In
Assyria there are many great cities, but the most famous
and strongest, and the one where the royal palace was established
after the destruction of Nineveh, was Babylon. This is the
kind of city it is. It lies in a great plain, and, each
side being one hundred and twentystades,
it is a square. So the circumference of the city of Babylon
is some four hundred and eighty stades. Such is its bigness,
and it is planned as no other city of which we know. First
a ditch, broad and deep, full of water, runs around it and,
after that, a wall that is in thickness fifty royal cubits
and in height two hundred. The royal
cubit is greater by three fingers' breadth than the
ordinary cubit.
I must explain also where the earth was used that was taken
from the trench and how the wall was built. As they dug
the trench, they made bricks of the mud that was carried
out of the trench; and when they had made enough of the
bricks, they baked them in ovens. Then, using hot asphalt
for cement and stuffing in mats of reeds at every thirty
courses of bricks, they built first the banks of the trench
and then the wall itself in the same manner. On top of the
wall, along the edges, they built houses of a single room
facing one another. A space was left between these houses
big enough for a four-horse chariot to drive through. There
were a hundred gates set in the circuit of the wall, all
of bronze, and of bronze likewise the posts and the lintels.
. . .
Such, then, was the building of the walls of Babylon. There
are two divisions of the city, for the river called Euphrates
divides it in the middle. It flows from Armenia -- a great,
deep, and swift stream and it issues into the
Red Sea. Each wall of the city has its ends brought
right down to the river, and from there they turn and, in
the form of a dry wall of baked bricks, stretch along the
banks of the river. The city itself is full of three- and
four-storied houses, and the roads that cut through it are
straight, including those that run crosswise to the river.
As each road ends at the wall beside the river, small gates
are set in it, one gate for each alleyway. These gates are
also of bronze and also open on the river.
