erbela and Nedjif or Meshed
Ali as special cemetery cities, to which thousands of corpses are brought
annually. At any rate, the quantity of human relics accumulated upon
certain Chaldaean sites is enormous, and seems to be quite beyond what
the mere population of the surrounding district could furnish. At Warka,
for instance, excepting the triangular space between the three principal
ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space within the
walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled
with human bones and sepulchres. In places coffins are piled upon
coffins, certainly to the depth of 30, probably to the depth of 60 feet;
and for miles on every side of the ruins the traveller walks upon a soil
teeming with the relics of ancient, and now probably extinct, races.
Sometimes these relics manifestly belong to a number of distinct and
widely separate eras; but there are places where it is otherwise.
However we may account for it--and no account has been yet given which
is altogether satisfactory--it seems clear, from the comparative
homogeneousness of the remains in some places, that they belong to a
single race, and if not to a single period, at any rate to only two,
or, at the most, three distinct periods, so that it is no longer very
difficult to distinguish the more ancient from the later relics. Such
is the character of the remains at Mugheir, which are thought to contain
nothing of later date than the close of the Babylonian period, B. C.
538; and such is, still more remarkably, the character of the ruins at
Abu-Shahrein and Tel-el-Lahm, which seem to be entirely, or almost
entirely, Chaldaean. In the following account of the coffins and mode of
burial employed by the early Chaldaeans, examples will be drawn from
these places only; since otherwise we should be liable to confound
together the productions of very different ages and peoples.

[Illustration: PLATE 11]

The tombs to which an archaic character most certainly attaches are of
three kinds-brick vaults, clay coffins shaped like a dish-cover, and
coffins in the same material, formed of two large jars placed mouth to
mouth, and cemented together with bitumen. The brick vaults are found
chiefly at Mugheir. [PLATE XI., Fig. 1.] They are seven feet long, three
feet seven inches broad, and five feet high, composed of sun-dried bricks
imbedded in mud, and exhibit a very remarkable form and construction of
the arch. The