[10] L. Gaillard, Varietes sinologiques, xvi (plan) and xxiii.
    pp. 8, 235 (Chang-hai, 1898, 1903).  Others give the figures a
    little differently, but not so as to affect the argument.

[11] Hdt. iii. 159.  The theory that there were originally two parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. ii. 2696), is meaningless.  There could be no use in razing one and leaving the other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181).  It is, however, not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were two outer parallel walls.

Turn now to the actual remains of Babylon, as known from surveys and excavations.  We find a large district extending to both banks of the Euphrates, which is covered rather irregularly by the mounds of many ruined buildings.  Two sites in it are especially notable.  At its southern end is Birs Nimrud and some adjacent mounds, anciently Borsippa; here stood a huge temple of the god Nebo.  Near its north end, ten or eleven miles north of Borsippa, round Babil and Kasr, is a larger wilderness of ruin, three miles long and nearly as broad in extreme dimensions; here town-walls and palaces of Babylonian kings and temples of Babylonian gods and streets and dwelling-houses of ordinary men have been detected and in part uncovered.  Other signs of inhabitation can be traced elsewhere in this district, as yet unexplored.

Not unnaturally, some scholars have thought that this whole region represents the ancient Babylon and that the vast walls of Herodotus enclosed it all.[12] This view, however, cannot be accepted.  Quite apart from the considerations urged above, the region in question is not square but rather triangular, and traces of wall and ditch surrounding it are altogether wanting, though city-walls have survived elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can wholly delete an ancient ditch.  We have, in short, no good reason to believe that Babylon, in any form or sense whatever, covered at any time this large area.

    [12] So Baumstark, art.  Babylon in Pauly-Wissowa, ii. 2696.

On the other hand, the special ruins of Babil and Kasr and adjacent mounds seem to preserve both the name and the actual remains of Babylon (fig. 1).  Here, on the left bank of the Euphrates, are vast city-walls, once five or six miles long.[13] They may be described roughly as enclosing half of a square bisected diagonally by the river, much as Herodotus writes; there is good reason to think that they had some smaller counterpart on the right bank, as yet scantily explored.  Within these walls were the palaces of the Babylonian kings, Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar (625-561 B.C.), the temples of the national god Marduk or Merodach and other Babylonian deities, a broad straight road, Aiburschabu, running north and south from palaces to temples, a stately portal spanning this road at the Istar Gate, many