failed him in this instance, or that he mistook his notes on the subject.  Or we may explain his error by supposing that he confounded a canal from the Euphrates, which seems to have anciently passed between the Babil mound and the Kasr (called Shebil by Nebuchadnezzar) with the main stream.  Or, finally, we may conceive that at the time of his visit the old palace lay in ruins, and that the palace of Nerig-lissar on the west bank of the stream was that of which he spoke.  It is at any rate remarkable, considering how his authority is quoted as fixing the site of the Belus tower to the west bank, that, in the only place where he gives us any intimation of the side of the river on which he would have placed the tower, it is the east and not the west bank to which his words point.  He makes those who saw the treachery of Zopyrus at the Belian and Kissian gates, which must have been to the east of the city, at once take refuge in the famous sanctuary, which he implies was in the vicinity.

On the whole, therefore, it seems best to regard the Babil mound as the ziggurat of the great temple of Bel (called by some “the tomb of Belus”) which the Persians destroyed and which Alexander intended to restore.  With regard to the “hanging gardens,” as they were an erection of less than half the size of the tower, it is not so necessary to suppose that distinct traces must remain of them.  Their debris may be confused with those of the Kasr mound, on which one writer places them.  Or they may have stood between the Kasr and Amran ruins, where are now some mounds of no great height.  Or, possibly, their true site is in the modern El Homeira, the remarkable red mound which lies east of the Kasr at the distance of about 800 yards, and attains an elevation of sixty-five feet.  Though this building is not situated upon the banks of the Euphrates, where Strabo and Diodorus place the gardens, it abuts upon a long low valley into which the Euphrates water seems formerly to have been introduced, and which may therefore have been given the name of the river.  This identification is, however, it must be allowed, very doubtful.

The two lines of mounds which enclose the long low valley above mentioned are probably the remains of an embankment which here confined the waters of a great reservoir.  Nebuchadnezzar relates that he constructed a large reservoir, which he calls the Yapur-Shapu, in Babylon, and led water into it by means of an “eastern canal”—­the Shebil.  The Shebil canal, it is probable, left the Euphrates at some point between Babil and the Kasr, and ran across with a course nearly from west to east to the top of the Yapur-Shapu.  This reservoir seems to have been a long and somewhat narrow parallelogram, running nearly from north to south, which shut in the great palace on the east and protected it like a huge moat.  Most likely it communicated with the Euphrates towards the south by a second canal, the exact line of which cannot be determined.  Thus the palatial residence of the Babylonian kings looked in both directions upon broad sheets of water, an agreeable prospect in so hot a climate; while, at the same time, by the assignment of a double channel to the Euphrates, its floods were the more readily controlled, and the city was preserved from those terrible inundations which in modern times have often threatened the existence of Baghdad.