wanderings and we have no cause to distrust him; we may even date his
visit to somewhere about 450 B.C. He was not indeed the only Greek of
his day, nor the first, to get so far afield. But his account
nevertheless neither is nor professes to be purely that of an
eyewitness. Like other writers in various ages,[8] he drew no sharp
division between details which he saw and details which he learnt from
others. For the sake (it may be) of vividness, he sets them all on one
plane, and they must be judged, not as first-hand evidence but on
their own merits.

[7] Hdt. i. 178 foil. The accounts of Ctesias and other ancient
writers seem to throw no light on the town-planning and streets
of Babylon, however useful they may otherwise be.

[8] The Elizabethan description of Britain by William Harrison is
an example from a modern time.

Babylon, says Herodotus, was planted in an open plain and formed an
exact square of great size, 120 stades (that is, nearly 14 miles) each
way; the whole circuit was 480 stades, about 55 miles. It was girt
with immense brick walls, 340 ft. high and nearly 90 ft. thick, and a
broad deep moat full of water, and was entered through 100 gates;
presumably we are intended to think of these gates as arranged
symmetrically, 25 in each side. From corner to corner the city was cut
diagonally by the Euphrates, which thus halved it into two roughly
equal triangles, and the river banks were fortified by brick
defences--less formidable than the main outer walls--which ran along
them from end to end of the city. There was, too, an inner wall on the
landward side. The streets were also remarkable: