The Chaldean Account of Genesis: Chapter X. Fragments of Miscellaneous Texts

have been devoted to the planet Saturn. The second stage was a square of 230 feet, 26 feet high, faced with orange-coloured bricks; supposed to be devoted to Jupiter. The third stage, 188 feet square, and 26 feet high, faced with red bricks, was probably dedicated to Mars. The fourth stage, 146 feet square, and 15 feet high, was probably devoted to the Sun, and is supposed by Sir H. Rawlinson to have been originally plated with gold. The fifth stage is supposed to have been 104, the sixth 62, and the seventh 20 feet square, but the top was too ruinous to decide these measurements. These stages were probably devoted to Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. Each stage of the building was not set in the centre of the stage on which it rested, but was placed 30 feet from the front, and 12 feet from the back. The ruin at present rises 154 feet above the level of the plain, and is the most imposing pile in the whole country. The only other ruin which has any claim to represent the tower is the Babil mound within the enclosure of Babylon, which is the site of the Temple of Bel. I have given views of both ruins as the possible alternative sites.

In the Babylonian and Assyrian sculptures there are occasionally representations of towers similar in style to the supposed Tower of Babel; one of these is given on the stone of Merodach Baladan I., opposite p. 236 of "Assyrian Discoveries;" another occurs on the sculptures at Nineveh, representing the city of Babylon; this tower is probably the Borsippa pile,

which is supposed to represent the Tower of Babel. Birs Nimrud now consists of seven stages, but the top stages were only built by Nebuchadnezzar; before his time it probably presented the appearance shown in the Assyrian sculpture, and in the similar Babylonian representation figured opposite page 236 of "Assyrian Discoveries."