ower part of our engraving are imaginary, but they
are by no means improbable. Among them may be distinguished the wide
flights of steps and inclined planes by which the platform on which the
temple stood was reached.[467] At the foot of the temple on the right of
the engraving there is a palace, on the left two obelisk-shaped steles and
a small temple of a type to be presently described. Behind the tower
stretch away the waters of a lake. Nebuchadnezzar, in one of his
inscriptions, speaks of surrounding the temple he had built with a lake.

[Illustration: FIGS. 174-176.--Transverse section, plan, and horizontal
section of a square, single-ramped, Chaldaean Temple.]

[Illustration: FIGS. 177-179.--Transverse section, plan, and horizontal
section of a square, double-ramped Chaldaean Temple.]

In seeking to vary the effect produced by these external ramps, the idea of
a more complicated arrangement than the one last noticed may have occurred
to the Chaldees. This M. Chipiez has embodied in his restoration of a
SQUARE DOUBLE-RAMPED CHALDAEAN TEMPLE (Plate III. and Figs. 177, 178, and
179). As in the last model, there are seven stages, each stage being square
on plan, but the difference consists in the use of two ramps leading from
base to summit. Each of these keeps to its own side of the building, only
approaching the other on the front and back facades at the fourth, fifth,
and sixth stages (see Plate III). In order that the building as a whole
should have a symmetrical and monumental appearance, it was necessary that
all its seven stages--with the exception of the first, to which a rather
different _role_ was assigned--should be of equal height. But their length
and width differed in proportion to their height in the building. The
continual shortening of the distance within which the incline had to be
packed, would, if we suppose each ramp confined to one side of the tower,
have required the slope to become steeper with each story. Such a want of
parallelism would have been very ugly, and there was but one means of
avoiding it, and that was to continue the ramps nearly to the centre of the
front at the fourth and sixth stages, and to the centre of the posterior
facade at the fifth. The advantages of such an arrangement are obvious.
Banished mostly to the flanks the double ramp left four stages clear
both at front and back, providing an ample promenade. On the other three it
showed itself just sufficiently to "furnish" t