ls,
to the height of some eighteen feet above the battlements: a hundred
gates fitted with bronze-plated doors, which could be securely shut at
need, gave access to the city.*

* The description of the fortifications of the city is
furnished by Herodotus, who himself saw them still partially
standing; the account of their construction has been given
by Nebuchadrezzar himself, in the _East India Company's
Inscription_.

The space within the walls was by no means completely covered by houses,
but contained gardens, farms, fields, and, here and there, the ruins of
deserted buildings. As in older Babylon, the city proper clustered round
the temple of Merodach, with its narrow winding streets, its crowded
bazaars, its noisy and dirty squares, its hostelries and warehouses of
foreign merchandise.

[Illustration: 458.jpg FRAGMENT OF A BABYLONIAN BAS-RELIEF]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch in Layard.

The pyramid of Esarhad-don and Assur-bani-pal, too hastily built, had
fallen into ruins: Nebuchadrezzar reconstructed its seven stages, and
erected on the topmost platform a shrine furnished with a table of
massive gold, and a couch on which the priestess chosen to be the spouse
of the god might sleep at night. Other small temples were erected here
and there on both banks of the river, and the royal palace, built in the
marvellously short space of fifteen days, was celebrated for its hanging
gardens, where the ladies of the harem might walk unveiled, secure from
vulgar observation. No trace of all these extensive works remains at the
present day.

[Illustration: 459.jpg RUINS OF THE ZIGGURAT OF THE TEMPLE OF BEL]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch in Layard.

Some scattered fragments of crumbling walls alone betray the site of
the great ziggurat, a few bas-reliefs are strewn over the surface of the
ground, and a lion of timeworn stone, lying on its back in a depression
of the soil, is perhaps the last survivor of those which kept watch,
according to custom, at the gates of the palace. But the whole of this
vast work of reconstruction and ornamentation must not be attributed to
Nebuchadrezzar alone. The plans had been designed by Nabopolassar under
the influence of one of his wives, who by a strange chance bears in
classic tradition the very Egyptian name of Nitocris; but his work was
insignificant compared with that accomplished by his son, and the name
of Nebuchadrezzar was