man in town fashion which has yet been explored in any land near
Greece is that of Kahun, in Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C. Here
Professor Flinders Petrie unearthed many four-roomed cottages packed
close in parallel oblong blocks and a few larger rectangular houses:
they are (it seems) the dwellings of the workmen and managers busy
with the neighbouring Illahun pyramid.[6] But the settlement is very
small, covering less than 20 acres; it is not in itself a real town
and its plan has not the scheme or symmetry of a town-plan. For that
we must turn to western Asia, to Babylonia and Assyria.

[6] W.F. Petrie, _Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob_ (London, 1891), ch.
ii, plate xiv. The plan is reproduced in Breasted's _History of
Egypt_, p. 87, R. Unwin's _Town planning_, fig. 11 (with wrong
scale), &c.

Here we find clearer evidence. The great cities of the Mesopotamian
plains show faint traces of town-planning datable to the eighth and
following centuries, of which the Greeks seem to have heard and which
they may have copied. Our knowledge of these cities is, of course,
still very fragmentary, and though it has been much widened by the
latest German excavations, it does not yet carry us to definite
conclusions. The evidence is twofold, in part literary, drawn from
Greek writers and above all Herodotus, and in part archaeological,
yielded by Assyrian and Babylonian ruins.

The description of Babylon given by Herodotus is, of course,
famous.[7] Even in his own day, it was well enough known to be
parodied by contemporary comedians in the Athenian theatre. Probably
it rests in part on first-hand knowledge. Herodotus gives us to
understand that he visited Babylon in the course of his many