There is still greater discrepancy with respect to the height of the walls.  Herodotus says that the height was 200 royal cubits, or 300 royal feet (about 335 English feet); Ctesias made it 50 fathoms, or 300 ordinary Greek feet; Pliny and Solinus, substituting feet for the royal cubits of Herodotus, made the altitude 235 feet; Philostratus and Q. Curtius, following perhaps some one of Alexander’s historians, gave for the height 150 feet; finally Clitarchus, as reported by Diodorus Siculus, and Strabo, who probably followed him, have left us the very moderate estimate of 75 feet.  It is impossible to reconcile these numbers.  The supposition that some of them belong properly to the outer, and others to the inner wall, will not explain the discrepancies—­for the measurements cannot by any ingenuity be reduced to two sets of dimensions.  The only conclusion which it seems possible to draw from the conflicting testimony is that the numbers were either rough guesses made by very unskilful travellers, or else were (in most cases) intentional exaggerations palmed upon them by the native ciceroni.  Still the broad facts remain—­first, that the walls enclosed an enormous space, which was very partially occupied by buildings; secondly, that they were of great and unusual thickness; and thirdly, that they were of a vast height—­seventy or eighty feet at least in the time of Alexander, after the wear and tear of centuries and the violence of at least three conquerors.

The general character of the construction is open to but little doubt.  The wall was made of bricks, either baked in kilns, or (more probably) dried in the sun, and laid in a cement of bitumen, with occasional layers of reeds between the courses.  Externally it was protected by a wide and deep moat.  On the summit were low towers, rising above the wall to the height of some ten or fifteen feet, and probably serving as guardrooms for the defenders.  These towers are said to have been 250 in number; they were least numerous on the western face of the city, where the wall ran along the marshes.  They were probably angular, not round; and instead of extending through the whole thickness of the wall, they were placed along its outer and inner edge, tower facing tower, with a wide space between them—­“enough,” Herodotus says, “for a four-horse chariot to turn in.”  The wall did not depend on them for its strength, but on its own height and thickness, which were such as to render scaling and mining equally hopeless.

Such was Babylon, according to the descriptions of the ancients—­a great city, built on a very regular plan, surrounded by populous suburbs interspersed among fields and gardens, the whole being included within a large square strongly fortified enceinte.  When we turn from this picture of the past to contemplate the present condition of the localities, we are at first struck with astonishment at the small traces which remain of so vast and wonderful a metropolis.  “The broad walls of Babylon” are “utterly