Very few words are necessary to explain this account, which agrees with that of the city walls as rebuilt by Nehemiah. Hippicus was the most western of the three “royal towers,” and stood at the north-west angle of the upper city. It defended the narrow neck which separated the broad Tyropœon from the head of the _Gai_, or Hinnom gorge. The Hasmonæan Valley joined the Tyropœon from the north, on the west of the Temple, and the two together descended rapidly to Siloam, separating the upper city from the Ophel. The north face of the old wall ran on a precipitous rock, and the Xystos lay north of the great Tyropœon bridge. The name of the place on the south-west side of the upper city “called Bethso” is generally supposed to mean “House of Dung,” being near the old Dung Gate, which seems here to be called the Gate of the Essenes. The wall ran “above” Siloam; and “Solomon’s Pool” was the Kidron spring--the Gihon where he was anointed. Ophla is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew Ophel, and the course of the wall here coincides with the line of fortification discovered by Sir Charles Warren. As to the second wall, the description is brief because the wall was short in extent. The junction with Antonia must have been at the north-west angle of that fortress, for the great counterscarp of the fosse which defended it on the north is known to continue some way west of the fortress, thus forming the counterscarp of the north wall as well. No bends or angles are noticed, but, on the contrary, it is said to “encircle” the north ridge. The name of the Gate Gennath is usually thought to mean “the Garden Gate,” but not impossibly it may stand for the “Gehenna Gate,” and it answers to the old “Valley Gate.” The second wall--as already urged--must have crossed the saddle near Hippicus, but the junction was not exactly at that tower, where was a smaller postern.[239] As the Gennath Gate was in the first wall, there was evidently a re-entering angle, and in later times the third wall started from Hippicus, but was “not joined on” to the second wall.