
tensive than it now is. But we will not venture into the field 
of conjecture; our object is to describe what has been actually 
discovered. 
The point where the excavations were commenced was near 
the margin of the mound, about twenty feet above its base, and 
where the top of what seemed to be a stone wall presented 
