e in Mesopotamia was that
every structure of a certain importance should be thus borne on an
artificial hill. An examination of the ruins themselves and of the
monuments figured upon the bas-reliefs shows us that these substructures
did not always have the same form. Their faces were sometimes vertical,
sometimes inclined; sometimes again they presented a gentle outward curve
(see Fig. 34); but these purely external differences did not affect the
principle. In all the river basins of Mesopotamia, whether of the
Euphrates, the Tigris, or the smallest affluents of the Persian Gulf,
whenever you see one of these _tells_, or isolated mounds, standing above
the general surface of the plain, you may be sure that if you drive a
trench into it you will come upon those courses of crude brick that
proclaim its artificial origin. Rounded by natural disintegration and
scarred by the rain torrents, such a hillock is apt to deceive the
thoughtless or ignorant traveller, but an instructed explorer knows at a
glance that many centuries ago it bore on its summit a temple, a fortress,
or some royal or lordly habitation (Fig. 35).

The distinguishing feature of the staged towers is their striving after the
greatest possible elevation. It is true that neither from Herodotus nor
Diodorus do we get any definite statements as to the height of the most
famous of these monuments, the temple of Belus at Babylon;[149] Strabo
alone talks of a stade (616 feet), and it may be asked on what authority he
gives that measurement, which has been freely treated as an exaggeration.
In any case we may test it to a certain extent by examining the largest and
best preserved of the artificial hills of which we have spoken,[150] and we
must remember that all the writers of antiquity are unanimous in asserting
its prodigious height.[151] We run small risk of exaggeration, therefore,
in saying that some of these Chaldaean temples were much taller than the
highest of the Gizeh Pyramids. Their general physiognomy was the reverse of
that of the Mesopotamian palaces, but it was no less the result of the
natural configuration of the country. Their architect sought to find his
effect in contrast; he endeavoured to impress the spectator by the strong,
not to say violent, opposition between their soaring lines and the infinite
horizon of the plain. Such towers erected in a hilly country like Greece
would have looked much smaller. There, they would have had for close
neigh