In his description of Babylon, as Nebuchadnezzar and the kings of his dynasty made it, Herodotus expresses himself as follows: “This city, situated in a vast plain, forms a perfect square of which each side is 120 stadia long, so that the circumference is 480 stadia.” Pausanias says that Babylon was the greatest city that the sun had ever seen in his course; Aristotle seems to compare it to the Peloponnese in size.[33] Classical authors also assign to the walls of the Chaldæan capital a height of 200 royal cubits (342 ft.) and a thickness of 85 ft. They are said to be pierced by a hundred gates, flanked by two hundred and fifty towers and protected by a large moat, into which the waters of the Euphrates were turned. The exactness of these descriptions, which at first might seem hyperbolical, has been confirmed, as far as the thickness of the walls is concerned, by the excavations at Khorsabad, the ramparts of which are 78 ft. and even 90 ft. thick where they are furnished with bastions. The extent of the city itself was verified on the spot between 1852 and 1854 by the French expedition to Mesopotamia. The great enclosure of Babylon, that is to say, the enlarged Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, according to M. Oppert, is 199 square miles in area--that is to say, seven times the extent of the fortified enclosure of [Illustration: Fig. 55.--Walls of Babylon (British Museum).] Paris. A raised road, 196 ft. broad, ran along the interior of this rampart, and separated it from the interior wall, itself four times as long as the circumference of Paris; the two concentric walls bear in the cuneiform texts the names of Imgur Bel and Nimitti Bel. A view of the walls of Babylon seems to be given in one of the bas-reliefs from Kouyunjik, which represent the campaign of Assurbanipal against his brother Samas-sum-ukin, king of Babylon (B.C. 651-648). Nebuchadnezzar says that his own father Nabopolassar began to build the walls, and that he himself finished them; but this does not mean that the earlier city, called by Herodotus the Royal City, was not surrounded, as in the bas-relief, by a double wall like the later. Diodorus says that Semiramis surrounded the western part of the city with three walls, and two of these are identified by M. Oppert.[34] Fifty principal streets, twenty-five of which were parallel to the Euphrates, and twenty-five at right angles to it, leading to the hundred gates, divided the city into regular squares; a single bridge, formed of wooden planks resting on stone piles, was thrown across the Euphrates, which cut the city in two diagonally. The limits of the wall of Nineveh are not yet exactly known; but the testimony of the Bible gives us reason to believe that this city scarcely yielded in point of size to Babylon. The best mode of reconciling the statements of modern explorers with those of the Book of Jonah and the historian Ctesias, is, perhaps, to adopt the suggestion of