me detached and leave a gap through which
the water could penetrate to the soft core within, and set up a process of
disintegration which would become more actively mischievous with every year
that passed. The present appearance of these ruins is thus, to a great
extent, to be explained. Travellers in the country agree in describing them
as irregular mounds, deeply seamed by the rains; and the sides against
which the storms and waterspouts that devastate Mesopotamia would chiefly
spend their force are those on which the damage is most conspicuous (see
Fig. 37).

Even in antique times these buildings had suffered greatly. In Egypt, when
the supreme power had passed, after one of those periods of decay that were
by no means infrequent in her long career, into the hands of an energetic
race of princes like those of the eighteenth or twenty-sixth dynasties, all
traces of damage done to the public monuments by neglect or violence were
rapidly effaced. The pyramids could take care of themselves. They had seen
the plains at their feet covered again and again with hordes of barbarians,
and yet had lost not an inch of their height or a stone of their polished
cuirass. Even in the temples the setting up of a few fallen columns, the
reworking of a few bas-reliefs, the restoration of a painting here and
there, was all that was necessary to bring back their former splendour.

[Illustration: FIG. 37.--Babil, at Babylon. From Oppert.]

In Chaldaea the work undertaken by Nabopolassar and his dynasty was far more
arduous. He had to rebuild nearly all the civil and religious buildings
from their foundations, to undertake, as we know from more than one text, a
general reconstruction.[154] A new Babylon was reared from the ground.
Little of her former monuments remained but their foundations and
materials. Temples richer than the first rose upon the lofty mounds, and,
for the sake of speed, were often built of the old bricks, upon which
appeared the names of forgotten kings. Nothing was neglected, no expense
was spared by which the solidity of the new buildings could be increased,
and yet, five or six centuries afterwards, nothing was left but ruins.
Herodotus seems to have seen the great temple of Bel while it was still
practically intact, but Diodorus speaks of it as an edifice "which time had
caused to fall,"[155] and he adds that "writers are not in accord in what
they say about this temple, so that it is impossible for us to make sure