ith that of the Installation of the Egyptian Nagid
(_J.Q.R._, IX, p. 717).]

[Footnote 135: This is a well-known sage, whose name often
occurs in the Talmud.]

[Footnote 136: The Babel of Bible times was captured by
Sennacherib; after stopping up a dam of the Euphrates, the
country was placed under water and the city destroyed.
Nebuchadnezzar restored the city; he also erected a
magnificent palace for himself--the Kasr--also the Temple of
Bel. Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 178-89, fully describes these
edifices, and dwells upon the huge extent of the metropolis,
which was estimated to have a circuit of fifty miles. Xerxes
destroyed the city. Alexander the Great contemplated the
restoration of Bel's Temple, but as it would have taken two
months for 10,000 men merely to remove the rubbish, he
abandoned the attempt. The ruins have been recently explored
by Germans. The embankments which regulated the flow of the
Euphrates and Tigris have given way, and at the present time
the whole region round Babylon is marshy and malarious. In
the words of Jeremiah, li. 43, "Her cities are a desolation,
a sterile land, and a wilderness, a place wherein no man
dwelleth."]

[Footnote 137: The Valley of Dura mentioned in Daniel iii.
is here referred to. See Dr. Berliner's _Beitraege zur
Geographie und Ethnographie Babyloniens_; also Layard's
_Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 469. Cf. Berachot, 57 b.]

[Footnote 138: Bereshith Rabba, chap, xxxviii, says the
tower was at Borsippa, and the ruins here spoken of are
probably those of the Birs Nimroud, fully described by
Layard, _Nineveh and Babylon_, chap, xxii, p. 496. He says:
"The mound rises abruptly to the height of 198 feet, and has
on its summit a compact mass of brickwork 37 feet high by 28
broad.... On one side of it, beneath the crowning masonry,
lie huge fragments torn from the pile itself. The calcined
and vitreous surface of the bricks, fused into rock-like
masses, show that their fall may have been caused by
lightning. The ruin is rent almost from top to bottom. No
traces whatever now remain of the spiral passage spoken of
by the Jewish traveller." Cf. Professor T.K. Cheyne's
article, "The Tower of Babel," in the new _Biblical
Cyclopaedia_. Nebuchadnezzar, in his Borsippa inscription,