The meanwhile Rassam, had used to the utmost the facilities granted to him under the generous terms of the 1878 firmân, and had covered as much ground and visited as many sites as possible, though whether science would have gained more by the systematic exploration of a few mounds than by the ransacking of many is a question which would probably have to be answered in the affirmative. In 1879, he commenced operations in Babylonia, the ruined mounds of Babylon and Borsippa being the first to receive his attention. On his arrival he found a number of Arabs busily engaged in extracting building material from the Babil mound, and in the course of their digging they came upon four wells, some 140 feet deep, and made of blocks of red granite, each block being about 3 feet high, and fitted to the adjoining block with an extraordinary degree of precision. From the general appearance of the mound as well as from the magnitude of the ruined walls which it covered, Rassam came to the conclusion arrived at by Rich nearly a century before, and accepted by Hilprecht some years later, that to Babil we must look for the world-renowned hanging gardens of Diodorus and Pliny. Rassam’s trenches on the Ḳasr mound were attended with no important results, but his work at the Jumjuma mound in the South,—so called from the name of the modern village now situated there,—yielded a rich harvest of tablets, mostly of a commercial character. Borsippa in like manner responded to the appeal made to it by the spade of Rassam, many tablets being recovered, while a large part of the renowned temple of E-zida, dedicated to the god Nebo, once again saw the light of day: among the smaller relics, the recovery of a bronze step of the famous Nebuchadnezzar is deserving of special mention, and also a baked clay cylinder of the time of Antiochus Soter 270 B.C., the latter being, according to Hilprecht, “the last royal document composed in the Old Babylonian writing and language.” But perhaps Rassam’s most valuable contribution to Assyriology was the identification of the site of ancient Sippar. Many unsuccessful attempts had previously been made to locate this city, so frequently mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions, and already George Smith had tentatively suggested the mound of Abû Habba, located about thirty miles north of the City of Babylon, as its possible site, but to Rassam we owe the actual identification of the site of this old centre of the worship of Shamash the Sun-god in the Babylonian plain. The ruins of Abû Habba are low but extensive, the longest of the ancient city-walls measuring some 1400 yards, while on the western side the remains of an old ziggurat, or temple-tower are still to be seen. Rassam’s excavations on this site were abundantly successful, the most important of his discoveries in the ancient building with which he was principally concerned, being the famous stone tablet of Nabû-aplu-iddina, king of Babylonia, about 870 B.C. The