The Babylonian palace, like the Assyrian, and the Susianian, stood upon a lofty mound or platform.  This arrangement provided at once for safety, for enjoyment, and for health.  It secured a pure air, freedom from the molestation of insects, and a position only assailable at a few points.  The ordinary shape of the palace mound appears to have been square; its elevation was probably not less than fifty or sixty feet.  It was composed mainly of sun-dried bricks, which however were almost certainly enclosed externally by a facing of burnt brick, and may have been further strengthened within by walls of the same material, which perhaps traversed the whole mound.  The entire mass seems to have been carefully drained, and the collected waters were conveyed through subterranean channels to the level of the plain at the mound’s base.  The summit of the platform was no doubt paved, either with stone or burnt brick—­mainly, it is probable, with the latter; since the former material was scarce, and though a certain number of stone pavement slabs have been found, they are too rare and scattered to imply anything like the general use of stone paving.  Upon the platform, most likely towards the centre, rose the actual palace, not built (like the Assyrian palaces) of crude brick faced with a better material, but constructed wholly of the finest and hardest burnt brick laid in a mortar of extreme tenacity, with walls of enormous thickness, parallel to the sides of the mound, and meeting each other at right angles.  Neither the ground-plan nor the elevation of a Babylonian palace can be given; nor can even a conjectural restoration of such a building be made, since the small fragment of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace which remains has defied all attempts to reduce it to system.  We can only say that the lines of the building were straight; that the walls rose, at any rate to a considerable height, without windows; and that the flatness of the straight line was broken by numerous buttressses and pilasters.  We have also evidence that occasionally there was an ornamentation of the building, either within or without, by means of sculptured stone slabs, on which were represented figures of a small size, carefully wrought.  The general ornamentation, however, external as well as internal, we may well believe to have been such as Diodorus states, colored representations on brick of war-scenes, and hunting-scenes, the counterparts in a certain sense of those magnificent bas-reliefs which everywhere clothed the walls of palaces in Assyria.  It has been already noticed that abundant remains of such representations have been found upon the Kasr mound. [PLATE XV., Fig. 2.] They seem to have alternated with cuneiform inscriptions, in white on a blue ground, or else with a patterning of rosettes in the same colors.