annually. At any rate, the quantity of human
relics accumulated upon certain Chaldaean sites is
enormous, and seems to be quite beyond what the mere
population of the surrounding district could furnish.
At Warka, for instance, excepting the triangular
space between the three principal ruins, the whole
remainder of the platform, the whole space within the
walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them,
are everywhere filled with human bones and sepulchres.
In places coffins are piled upon coffins, certainly
to the depth of 30, probably to the depth of 60 feet;
and for miles on every side of the ruins the traveller
walks upon a soil teeming with the relics of ancient,
and now probably extinct, races. Sometimes these
relics manifestly belong to a number of distinct and
widely separate eras; but there are places where it
is otherwise. However we may account for it—and
no account has been yet given which is altogether
satisfactory—it seems clear, from the comparative
homogeneousness of the remains in some places, that
they belong to a single race, and if not to a single
period, at any rate to only two, or, at the most,
three distinct periods, so that it is no longer very
difficult to distinguish the more ancient from the
later relics. Such is the character of the remains
at Mugheir, which are thought to contain nothing of
later date than the close of the Babylonian period,
B. C. 538; and such is, still more remarkably, the
character of the ruins at Abu-Shahrein and Tel-el-Lahm,
which seem to be entirely, or almost entirely, Chaldaean.
In the following account of the coffins and mode of
burial employed by the early Chaldaeans, examples will
be drawn from these places only; since otherwise we
should be liable to confound together the productions
of very different ages and peoples.
[Illustration: PLATE 11]
The tombs to which an archaic character most certainly
attaches are of three kinds-brick vaults, clay coffins
shaped like a dish-cover, and coffins in the same
material, formed of two large jars placed mouth to
mouth, and cemented together with bitumen. The
brick vaults are found chiefly at Mugheir. [PLATE
XI., Fig. 1.] They are seven feet long, three feet
seven inches broad, and five feet high, composed of
sun-dried bricks imbedded in mud, and exhibit a very
remarkable form and construction of the arch.
The side walls of the vaults slope outwards as they
ascend; and the arch is formed, like those in Egyptian
buildings and Scythian tombs, by each successive layer
of bricks, from the point where the arch begins, a
little overlapping the last, till the two sides of
the roof are brought so near together that the aperture
may be closed by a single brick. The floor of
the vaults was paved with brick similar to that used
for the roof and sides; on this floor was commonly
spread a matting of reeds, and the body was laid upon
the matting. It was commonly turned on its left
side, the right arm falling towards the left, and the