out of reach of the arrows or slings of the besiegers:  the remains of the ramparts at Uruk at the present day are still forty to fifty feet high, and twenty or more feet in thickness at the top.  Narrow turrets projected at intervals of every fifty feet along the face of the wall:  the excavations have not been sufficiently pursued to permit of our seeing what system of defence was applied to the entrances.  The area described by these cities was often very large, but the population in them was distributed very unequally; the temples in the different quarters formed centres around which were clustered the dwellings of the inhabitants, sometimes densely packed, and elsewhere thinly scattered.  The largest and richest of these temples was usually reserved for the principal deity, whose edifices were being continually decorated by the ruling princes, and the extent of whose ruins still attracts the traveller.  The walls, constructed and repaired with bricks stamped with the names of lords of the locality, contain in themselves alone an almost complete history.  Did Urbau, we may ask, found the ziggurat of Nannar in Uru?  We meet with his bricks at the base of the most ancient portions of the building, and we moreover learn, from cylinders unearthed not far from it, that “for Nannar, the powerful bull of Anu, the son of Bel, his King, Urbau, the brave hero, King of Uru, had built E-Timila, his favourite temple.”  The bricks of his son Dungi are found mixed with his own, while here and there other bricks belonging to subsequent kings, with cylinders, cones, and minor objects, strewn between the courses, mark restorations at various later periods.  What is true of one Chaldaean city is equally true of all of them, and the dynasties of Uruk and of Lagash, like those of Uru, can be reconstructed from the revelations of their brickwork.  The lords of heaven promised to the lords of the earth, as a reward of their piety, both glory and wealth in this life, and an eternal fame after death:  they have, indeed, kept their word.  The majority of the earliest Chaldaean heroes would be unknown to us, were it not for the witness of the ruined sanctuaries which they built, and that which they did in the service of their heavenly patrons has alone preserved their names from oblivion.  Their most extravagant devotion, however, cost them less money and effort than that of the Pharaohs their contemporaries.  While the latter had to bring from a distance, even from the remotest parts of the desert, the different kinds of stone which they considered worthy to form part of the decoration of the houses of their gods, the Chaldaean kings gathered up outside their very doors the principal material for their buildings:  should they require any other accessories, they could obtain, at the worst, hard stone for their statues and thresholds in Magan and Milukhkha, and beams of cedar and cypress in the forests of the Amanus and the Upper Tigris.  Under these conditions a temple was soon erected,