THE HANGING GARDENS.

57

have weighed the evidence,” he adds, "and examined the site, and my own conclusion is that they were on the west side of the Kasr mound, between the palace and the river Euphrates. It is unfortunate

that while whole volumes have been expended on dissertations and speculations on the size and buildings of Babylon, no satisfactory attempt has been made to ascertain the truth by excavation. The isolated pits and tunnels made here and there in the mounds are acknowledged to have had no effect on these questions, and the recovery of Babylon has yet to be accomplished.”

Stately piers and buttresses of fine yellow bricks are still to be seen on the Kasr; and in one of the hollows on the north is the roughly sculptured group of a lion standing over a man, to which every traveller alludes. Not less noticeable is the solitary tree, supposed by not a few authorities to be the last relic of the glories of the Hanging Gardens, and celebrated as the Tree of Semiramis. The Moslems attach to it a sacred character. They call it Atéti, and assert that Ali fastened his horse to it before engaging in that battle of Kabala in which he perished. It was once a vigorous and noble tamarisk; but only the trunk remains, branches and

boughs having been pulled to pieces by travellers and tourists for the sake of the wood.

Let us now diverge again to Birs Nimrud, which lies to the south-west. Mr. George Smith characterizes it as one of the most imposing ruins in the country; its height being rendered all the more impressive by its position in the centre of a vast plain, with nothing to break the view. The principal mound, as we have already stated, rises about one hundred and fifty feet above the plain in the shape of a pyramid or cone, on the summit of which stands a solid mass of vitrified bricks. We repeat these details for the sake of adding that Sir Henry Rawlinson, when he examined this site, concluded that the tower was in seven stages: the lowest, 272 feet each way, and 26 feet high; the second, 230 feet square, and 26 feet high; the third, 188 feet square, and 26 feet high; the fourth, 146 feet square, and only 15 feet high. Thus it will be seen that each stage decreased by 42 feet in length and breadtn. From receptacles in the corners of one of these stages, Sir Henry Rawlinson obtained inscribed cylinders, which stated that the building was the Temple of the Seven Planets; that it had

been partially built by a former king of Babylon; and, having fallen into decay, was restored and completed by Nebuchadnezzar.

Our authority, M. Lejean, sees in the vitrified blocks on its summit the most remarkable peculiarity of this so-called "Tower of Babel." At first he took them to be igneous rocks, of which they have all the appearance, and especially the cohesion. A second glance showed him the greenish-yellow layers of bricks held together by the well-known bituminous cement, and covered with a coat of bitumen; the whole having been baked and vitrified en bloc, until it attained a solidity equalled only by that of the Roman masonry. M. Lejean suggests, and the suggestion is not improbable, that the entire tower originally was encased in the same kind of vitrification,

The same writer examines into the theory which puts forward Birs Nimrud as the Tower of Babela theory endorsed by the late eminent Assyriologist, Mr. George Smith. He dismisses it with, as it appears to us, unnecessary readiness, and adopts the following conclusions—which, however, are not inconsistent with it: That the Birs is the Temple of

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BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMERS.

Belus described by Herodotus and Diodorus; that it was at the same time, as Sir H. Rawlinson has proved, the "Tower of the Seven Planets," or the principal observatory of the Babylonians; and, finally, that the great mass of ruins lying to the east, and surmounted by a ziaret, or oratory, consecrated to Abraham, represents the Bursif of the Chaldeans, the Borsippa of Strabo, the centre of one of the two great astronomical castes of Babylon, the Borsippanians; the other, that of the Orchoenians, was settled at Orchoe, now called Warka.

It is impossible to wander among these ruins without emotion, when we reflect that they saw, in all probability, the origin and development of the most exact and beautiful of the sciences. It is said that Alexander the Great found the Babylonians in possession of an uninterrupted series of astronomical observations extending over nineteen hundred and four years; that he sent the catalogue to Aristotle; and that, afterwards, Ptolemy made it the basis of his Astronomical Geography. We know that they were inscribed on enamelled bricks, like those which have been discovered by thousands at Birs, at Kasr, at Amram.

The ancients attributed to Borsippa another spe

ciality—the possession of an enormous quantity of bats of exceptional size. They seem, however, to have emigrated to Hillah and Bagdad; and no other souvenir of them remained at Birs than a very fine figure of a bat in bronze discovered among the ruins by Colonel (now Sir Arnold) Kemball, when British Consul at Bagdad.

A short distance from Birs begins a sheet of water, "deeply, darkly, beautifully blue," extending almost to the western horizon; this is the lake or lagoon of Hindia, formed by the overflow of the canal of the same name. It stretches in a semicircle around the Birs, and is studded with numerous islands and banks of reeds, the dazzling green of which contrasts very agreeably with the somewhat sombre and "ashen" tint of the plain. Among the islands are scattered various pretty Arab villages, surrounded by luxuriant verdure.

Nothing can be more strange or sharp or painful than the contrast between the populous life of the lagoon and the desolation of the plain. Between Birs Nimrud and Hillah there is not a house; nothing but ruins, ruins, ruins. A score of dried-up canals bear witness to the ancient prosperity of a country where now-a-days the traveller may wander