inues
very much in the condition in which it was when the lower stage was first
built. This stage, being built of crude brick, was necessarily weak; it
is therefore supported by four massive buttresses of baked brick, each
placed exactly in the centre of one of the sides, and carried to about
one-third of the height. Each buttress is nineteen feet high, six feet
one inch wide, and seven and a half feet in depth; and each is divided
down the middle by a receding space, one foot nine inches in width. All
the bricks composing the buttresses are inscribed, and are very firmly
cemented together with bitumen, in thick layers. The buttresses were
entirely hidden under the mass of rubbish which had fallen from the
building, chiefly from the upper story, and only became apparent when Mr.
Loftus made his excavations.

It is impossible to reconstruct the Bowariyeh ruin from the facts and
measurements hitherto supplied to us even the height of the first story
is at present uncertain; and we have no means of so much as conjecturing
the height of the second. The exact emplacement of the second upon the
first is also doubtful, while the original mode of access is
undiscovered; and thus the plan of the building is in many respects still
defective. We only know that it was a square; that it had two stories at
the least; and that its entire height above the plain considerably
exceeded 100 feet. The temple at Mugheir has been more accurately
examined. [PLATE VIII., Fig. 2.] On a mound or platform of some size,
raised about twenty feet above the level of the plain, there stands a
rectangular edifice, consisting at present of two stories, both of them
ruined in parts, and buried to a considerable extent in piles of rubbish
composed of their debris. The angles of the building exactly face the
four cardinal points. It is not a square, but a parallelogram, having
two longer and two shorter sides. [PLATE IX., Fig. 1.] The longer sides
front to the north-east and south-west respectively, and measure 198
feet; while the shorter sides, which face the north-west and south-east,
measure 133 feet. The present height of the basement story is 27 feet;
but, allowing for the concealment of the lower part by the rubbish, and
the destruction of the upper part by the hand of time, we may presume
that the original height was little, if at all, short of 40 feet. The
interior of this story is built of crude or sun-dried bricks of small
size, la