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As soon as it is reached no greater depth need be attempted; all attention is then given to driving lateral trenches in every direction. See HERODOTUS, i. 181-184; and DIODORUS, ii. 9. By such means M. OPPERT arrives at a height of 250 Babylonian feet, or about 262 feet English for the monument now represented by the mound in the neighbourhood of Babylon known as Birs-Nimroud.
At Birs-Nimroud the excavations of Sir Henry Rawlinson in 1854 were by no means fruitless but, unhappily, we are without any detailed account of their results.
Profiting by the hint thus given Sir Henry Rawlinson excavated the angles of one of the terraces of the Birs-Nimroud at Babylon, and to the astonishment of his workmen he found the terra-cotta cylinders upon which the reconstruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar is narrated exactly at the point where he told them to dig. These little tubs are called cylinders a not very happy title.
Babil would be the oldest of them all the Bit-Saggatu or "temple of the foundations of the earth" which stood in the very centre of the royal city and was admired and described by Herodotus. The Birs-Nimroud would correspond to the no less celebrated temple of Borsippa, the Bit-Zida, the "temple of the planets and of the seven spheres."
Just then the glow of the disappearing sun touched the upper edge of Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as though the ghost of some Babylonian watchman were waving a lit torch from its summit, but the lurid glare soon faded and a dead gray twilight settled solemnly down over the melancholy landscape.
A low red sun was sinking slowly on the edge of the horizon, when, pausing to look about him, he perceived in the near distance, the dark outline of the great mound known as Birs-Nimroud, and realized with a sort of shock that he was actually surrounded on all sides by the crumbled and almost indistinguishable ruins of the formerly superb all-dominant Assyrian city that had been "as a golden cup in the Lord's hand," and was now no more in very truth than a "broken and an empty vessel."
PLACE, Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol. i. p. 236; LAYARD, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 261. LOFTUS, Warka, its Ruins, &c. p. 10. PLACE, Ninive, vol. i. pp. 29 and 248. BOTTA, Monument de Ninive, vol. v. p. 58. See also TAYLOR on "Mugheir," &c. At Birs-Nimroud these conduits are about nine inches high and between five and six wide.
Why is it that the whole of those monuments, with the single exception of the so-called Observatory of Khorsabad, are now mere heaps of formless dust, fulfilling to the letter the biblical prophecies as to the fate of Nineveh and Babylon? One traveller tells us how when he approached the Birs-Nimroud he saw wolves stretched upon its slopes and basking in the sun.
It is quite otherwise with the two other ruins in the same neighbourhood, called respectively Kasr and Birs-Nimroud. Their bricks are held together by an excellent mortar of lime, and cannot be separated without breaking. Elsewhere, at Mugheir for instance, the mortar is composed of lime and ashes.
It is clearly shown in our figure Sir Henry LAYARD leaves us in no doubt on this score: "The Birs-Nimroud rises to a height of 198 feet, and has on its summit a compact mass of brickwork thirty-seven feet high by twenty-eight broad, the whole being thus 235 feet in perpendicular height," Discoveries, p. 495.
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