t for the pleasure of Queen Amuhia, who, as a
Median princess, missed her native mountains, but a more commonplace
explanation is that they were carried so high to escape the mosquitoes
that swarmed on the lower level.

Various splendid edifices, chiefly religious, adorned the great
squares of the city: the temple of the god Bel, enriched by the spoils
of Tyre and Jerusalem, was the especial pride of Nebuchadnezzar. It
rose in a succession of eight lofty stages, and supported on the top a
golden statue of the god, forty feet high. Still another temple of Bel
was built in seven stages, each faced with enamelled brick of one of
the planetary colors; the topmost one of blue, the color dedicated to
Mercury or Nebo, the patron god of Nabopolassar.

But the most important of the civic undertakings of Nebuchadnezzar was
the extension of the great system of canalization by which the barren
wastes of the Babylonian plain were made to rival the valley of the
Nile in fertility, and become the granary of the East. The whole
territory was covered with a network of canals fed by the Tigris and
Euphrates, and used for both irrigation and navigation. One branch had
already connected Nineveh with Babylon, and another constructed by
Nebuchadnezzar united Babylon to the Persian Gulf, running a distance
of four hundred miles. This is still to be traced in a portion of its
length.

The fate of Nebuchadnezzar is one of the most tragic in the long list
of calamities that have overtaken the great and powerful of the earth.
According to Daniel, it was just after the king had spoken those words
of exulting pride as he walked in the palace of the Kingdom of
Babylon: "Is not this great Babylon that I have built," when he was
attacked by that dreadful form of madness, called by the Greeks,
lycanthropy (wolf-man), in which the victim fancies himself a beast:
in its fiercer manifestations a beast of the forest, or in milder
visitations a beast of the field. Nebuchadnezzar's madness became so
violent that for four years he was exiled from his throne and from the
company of men, and wandered in the fields, eating grass like oxen,
"and his body was wet with the dews of heaven, and his hairs were
grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws."
Although no mention is made of this strange malady in any writing but
the book of Daniel, yet it has a pathetic confirmation in one of the
rock-cut inscriptions that record the acts of Nebuchadnez