r at wider intervals--according
to Niebuhr and Ives, every seventh or eighth course;
according to Raymond, every seventh course, or sometimes
every fifth or sixth course, but in these cases the layer of
reeds becomes 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 inches wide. H. Rawlin-son
thinks, on the other hand, that all the monuments in which
we find layers of straw and reeds between the brick courses
belong to the Parthian period.

[Illustration: 128.jpg A CHALDAEAN STAMPED BRICK.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a brick preserved in the
Louvre. The bricks bearing historical inscriptions, which
are sometimes met with, appear to have been mostly ex-voto
offerings placed somewhere prominently, and not building
materials hidden in the masonry.

Monuments constructed of such a plastic material required constant
attention and frequent repairs, to keep them in good condition: after a
few years of neglect they became quite disfigured, the houses suffered
a partial dissolution in every storm, the streets were covered with
a coating of fine mud, and the general outline of the buildings and
habitations grew blurred and defaced. Whilst in Egypt the main features
of the towns are still traceable above ground, and are so well preserved
in places that, while excavating them, we are carried away from
the present into the world of the past, the Chaldaean cities, on the
contrary, are so overthrown and seem to have returned so thoroughly to
the dust from which their founders raised them, that the most patient
research and the most enlightened imagination can only imperfectly
reconstitute their arrangement.

The towns were not enclosed within those square or rectangular
enclosures with which the engineers of the Pharaohs fortified their
strongholds. The ground-plan of Uru was an oval, that of Larsam formed
almost a circle upon the soil, while Uruk and Eridu resembled in shape
a sort of irregular trapezium. The curtain of the citadel looked down on
the plain from a great height, so that the defenders were almost out
of reach of the arrows or slings of the besiegers: the remains of the
ramparts at Uruk at the present day are still forty to fifty feet
high, and twenty or more feet in thickness at the top. Narrow turrets
projected at intervals of every fifty feet along the face of the wall:
the excavations have not been sufficiently pursued to permit of our
seeing what system of defence was applied to th