The principal excavations are in the Kasr, at one time a vast block of buildings where are still the traces of a great and broad street used as a processional road to the temple of E-Sagila, which lies to the south about 700 yards away.  Some of the stones of this road are in their original places, and there are pieces of brick pavement, each bearing cuneiform characters.  If you take up a brick and look at it casually, you might think that it had “Jones & Co.” or the “Sittingbourne Brick Co.” stamped upon it and it does not look at all old.  It is rather startling to be told that the letters read:—­

“I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon; I paved the Babel Way with blocks of shadu stone for the procession of the great lord Marduk.  O Marduk, Lord, grant long life.”

These mounds of the Kasr have suffered by successive generations of brick getters.  Half Hillah is said to be built out of bricks from the ruins of Babylon, and bricks are still taken for any building operations that occur within easy access of these well-nigh inexhaustible supplies.  In one place, the Temple of Nin-Makh, the Great Mistress, there are to be found an immense number of little clay images, thought to be votive offerings made by women to the great Mother Goddess.

In the Mound of Amram, according to Major R. Campbell Thompson, are traces of the E-Temenanki referred to in Murray’s handbook as not yet identified. [My Murray’s handbook is 15 years old.] He writes, in a most useful little book published in Baghdad, 1918, “History and Antiquities of Mesopotamia":—­“A hundred yards north of the north slope of Amram is the ancient zigurrat or temple-tower of the famous E-Temenanki:  ’the foundation stone of Heaven and Earth’ (the Tower of Babylon).  The enclosing wall forms almost a square, and part has been excavated, but all the buildings have suffered from brick-robbers.  The remains of the actual Tower are towards the south-west corner.

“Many ancient restorations were carried out here.  Professor Koldeway found inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Sardanapalus and thereafter inscriptions of Babylonian Kings.  Herodotus calls the group of buildings ‘the brazen-doored sanctuary of Zeus Below,’ and he describes the zigurrat as a temple-tower in eight stages.  The cuneiform records of Nabopolassar relate how the god Marduk commanded him ’to lay the foundation of the Tower of Babylon ... firm on the bosom of the underworld while its top should stretch heavenwards.’”

The first impression of the Kasr is that of a shelled town or mined flour mill, where nothing remains but the lower walls of buildings.  From a painter’s point of view, the scene of this great city, about which he has pictured so much, is somewhat disappointing.  There is such an absence of anything suggestive of palaces and streets.  Frankly, the ruins of the cement works at Frindsbury are, pictorially, far more suggestive.  I have always said that the hanging gardens of Borstal knocked spots off the hanging gardens of Babylon, and now I know it.  So much for a first impression.