"great Babylon" of Nebuchadnezzar. Within a space little more than three
miles long and a mile and three quarters broad are contained all the
undoubted remains of the greatest city of the old world. These remains,
however, do not serve in any way to define the ancient limits of the
place. They are surrounded on every side by nitrous soil, and by low
heaps which it has not been thought worth while to excavate, but which
the best judges assign to the same era as the great mounds, and believe
to mark the sites of the lesser temples and the other public buildings
of the ancient city. Masses of this kind are most frequent to the north
and east. Sometimes they are almost continuous for miles; and if we take
the Kasr mound as a centre, and mark about it an area extending five
miles in each direction (which would give a city of the size described
by Ctesias and the historians of Alexander), we shall scarcely find a
single square mile of the hundred without some indications of ancient
buildings upon its surface. The case is not like that of Nineveh, where
outside the walls the country is for a considerable distance singularly
bare of ruins. The mass of Babylonian remains extending from Babil to
Amran does not correspond to the whole _enceinte_ of Nineveh, but to the
mound of Koyunjik. It has every appearance of being, not the city, but
"the heart of the city"--the "Royal quarter" outside of which were the
streets and squares, and still further off, the vanished walls. It may
seem strange that the southern capital should have so greatly exceeded
the dimensions of the northern one. But, if we follow the indications
presented by the respective sites, we are obliged to conclude that there
was really this remarkable difference.

It has to be considered in conclusion how far we can identify the
various ruins above described with the known buildings of the ancient
capital, and to what extent it is possible to reconstruct upon the
existing remains the true plan of the city. Fancy, if it discards the