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

28 EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS
canals and outlying mounds, and " the prodigious extent " of
the centre of all his attention,— the ruins of Babylon itself.
And to all this he adds his personal observations on the
modern fashion of building houses, and the present occupations
and customs of the inhabitants of 'Iraq, interwoven
with frequent references to the legends of the Arabs and the
methods of their administration under Turkish rule, correctly
assuming that " the peculiar climate of this district
must have caused a similarity of habits and accommodations
in all ages." But valuable as all these details are, they
form, so to speak, only the framework for his faithful and
minute picture of the" ruins of Babylon, 1 which we now
reproduce, as far as possible with his own words :
—
" The whole of the area enclosed by the boundary on
the east and south, and the river on the west, is two miles
and six hundred yards in breadth from E. to W., and as
much from Pietro della Valle's ruin [/. e., Babil in the north],
to the northern part " of the southern city wall, " or two miles
and one thousand yards to the most southerly mound of all.
This space is again longitudinally subdivided into nearly
half,
by a straight line of the same kind with the boundary,
but much its inferior in point of size. . . . These ruins
consist of mounds of earth, formed by the decomposition of
buildings,
channelled and furrowed by the weather, and the
surface of them strewed with
pieces of brick, bitumen, and
pottery."
The most northern mound is Babil, called by the natives
Mujeliba? "Full five miles distant from Hilla, and nine
hundred and fifty yards from the river bank, it is of an
oblong shape, irregular in its height and the measurement
of its sides, which point to the cardinal points. The elevation
of the southeast or highest angle, is one hundred and
1
Comp. Map, No. 2 (Plan of Babylon).
2
Like Beauchamp, Rich states correctly that this term is sometimes also
applied to the second mound, El-Qasr.