and its construction did not demand centuries of continuous labour, like the great limestone and granite sanctuaries of Egypt:  the same ruler who laid the first brick, almost always placed the final one, and succeeding generations had only to keep the building in ordinary repair, without altering its original plan.  The work of construction was in almost every case carried out all at one time, designed and finished from the drawings of one architect, and bears traces but rarely of those deviations from the earlier plans which sometimes make the comprehension of the Theban temples so difficult a matter:  if the state of decay of certain parts, or more often inadequate excavation, frequently prevent us from appreciating their details, we can at least reinstate their general outline with tolerable accuracy.

While the Egyptian temple was spread superficially over a large area, the Chalaean temple strove to attain as high an elevation as possible.  The “ziggurats,” whose angular profile is a special characteristic of the landscapes of the Euphrates, were composed of several immense cubes, piled up on one another, and diminishing in size up to the small shrine by which they were crowned and wherein the god himself was supposed to dwell.  There are two principal types of these ziggurats.  In the first, for which the builders of Lower Chaldaea showed a marked preference, the vertical axis, common to all the superimposed stories, did not pass through the centre of the rectangle which served as the base of the whole building; it was carried back and placed near to one of the narrow ends of the base, so that the back elevation of the temple rose abruptly in steep narrow ledges above the plain, while the terraces of the front broadened out into wide platforms.  The stories are composed of solid blocks of crude brick; up to the present, at least, no traces of internal chambers have been found.* The chapel on the summit could not contain more than one apartment:  an altar stood before the door, and access to it was obtained by a straight external staircase, interrupted at each terrace by a more or less spacious landing.** The second type of temple frequently found in Northern Chaldaea was represented by a building on a square base with seven stories, all of equal height, connected by one or two lateral staircases, having on the summit, the pavilion of the god; this is the “terraced tower” which excited the admiration of the Greeks at Babylon, and of which the temple of Bel was the most remarkable example.  The ruins of it still exist, but it has been so frequently and so completely restored in the course of ages, that it is impossible to say how much now remains of the original construction.  We know of several examples, however, of the other type of ziggurat—­one at Uru, another at Bridu, a third at Uruk, without mentioning those which have not as yet been methodically explored.  None of them rises directly from the surface of the ground, but they are all built on a