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which was sixty miles in compass; a city which contained so many thousand inhabitants; a city which had walls, according to Diodorus Siculus, a hundred feet high, and so thick that three chariots could go abreast upon them, and fifteen hundred towers, at proper distances in the walls, of two hundred feet in height: what probability was there, I say, that such a city should ever be totally destroyed? And yet so totally was it destroyed, that the place is hardly known where it was situated. Lucian, who flourished in the second century after Christ, affirms, that Nineveh was utterly perished, and there was no footstep of it remaining,

nor could you tell where once it was situated: and the greater regard is to be paid to Lucian's testimony, as he was a native of Samosata, a city upon the river Euphrates; and coming from a neighbouring country, he must, in all likelihood, have known whether there had been any remains of Nineveh or not. Mr. Salmon, who is an industrious collector and compiler from others, saith in his Account of Assyria: "In this country the famous city of Nineveh once stood, on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, opposite to the place where Mosul now stands. There is nothing now to be seen but heaps of rubbish, almost a league along the river

Tigris, over against Mosul, which people imagine to be the remains of this vast city." But it is more than probable that these ruins are the remains of the Persian Nineveh, and not the Assyrian; for even the ruins of old Nineveh have been long ago ruined and destroyed: such an utter end hath been made of it, and such is the truth of the Divine predictions.

Prophecies concerning Babylon.

AFTER Nineveh was destroyed, Babylon became the queen of the east. They were both equally enemies to the people of God: the one subverted the kingdom of Israel, and the other the kingdom of Judah; the

one carried away the ten tribes, and the other the two remaining tribes

into captivity.

Babylon was a very great and a very ancient city, as well as Nineveh. The latter was constructed in the form of a parallelogram, and the former was an exact square, each side being 120 furlongs in length. So that, according to this account, Babylon contained more ground in it than Nineveh did; for by multiplying the sides, the one by the other, it will be found, that Nineveh contained, within its walls, only 13,500 furlongs, and that Babylon contained 14,400.

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It was, too, as

ancient, or more ancient than Ni

neveh; for in the words of Moses, speaking of Nimrod, it was the beginning of his kingdom: that is, the first city, or the capital city in his dominions. Though Babylon was situated in a low, watery plain, yet in Scripture it is called a mountain, on account of the height of its great walls and towers, its palaces and temples: and Berosus, speaking of some of its buildings, saith, that they appeared most like mountains. Such a city as this, one would imagine, was in no danger of being totally abandoned, and coming to nought. Such a city as this might surely, with less vanity than any other, boast that she should continue for ever. So she vainly

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