The old sanctuaries of primitive Chaldæa, E-saggil, E-zida, the Temple of the Great Light, E-parra, E-anna, E-ulbar, and others consecrated to Sin, to Samas, to Nana, to Bel Marduk, to Nebo, are restored at great expense by Nabonidus, the last King of Babylon, who sets himself the task of recalling in his inscriptions the material difficulties of this work worthy of a pious antiquarian. Let no one be surprised after this at the striking contrast between the ruins of Mesopotamia, and those of Egypt as we now see them. In the valley of the Nile building-stone abounds, and the architect has only to make his choice among the various qualities of material. Accordingly he hews out gigantic monoliths, erects imposingly majestic pylons, rears to an aerial height forests of pillars which seem to uphold the sky, plants in the middle of the desert those massive Pyramids which will defy to the end of time even the most determined of Vandals. On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, on the contrary, there is now nothing but the uniform plain of the desert, broken here and there by mounds of _débris_ covered with sand; here it may be said with truth that the very ruins have perished. Only in thought can the archæologist reconstruct vast buildings in accordance with the vast material buried in disorder in the mud. The use of bricks in building has been, to a greater extent than political events, the auxiliary of Jehovah’s wrath against Nineveh and Babylon. If the nature of the soil forced the Mesopotamian architect to build with bricks, the neighbourhood of rivers and canals for irrigation and the want of outlet for the water obliged him at the same time to have recourse to an expedient peculiar to Chaldæo-Assyrian architecture. He had to raise the actual dwelling on an artificial terrace removed from the level of a soil impregnated with unwholesome damp. This platform or basement of unbaked brick on which the building was placed is met with everywhere, not only at Nineveh and Babylon, but from the beginning in the substructures of Mugheir, Tello, Warka, and Abu Shahrein. In the palace of the _patesi_ Gudea, the mass forms a sort of immense pedestal 39 ft. high, and nearly 655 ft. at the base; at the present day the sides form in relation to the plain a slope of 164 ft. Formerly the platform was mounted by a gentle slope intended for horses and chariots, and by one or more flights of steps which broke the outline of the terrace. The stone staircases by which the terrace of the palaces of Persepolis is ascended, are still in place; in Chaldæa and Assyria, where they were built of brick, they have almost everywhere disappeared. However, Taylor discovered two on the side of the platform of the palace of Abu Shahrein; one has only twelve steps 2 ft. broad; but the other was a monumental staircase of stone, 16 ft. broad, with a slope of more than 65 ft.