its walls are the work of an Empire greater than Babylon; but they
measure less than 24 miles in circuit, and they are or were little
more than 30 ft. thick and 70 ft. high.[10] Moreover, Herodotus's
account of the walls has to be set beside a statement which he makes
elsewhere, that they had been razed by Darius sixty or seventy years
before his visit.[11] The destruction can hardly have been complete.
But in any case Herodotus can only have seen fragments, easily
misinterpreted, easily explained by local _ciceroni_ as relics of
something quite unlike the facts.

[10] L. Gaillard, _Variétés sinologiques_, xvi (plan) and xxiii.
pp. 8, 235 (Chang-hai, 1898, 1903). Others give the figures a
little differently, but not so as to affect the argument.

[11] Hdt. iii. 159. The theory that there were originally two
parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the
other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ ii. 2696), is
meaningless. There could be no use in razing one and leaving the
other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181). It is, however,
not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were
two outer parallel walls.

Turn now to the actual remains of Babylon, as known from surveys and
excavations. We find a large district extending to both banks of the
Euphrates, which is covered rather irregularly by the mounds of many
ruined buildings. Two sites in it are especially notable. At its
southern end is Birs Nimrud and some adjacent mounds, anciently
Borsippa; here stood a huge temple of the god Nebo. Near its north
end, ten or eleven miles north of Borsippa, round Babil and Kasr, is a
larger wilderness of ruin, three miles long and nearly as broad in