"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [ظ‎‎٣‎٩‎٩] (٨٦٢/٨٠١)

TEN HISTORICAL SITES
630
Dynasty king Shulgi (p. 209), consisting of groups of rooms like private
houses, with staircases leading down to the vaulted tombs 26 feet below.
Some rooms were decorated with gold-leaf panelling. Other vaulted and
domed tombs of kings are to be found in the irregular cavity where the
cemetery was excavated. The tomb of Abargi contained the bodies of
soldiers, courtiers, and women, laid out in rows, who were slaughtered
at the funeral.
East of the temple precinct is the palace of Nabonidus, surrounded by
a strong wall, and adjoining it are the foundations of the so-called Harbour
Temple. The area of private houses shows the town as it was in Abraham’s
day with its narrow lanes, numerous small shrines, and closely packed
dwellings, within which the dead were buried.
A fine selection of the jewellery and precious objects and the apparatus
of daily life discovered in the excavations are to be seen in the Iraqi
Museum at Baghdad.
Babylon (figs. 93, 94; photos. 97, in, 112)
Babylon, Bab-Ilu, Gate of the Gods, was the capital of Lower Meso
potamia from the time of Hammurabi (c. 1770 B.c.) till the building of
the Greek city of Seleucia in the third century B.c., after which it con
tinued to exist for three centuries as a decaying provincial city. The
buildings which have been excavated are mainly those of the Neo-
Babylonian period (p. 219), when under Nebuchadnezzar II the city
reached its greatest extent. The ruins, which were buried in a number of
mounds in an area of 1X2^ miles for the inner city alone, are dispersed
and confused, so that it is not easy to follow the plan of the city as a whole
or to trace the ground plans of particular buildings. The effect of the
excavation pits and trenches is aggravated by the fact that for many
centuries Babylon served as a brick-field for the builders of Ctesiphon,
Baghdad, and Hilla, whither great quantities of its fine kiln-burned bricks
were carried away. The northern mound, Qasr, in particular, served as
a brick quarry up to the present century; the robbery was not finally
stopped until the British occupation.
Babylon lies between the Nil canal and the Euphrates and is protected
by a series of great walls. The outer walls, parallel to the Nil canal on
the north-east, then turning abruptly towards the Euphrates on the
south-east, enclosed a huge triangle with the river as the third side, and
were continued beyond the river to form a quadrilateral with a periphery
of 11 miles. This Outer Wall is triple: the innermost mud-brick wall,
23 feet tnick, stands 39 feet from the middle burnt-brick wall, 25 feet
thick, the interspan was filled in with rubble and a carriageway ran on
top encompassing the whole city: the outermost wall of burnt brick, 11 feet
wide, simply reinforces the middle wall. Within stood the main town,
roughly rectangular and walled by the Inner Wall, a double wall of two