as those of Babylon, which answers in a remarkable manner to the recorded predictions of Holy Writ. These predictions will be noticed, after describing briefly the site and the ruins of that once"golden city."

The best authorities place Babylon near Hillah, a town situated on the Euphrates, which was erected out of the ruins in its vicinity, a. D. 1101, and which is about forty-eight miles south of Bagdad. This opinion is founded on, 1. The latitude of the place, as given by the best oriental geographers, compared with the situation of Babylon, as recorded by classical writers; 2. The stupendous magnitude and extent of the adjacent ruins; 3. Its. vicinity to the bituminous fountains of Hit, mentioned by Herodotus, as being eight days' journey above Babylon, upon a stream of the same name, which falls into the Euphrates; and, 4. From the circumstance that the whole surrounding district has been distinguished by the name of Babel, from the remotest ages to the present hour. The author of "Critical Geography," after ably analyzing the opinions of ancient and modern geographers, concludes by saying, that, taking all these authorities together, the site of old Babylon is clearly pointed out to be at, or in the direction of Hillah; and he thus determines its geographical posi

tion:

As the longitude of Bagdad is, according to Rich, 44° 45' 45" E. of Greenwich, and N. latitude 33° 19' 40"; and as the longitude of Hillah, by the same authority, is 44° 33' 9", or 12° 36' of Bagdad, and its latitude 32° 31' 18" N., or 38 geographical miles s. of the parallel of Bagdad, and its general bearing from that place is s. 13° w., and the road distant 50 geographical, or rather more than 57 English miles; we may fix the southern limit of the ruins indicating its site, in 32° 43′ N. latitude, and E. longitude 44° 32′ E. of Greenwich, two miles w. of Hillah.

It is not possible to determine precisely the extent and circumference of ancient Babylon, so as to decide which of the various statements of Herodotus, Pliny, Strabo, Solinus, Ctesias, Diodorus, Clitarchus, and Curtius, are correct. The broad walls of Babylon are broken down, and neither wall nor ditch exists within the area to point out where they stood. Untraceable, however, as the walls now are, some traces of the ancient city commence at two canals, rising east and west, immediately to the south of the village of Mahowil, and a little east of the eastern bank of the Euphrates. One of these canals is crossed by a brick bridge, and as soon as the travel

ler has gained the opposite side, the vestiges of the fallen city present themselves to his view in awful grandeur. For the distance of twelve miles along the banks of the Euphrates, his eye wanders over mounds of temples, palaces, and human habitations of every kind, now buried in shapeless heaps; and he travels onward amidst a silence, profound as that which presides over the abodes of the dead.

The first object surveyed, after crossing the bridge, is a mound of considerable elevation, about five hundred yards from the second canal. The sloping sides of this mound are covered with broken bricks and other fragments of buildings, while the ground around its base presents a nitrous surface. A few hundred yards in the advance, is another mound of still greater elevation, from which other elevations project in several directions. Two miles from the bridge are the remains of a larger and higher embankment than that of a simple watercourse, and which seems to be the remnant of some interior boundary. The road from this embankment, for the space of four miles, though somewhat even, is nevertheless broken by several mounds, detached portions of canal embankments, and other indications of a place in ruin. These are mingled with large marshy hollows in the ground, and large nitrous spots, which arise from the deposits of accumulated rubbish. At the end of this tract of four miles, a spacious canal is encountered, beyond which, eastward, is a vast uninterrupted flat. At the distance of half an hour's ride from this canal, the eastern face of the Mujelibe is described. After a further ride of an hour and a quarter in the same direction, the Euphrates appears in sight; the view of its northeastern bank being hitherto totally excluded by the long intervening lines of ruin, which in the ear of reason reiterates the words of the prophet:

"Babylon is fallen, is fallen.”—Isa. xxi. 9.

From this point to the base of the Mujelibe, large masses of ancient foundations spread on the right, more resembling natural hills than mounds, and concealing the ruins of splendid edifices. Amid these ruins, the majestic Euphrates flows in peaceful solitude; and although the glory of that river is also departed, it is still a noble feature of the waste scenery. The ruins which claim most attention are comprised within an area of rather more than two miles, from east to west, and about the same distance from south to north. This space is bounded by the river along its western limits, and contains

a great number of small mounds, and three immense masses of ruins, denominated the Amram Hills, the Kasr, or palace, and the Mujelibe. This latter mound is five miles north of Hillah. To the north-west of this mound commences a magnificent rampart, which, running along its northern and eastern sides, takes its course southward, till intersected by the Nil canal. At this point it makes a curve, stretching away direct for rather more than two miles, at the end of which is an opening of three hundred feet, which is supposed to have been once intended for a majestic gateway. The rampart recommences on the southern side of this opening, and runs in an answering and expanding direction southwest, for a mile and a half, where it unites with a clustre of low mounds, connected with the great mass of ruins south of the hill of Amram. The whole of this rampart is broad and elevated, and along its summits and slopes are traces of ancient buildings; but no moat has been discovered. This space has been compared to a drawn bow from whence the arrow has just been discharged; the river forming the bow, and the two lines of the rampart the string. It is intersected by another ridge of mounds, commencing seven hundred yards south of the Nil canal, and running direct across the area to the opposite side of the rampart.

