private houses in the Merkes quarter, and an inner town-wall perhaps of earlier date.  Street and gate were built or rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar.  He, as he declares in various inscriptions, ’paved the causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord Marduk.’  He made the Istar Gate ’with glazed brick and placed on its threshold colossal bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons’.  Along the street thus built the statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march on the Babylonian New Year’s Day, when the king paid yearly worship to the god of his country.[14]

[13] F.H.  Weissbach, Stadtbild von Babylon (Der alte Orient, fasc. 5); R. Koldewey, Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa, plates i, ii; S. Langdon, Expositor, 1909, pp. 82, 142; Hommel, Geogr. des alten Orients, pp. 290, 331; E. Meyer, Sitzungsber. preuss.  Akad. 1912, p. 1102.  I am indebted to Dr. Langdon for references to some of the treatises cited here and below.  I cannot share the unfavourable view which is taken by Messrs. How and Wells, the latest good editors of Herodotus, of the views of these writers.

    [14] Koldewey, Pflastersteine von Aiburschabu (Leipzig, 1901). 
    Some of the streets of Babylon are much older than 600 B.C., but
    this point needs to be worked out further.

[Illustration:  FIG I. BABYLON]

Such are the remains of the city of Babylon, so far as they are known at present.  They do not fit ill with the words of Herodotus.  We can detect in them the semblance not indeed of one square but of two unequal half-squares, divided by the river; we can trace at least one great street parallel to the river and others which run at right angles to it towards the river.  If the brick defences along the water-side have vanished, that may be due to their less substantial character and to the many changes of the river itself.  To the student of Babylonian topography, the account of Herodotus is of very little worth.  But it is as good as most modern travellers could compile, if they were let loose in a vast area of buildings, without plans, without instruments, and without any notion that a scientific description was expected of them.

The remains show also—­and this is more to our purpose—­the idea of the sacred processional avenue which recurs in fifth-century Greece—­and is indeed beloved of architects in the most modern times.  Here is a germ of town-planning.  But whether this laying out of streets extended beyond the main highways, is less clear.  The Merkes excavations occasionally show streets meeting at right angles and at least one roughly rectangular insula, of 150 x 333 ft.  But the adjoining house-blocks agree neither in size nor shape, and no hint seems to have yet come to light of a true chess-board pattern.[15]

    [15] Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 42, Dec.
    1909, pp. 7, 19; 44, Dec. 1910, p. 26.