For the following particulars we are, principally, indebted to Mr. Rich, several years British minister at Bagdad. "The town of Hillah, enclosed within a brick wall, and known to have been built in the twelfth century, stands upon the western banks of the Euphrates (latitude thirty-two degrees, twenty-eight minutes). It is forty-eight miles south of Bagdad. The country, for miles around, is a flat, uncultivated waste; but it is traversed, in different directions, by what appear to be the remains of canals, and by mounds of great magnitude; most of which, upon being excavated, are found to contain bricks, some of which were evidently dried in the sun, others baked by a furnace, and stamped with inscriptions in a character now unknown." "The soil of the plains of ancient Assyria and Babylonia," says Major Keppell, "consists of a fine clay, mixed with sand, with which, as the waters retire, the shores are covered. This compost, when dried with the heat of the sun, becomes a hard and solid mass, and forms the finest materials for the beautiful bricks for which Babylon was celebrated." Hillah is built of such bricks; but there are others of more ancient appearance, which, no doubt, belonged to ancient Babylon; since they are stamped with characters, which have been ascribed to the Chaldeans. Hillah, then, stands upon the site of ancient Babylon: that is, a portion of it. Though this is certainly the case, there are no ruins at Hillah; the nearest being at a distance of two miles to the north, and upon the eastern side of the river. The first of these remains consists of a vast mound of earth, three thousand three hundred feet long, by two thousand four hundred feet broad, at its base, curved, at the south side, into the form of a quadrant. Its height is sixty feet at the highest part: and the whole appears to have been formed by the decomposition of sun-dried bricks, channelled and furrowed by the weather; and having the surface strewed with pieces of pottery, bricks, and bitumen. This mound is called Amran. On the north of this mound is another square, of two thousand one hundred feet, having one of its angles,--to the south-west,--connected with the other by a ridge, three hundred feet broad, and of considerable height. The building, of which this is a ruin, seems to have been finished in a very particular manner, for the bricks are of the finest description. "This is the place," says Mr. Rich, "where Beauchamp made his observations, and it is certainly the most interesting part of the ruins of Babylon. Every vestige discoverable in it declares it to have been composed of buildings far superior to all the rest, which have left traces in the eastern quarter: the bricks are of the finest description; and notwithstanding this is the grand storehouse of them, and that the greatest supplies have been, and are now, constantly drawn from it, they appear still to be abundant."