A little to the west of this, another mound commences, which appears rather low till an opening occurs, when it is seen again rising in high elevations, covered with the wreck of ancient buildings. At the north end of this ridge of mound another commences, striking off nearly at an angle from that point, and running direct west to the river, where it terminates in an elevated mass; the shore being there extremely steep and high, forming an admirable defence against the river, and the sudden invasion of an enemy. This is sup

posed to be the river embankment built by Nebuchadnezzar, who fortified it with brick and bitumen fortifications, and over against every street leading to its banks placed a brazen gate, with stairs leading down to the water. Diodorus and Ctesias say, that these embankments were formed of sun-dried bricks in courses; and such may yet be found in regular layers along the steep shore, from north to south, and huge fragments of the exterior walls are discerned both on the margin of and beneath the stream. From this point, the river bulwark runs north-west to the mouth of the Nil canal; and from the same point it runs south along the bending course of the river for three quarters of a mile, till it arrives at a

int where the river has changed its channel westward. eyond this deviation, the bulwark commences in a rapid scent of forty-five feet, following the course of the stream for bout 700 yards, till it is lost in the dense woods of bushes nd date trees leading to Hillah. Thus this famous embankent has been distinctly traced for the space of 2,000 yards, long the eastern shore of the Euphrates.

On the north of Hillah, the first ruin that meets the eye of he traveller is a mound called Jumjuma, an epithet which, ike Golgotha and Calvary, signifies, "the place of a skull." South of this is the Amram hill, which is 1,100 yards in ength, and 800 in breadth, and the figure of which nearly esembles that of a quadrant. The elevation of this mound s somewhat irregular, but at intervals it rises to seventy feet above the level of the plain. It is broken by deep ravines and long winding furrows, and the whole appears one vast elevated mass of earth, mixed with fragments of brick, pottery, vitrifications, mortar, and bitumen. At the foot of the narrowest and most elevated part of the embankment, a number of urns are cemented into the burned brick of the wall, which are filled with ashes, intermingled with small fragments of human bones.

A little to the north of the Amram hill is the Kasr, or Palace, an august ruin, rising full seventy feet above the general level. The whole of this mass is furrowed into deep ravines, intersecting each other in every direction, and as the traveller passes over it, his feet sink into dust and rubbish. Every vestige discovered in it shows it to have been composed of buildings superior to all the rest in this section of the ruins, but the excavations which are constantly going forward there to obtain bricks, make it difficult to decipher the original designs of the mound. In some places, the workmen have bored into the solid mass, discovering on every hand walls of burned brick laid in lime mortar, fragments of alabaster vessels, fine earthenware, marble, and varnished tiles. Rich discovered a colossal lion, standing on a pedestal of coarse granite of a grey colour, and of rude workmanship. This was on the north side of the mound; and immediately west of it are the ruins peculiarly denominated the Kasr, or Palace.

There is one remarkable difference between the material of the Kasr, and that of the Mujelibe and the Birs Nemroud. The latter piles are vast internal courses of sun-dried bricks, consolidated by the intervention of reeds and slime; but the Kasr is formed of furnace-burned brick, with its necessary

cements. Every brick has been found, on examination, to be placed with its face downward; and where bitumen has been used, the bricks of each course were covered with a layer of bitumen, spread over with reeds, or laid in regular matting; and on this preparation the faces of the succeeding courses were imbedded. This agrees with the account of Herodotus, who states that the bricks for the walls were made of the clay dug from the moat that surrounded them; that in order to join them together, warm bitumen was used, and that between every course of thirty bricks, beds of reeds were laid, interwoven together. The piles of the walls, still standing, are from sixteen to eighteen feet above the general line of their broken summit, and their thickness is from eight to nine feet. Their materials are so strongly cemented together, that though the bricks form the hardest part of the wall, yet they cannot be detached from the mortar. All the portions of brick remaining in this vast ruin, present traces of long pas sages of square chambers. The arch never appears, which is an evidence of the antiquity of the masses. From this indeed, both Rich and Ker Porter conclude, that the Kasr is part of the ruins of the terraced palace of Nebuchadnezzar; and as this is stated by Herodotus to be about seven and a half miles in circumference, the latter thinks that the large rampart described was the outer wall, and that the space included within the rampart answers to that recorded by the historian. One circumstance, which appears confirmatory of this opinion, is, that on the northern side of the Kasr, among the mouldering fragments, stands the solitary tree before described, called Athele by the Arabs. This would appear to be a solitary survivor, or rather a descendant, of those that adorned the re renowned hanging gardens of Nebuchadnezzar.

About a mile to the north, and 950 yards east of the river, is the famous mound called the Mujelibe. On the west, there are no ruins at all correspondent to those on the eastern sid of the river. There are a few small mounds enclosed by mud walls, and surrounded by cultivation, but there is no ap pearance of ruins. But though no ruins exist in the imme diate vicinity of the western bank, yet the most stupendous of all the remains of Babylon exist in the desert about six miles south-west of Hillah, and nine miles south-east of the Muje libe. These are the ruins of the Birs Nemroud, before des cribed.

To the north-west of the village of Anana, there is a mound 300 yards long, by fourteen feet high; and two miles farther