ASSUR AND NINEVEH. 173 
and carefully propped up to prevent damage by breakage. The 
sledges, which the Assyrians called ships or boats, are being 
dragged and forced forward by means of enormous levers upon 
rollers by armies of workmen, the captives taken in his warlike 
expeditions—Armenians, Pheenicians, Tyrians, Cilicians, Chal- 
deans, and others, driven to strenuous effort by the whips of 
unsparing taskmasters and the loud voices of the directors of 
the work. In the background, behind the slaves toiling at the 
great cables and the levers, we see the soldiers of the guard, and 
behind these again extensive wooded hills. In other sculptured 
pictures, however, it must be the pleasure-grounds of the palace 
which are represented, with a row of trees, alternately tall and 
short, in the distance. ‘This scene is placed on the banks of a 
river, whereon we see boats, and men astride on inflated skins. 
At another point we see the great king himself in his hand- 
chariot, superintending the work. Here the background consists 
of reeds and rushes, and we see the deer to which he apparently 
refers, and also a wild sow with a litter of young. One of 
Layard’s pictures, which is described as a representation of an 
“ Obelisk or stone in a boat,” implies that these boat-like sledges 
were made to float or to be moved on land by means of the 
rollers referred to above. In this case the “boat” is in the 
water, and being dragged by long rows of labourers, many of 
whom are naked, and all seem to be toiling in the water. The 
ropes attached to the boat-like sledges or rafts are excessively 
long, and even in the incomplete state of the slabs as Layard 
saw them, 36 men to each may be counted. The great pioneer 
of Assyrian exploration gives, in his Monuments of Nineveh, 
second series, an excellent drawing of a winged bull and human 
figure from one of the gates of the old wall of Nineveh, showing, 
if any proof were needed, how very excellent the work of 
Sennacherib’s sculptors was. It is said that some of the remains 
seen by Layard on the spot have been since his time destroyed, 
and if this be the case, it is a deplorable loss. Fortunately we 
have Layard’s drawings, and know what they were like. 
George Smith, in his Assyrian Discoveries, gives us a good 
account of Nineveh. He states that the north wall measures 
about 14 miles, the south rather more than half a mile, the east 
wall about 34 miles, and the west over 2} miles. No extension of 
the city outside the walls seems to have been recognised by the 
Assyrians, except that called Rébit Ninua, probably meaning 
“the extension of Nineveh,” which seems to have been on the 
north, stretching towards Khorsabad. It has been identified 
with great probability, as the Biblical Rehoboth-Ir. In the 
