The next traveller that visited Babylon appears to have been Della Valle (A.D. 1616). When at Bagdad he was led, by curiosity rather than business, to visit Babylon, which, says he, was well known to the people in that city, as well by its name of Babel, as by the traditions concerning it. "He found," says Rennell, "at no great distance from the eastern bank of the Euphrates, a vast heap of ruins, of so heterogeneous a kind, that, as he expresses it, he could find nothing whereon to fix his judgment as to what it might have been in its original state. He recollected the descriptions of the tower of Belus, in the writings of the ancients, and supposed that this might be the ruins of it." He then proceeds to give measurements; but better accounts have been received since. The remains of Babylon have been visited in our times by several accomplished travellers, amongst whom may be especially noted Mr. Rich and Sir Robert Ker Porter. The former of these travellers has given the most distinct and circumstantial account; but, before we state what he has afforded us, we afford space for that passage of Sir Robert, in which he describes his first entry into the scene. "We now came to the north-east shore of the Euphrates, hitherto totally excluded from our view by the intervening long and varied lines of ruin, which now proclaimed to us, on every side, that we were indeed in the midst of what had been Babylon. From the point, on which we stood, to the base of the Mujelibé, large masses of ancient foundations spread on our right, more resembling natural hills in appearance, than mounds covering the remains of former great and splendid edifices. The whole view was particularly solemn. The majestic stream of the Euphrates wandering in solitude, like a pilgrim monarch through the silent ruins of his devastated kingdom, still appeared a noble river, even under all the disadvantages of its desert-tracked course. Its banks were hoary with reeds, and the grey osier willows were yet there, on which the captives of Israel hung up their harps, and, while '_Jerusalem was not_,' refused to be comforted. But how is the rest of the scene changed since then! At that time, these broken hills were palaces; those long, undulating mounds, streets; this vast solitude, filled with the busy subjects of the proud daughter of the East! now, '_wasted with misery_,' her habitations are not to be found; and, for herself, '_the worm is spread over her_.' The banks of the Euphrates are, nevertheless, still covered with willows, as they were in ancient times[126]."