Nineveh is a fascinating city, with an incredible history.

One day, in the classical age of old Athens, when Rome was still an obscure rural village, the Greek traveler Xenophon passed through Mesopotamia with an army of mercenaries.

The travelers came upon a great deserted city, whose walls were built of clay bricks with a stone foundation, towering high above the plains. Xenophon stood and gazed up at those weathered walls, and asked what this place was called, and who had built it.

It had been the Assyrian city of Nineveh — a city of those fierce conquerors who’d risen after the Babylonians; a people who’d explored sand-swept Sumerian ruins and built vast library archives — as I describe in my article, “The Most Haunting Scene I Can Imagine” — to house the ancient texts and artifacts they’d dug up from the ruins of civilizations thousands of years older than theirs.

But now those archives and museums had sunk back into the sand.

In Xenophon’s time, only a crumbling wall still stood.

And no one remembered who had built it.

^ That was an excerpt from my article, “Time’s Orphans Have Names.” If Nineveh captured your interest, I’ve written a few articles that’ll take you a lot deeper than that. I think you’ll enjoy ‘em.