Leonhardt Rauwolf was a physician of Augsburg, who travelled to the East in 1573, for the purpose of collecting medical herbs. At Aleppo he disguised himself in Oriental garments, and started with a caravan for Bagdad. At Felujah, on the Euphrates, he saw mounds which, according to the common error which has already been mentioned, he supposed to be the remains of Babylon; and he gives a description of Akerkuf, under the belief that he had there beheld the scene of the confusion of tongues. His account of Nineveh is more correct:

"At Mosul and in the neighbourhood lay in ancient times the mighty city of Nineveh. In our days, except the fortress which stands on a hill on the opposite side of the river, and certain small hamlets which, according to the inhabitants, formed part of the ancient city, no ruins, such as those of Babylon, are still remaining."

The fortress on the hill is, of course, Kouyunjik, which, as we now know, covers the ruined palace of Sennacherib and his successors.

In 1583 there was a band of English traders at Bagdad and Bassorah. They were preparing the way for the foundation of the East India Company, and some of their letters were published in consequence of the general interest felt in the new Eastern trade. In one of these, John Eldred, not unmindful of the historical ground on which he stood, speaks of Bagdad as identical with the ancient city of Babylon. It was soon after this time that Anthony Sherley, whose observations are placed at the beginning of the chapter,

visited the desolate scenes of ancient magnificence which made so strong an impression upon him.

One of the most intelligent travellers in the early years of the seventeenth century was John Cartwright. He was the first European who attempted a survey of the ruins of Nineveh, among which he seems to have included the remains of neighbouring cities, unless his figures are entirely wrong.

Here

was

It seemes

"We set forward toward Mosul. Ninive, built by Nimrod, but finished by Ninus. by the ruinous foundation, which I thoroughly viewed, that it was built with four sides, but not equall or square, for the two longer sides had eache of them, as wee ghesse, a hundred and fifty furlongs, the two shorter sides ninety furlongs, which amounteth to four hundred and eighty furlongs of ground, which makes sixty miles, accounting eight furlongs to an Italian mile. Now it is destroyed, as God foretold it should be, by the Chaldæans, being nothing else than a sepulture of her selfe, a little Towne of small trade, where the Patriarch of the Nestorians keeps his seat.

"The citie of Bagdad by some is called New Babylone, and may well be, because it did rise out of the ruins of old Babylon, not farre distant. Two places of greate antiquitie did we thoroughly view in this country; the one was the ruines of the old Tower of Babel, as the inhabitants hold unto this day, built by Nimrod. And now at this day that which remayneth is called the remnant of the Tower of Babel; there standing as much as is a quarter of a mile in compass, and as high as the stone-worke of Paul's Steeple in London. It was built of burnt brick cimented and joyned with bituminous mortar. The bricks are three quarters of a yard in length and one quarter in thickness, and betweene every course of bricks there lieth a course of mats made of canes and palm-tree leaves, so fresh as if they had been laid within one yeare.

"The other place remarkable is the ruines of old Babylon. Some doe think that the ruines of Nimrod's Tower is but the foundation of the Temple of Bel, and that, therefore, many travellers

have been deceived who suppose they have seen part of the tower which Nimrod builded. But who can tell whether it be one or the other? It may be that confused chaos we saw was the ruins of both, the Temple of Bel being founded on that of Nimrod."

The tower here described is, of course, again Akerkuf, which was always forced upon the notice of European travellers, through its position on the road leading from the Euphrates to the Tigris, and to the city of Bagdad. Very few of these strangers from the west went southwards to Hillah, or examined the actual ruins of Babylon. But, at any rate, they passed through the territory of Babylon. Gasparo Balbi, a Venetian jeweller, and Alexander Hamilton, who both travelled at the end of the sixteenth century, speak in much the same terms as Cartwright of the remains that they saw on their way to Bagdad between the two great rivers. Hamilton names Masol (Mosul) as the ancient Nineveh.

Don Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, the ambassador from Philip III. of Spain to the Persian Court at this period, alludes to the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon; but a much fuller description of the latter is given by Pietro della Valle, a Roman gentleman, who, though he still fancies that Bagdad was on the site of Babylon, paid a visit to the great mound near Hillah, which has never lost the name of Babel, but which he mistook for the tower the building of which led to the confusion of tongues. Della Valle caused an artist who accompanied him to make a drawing of the mound; he also collected some of the bricks with which the ground was

strewn, and subsequently took them back with him to Rome, where he presented one of them to Athanasius Kircher, the learned Jesuit. Kircher, as he tells us in his treatise on the Tower of Babel, a monument of erudition and ingenuity, placed this brick in the museum which he had recently founded, in the belief that it had formed part of an edifice which had been the scene of one of God's most astounding judgments upon mankind. It is still to be seen in the Museo Kircheriano, and must always be of interest to archæologists as the first relic of Babylonian antiquity which reached Europe.

Pedro Teixeira, a Portuguese who visited Mesopotamia in the first years of the seventeenth century, seems aware that the real site of Babylon is at some distance from Bagdad, which generally bears the name, and says that the ruins are still called Babel, but that only "inconsiderable footsteps," as the English translator has it, still remain to show what the great city was. Sir Thomas Herbert went out with the British Ambassador to Shah Abbas in 1626. He returned through Mesopotamia, and, accordingly, mentions Bagdad as the new Babylon, and the Tower of Akerkuf. The French traveller, Tavernier, visited Mosul in 1644, and speaks thus, according to a translation of the period:

"Nineveh was built upon the left shoar of the Tigris, upon Assyria-side, being only a heap of rubbish extending almost a league along the river. Though Bagdat usually bears the name of Babylon, yet it is at a great distance from the ancient Babylon."