Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

18 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
able spot about 1700.
In sharp contrast to the earlier travellers,
who with but few exceptions were always ready to
chronicle as facts
the fanciful stories related to them by Oriental
companions and interpreters in obliging response to
their numerous questions, we here find a sober and distrustful
inquirer carefully discriminating between " the foolish
stories " current among the inhabitants of the country and
his own personal observations and inferences.
Near Hilla,
on the two opposite banks of the river and at a considerable
distance from each other, he noticed two artificial elevations,
the one " situated in
Mesopotamia," containing the ruins of
a large building, " the other in Arabia about an hour's distance
from the Euphrates," characterized by two masses of
cemented brick (the one standing, the other lying overturned
beside it), which " seemed as if they had been vitrified."
" People think that this latter hill is the remains of the real
Babylon, but I do not know what they will make of the
other, which is opposite and exactly like this one." Convinced,
however, that the ruins must be ancient, and much
impressed by the curious "writing in unknown characters "
which he found on the large square bricks, Father Emmanuel
selected a few of the latter from both hills and carried
them away with him.
Travellers, whose education was limited, and missionaries,
who viewed those ruins chiefly from a religious standpoint,
have had their say. Let us now brieflv discuss the views
of such visitors who took a strictly scientific
interest in the
ruins of Babylon. In connection with his epoch-making
journey to Arabia and Persia, Carsten Niebuhr examined the
mounds around Hilla in 1765. Though furnishing little
new information as to their real size and condition, in this
respect not unlike the French geographer and historian Jean
Otter, who had been at the same mounds in 1743, Niebuhr
presented certain reasons for his own positive conviction that
the ruins of Babylon must be located in the neighborhood