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phrates has a tendency to change its course and to lose itself in marshes to the west of its actual bed. We find that the low country on that side was subject to continual inundations from the earliest periods, and that, according to a tradition, Semiramis built embankments to restrain the river, whilst a later queen seems to have taken advantage of the overflowing of its waters to dig a great lake outside the walls. We know, too, from Arrian, that the western quarter of the city was surrounded and defended by enormous marshes, which prevented all access to it. These swamps were fed by the Euphrates.

The changes in its course, to which the Euphrates was thus liable, appear only to have taken place to the west of its present bed. After the most careful examination of the country, I could find no traces whatever of its having at any time flowed much further than it now does to the east, although during unusual floods it occasionally spreads over the plain on that side. The great mounds still rising on the eastern bank prove this. Supposing, therefore, the river from different causes to have advanced and receded

during many centuries, between the Hindiyah marshes and its present channel, it will easily be understood how the ruins, which may once have stood on the western bank, have gradually been washed away, and how the existing flat alluvial plain has taken their place. In this manner the complete disappearance of the principal part of the western division of the city may, I think, be accounted for.

It is more difficult to explain the total absence of all

traces of the external wall and ditch so fully and minutely described by Herodotus and other ancient writers, and, according to their concurrent accounts, of such enormous dimensions. If a vast line of fortifications, with its gates and equidistant towers, all of stupendous height and thickness, did once exist, it is scarcely to be believed that no part whatever of it should now remain. Darius and other conquerors, it is true, are said to have pulled down and destroyed these defences; but it is surely impossible that any human labour could have obliterated their very traces. Even supposing the ruins around Hillah do not represent the site of ancient Babylon, there are no remains elsewhere in Mesopotamia to correspond with those great ramparts. If there had been any, they could not have escaped the researches of modern travellers.

But Herodotus states that, in the midst of each division of the city, there was a circular space surrounded by a lofty wall one contained the Royal Palace; the other, the Temple of Belus. There can be little difficulty in admitting that the mounds within the earthen rampart on the eastern bank of the river might represent the first of these fortified enclosures, which we know to have been on that side of the Euphrates. It is not impossible, as Rich has suggested, that the Birs Nimroud, around which—as it will be seen-there are still the traces of a regular wall, may be the remains of the second; or, that the gradual changes in the course of the river just described may have completely destroyed all traces of it.

It may be inferred, I think, from the descriptions of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, that Babylon was built on the same general plan as Nineveh. More than one fortified enclosure, formed by lofty walls and towers, and containing the royal palaces and the temples with their numerous dependent buildings, courtyards, and gardens, rose in different quarters of the city. They were so built and guarded as to be able to resist an enemy and stand a protracted siege. Around them were the common dwellings of the people, with their palm-groves, their orchards and their small plots of corn-land.

It must not be forgotten that the outer walls of Nineveh as well as those of Babylon have entirely disappeared. Are we to suppose that the historians in their descriptions confounded them with those surrounding the temples and palaces, and that these exterior fortifications were mere ramparts of mud and brushwood, such as are still raised round modern Eastern cities? Such defences, when once neglected, would soon fall to dust, and leave no traces behind. I confess that I can see no other way of accounting for the entire disappearance of these exterior walls.

THE WONDERS OF THEBES

H. D. TRAILL

ETTER for Ali to enjoy another hour's sleep in the

Bhadow of the great Pylon and fall upon his prey BET

when they come forth exhausted by the perambulation of those acres of ruins and confused to the last point of mental bewilderment by the explanations of their dragoman.

Not that these well-meant attempts of incomplete knowledge to enlighten complete ignorance through the medium of an imperfectly mastered language are necessary to the full obfuscation of the ordinary tourist. In any case, he is likely enough to emerge from the Temple of Karnak stupefied by that mere vastness of scale, those Titanic proportions of architecture which ranked it ages ago when it was intact or nearly so, and which rank it to-day, when it is a ruin, among the Wonders of the World. It is not the mere area of the mighty building which oppresses one, though four cathedrals of Notre Dame would go, it is said, into the Hypostyle Hall. Nor is it merely the altitude to which the towering columns mount, or their enormous girth, or their forest-like array that make you think of those huge pillars that lose themselves in the upper gloom at Seville, and of the endlessly intersecting avenues of the Mosque of Cordova; and you feel that in these two points, at any rate,

Karnak, if it be not exactly rivalled, is not so very far ahead. It is the astonishing successful combination of all the widely differing architectural effects which are severally produced by number, by size, by proportion, by disposition, by the imperious influence of mass and the winning appeal of perspective—it is the combination of these into a phalanx of forces to be launched irresistibly against the senses and the soul of the beholder that make the great temple what it is. Those Atlantean columns, which were built, surely, to uphold the heavens themselves, and which seem to bear up their enormous surmounting monoliths as a giant would lift a child, have no suggestion of unwieldiness in their colossal size, leave no sense of excess in their multitudinous number. The calix-capital into which each column blossoms would take ten men to span its monstrous girth; yet it opens out against the blue Egyptian sky above its roofless head as lightly as if it were the finest Gothic tracery above an English cathedral nave.

Everywhere the feeling of absolute fitness, of perfect proportion redeems this majestic hall of the offence of mere Brobdingnagerie; and whether the eye dwells upon the parts or sweeps the whole-whether it travels through the endless alleys of this forest of stone, and rests by turns upon base and shaft and flower-like capital of its component columns, or pauses to peruse walls deep-graven with colossal gods and kings, and still glowing here and there with the undying colours of 4,000 years, the artistic taste is alike satisfied. So admirable, indeed, are the proportions

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