Greeks seem to have heard and which
they may have copied. Our knowledge of these cities is, of course,
still very fragmentary, and though it has been much widened by the
latest German excavations, it does not yet carry us to definite
conclusions. The evidence is twofold, in part literary, drawn from
Greek writers and above all Herodotus, and in part archaeological,
yielded by Assyrian and Babylonian ruins.

The description of Babylon given by Herodotus is, of course,
famous.[7] Even in his own day, it was well enough known to be
parodied by contemporary comedians in the Athenian theatre. Probably
it rests in part on first-hand knowledge. Herodotus gives us to
understand that he visited Babylon in the course of his many
wanderings and we have no cause to distrust him; we may even date his
visit to somewhere about 450 B.C. He was not indeed the only Greek of
his day, nor the first, to get so far afield. But his account
nevertheless neither is nor professes to be purely that of an
eyewitness. Like other writers in various ages,[8] he drew no sharp
division between details which he saw and details which he learnt from
others. For the sake (it may be) of vividness, he sets them all on one
plane, and they must be judged, not as first-hand evidence but on
their own merits.

[7] Hdt. i. 178 foil. The accounts of Ctesias and other ancient
writers seem to throw no light on the town-planning and streets
of Babylon, however useful they may otherwise be.

[8] The Elizabethan description of Britain by William Harrison is
an example from a modern time.

Babylon, says Herodotus, was planted in an open plain and formed an
exact square of great size, 120 stades (that is, nearly 14 miles) each
way; the whole circuit was 480 stades, about 55 miles. It was girt
with immense brick walls, 340 ft. high and nearly 90 ft. thick, and a
broad deep moat full of water, and was entered through 100 gates;
presumably we are intended to think of these gates as arranged
symmetrically, 25 in each side. From corner to corner the city was cut
diagonally by the Euphrates, which thus halved it into two roughly
equal triangles, and the river banks were fortified by brick
defences--less formidable than the main outer walls--which ran along
them from end to end of the city. There was, too, an inner wall on the
landward side. The streets were also remarkable:

'The city itself (he says) is full of houses, three or four
storeys high,