The ancient bed of the river is clearly marked just in the vicinity where a long depression between the mounds of ruins extends to the village of Kweiresh. In the south-west, close to the bridge head, one of these mounds of ruins rises to a considerable height. Its western side is worn away by the modern Euphrates into a vertical steep declivity, and the mud walls of the houses that stand out between the usual rubbish in the mound are here laid bare and clearly visible. They extend down below the usual level of the water. Among the Babylonian texts that refer to the bridge, it is described by Nebuchadnezzar as the work of Nabopolassar in the E-ulla cylinder (M’Gee, B. ii. col. 1, 8): “The embankment wall of Arachtu ... from the Ishtar Gate to the Urash Gate, my father, my begetter, had built with asphalt and brick, had erected piers of burnt brick for the crossing over of the Euphrates” (see _K.B._ iii. 2, p. 21, l. 7, and p. 41, l. 38). The meaning of the words _ma-ka-at a-bar-ti Purâti_ as “bridge over the Euphrates” was kindly given me as early as the year 1904 by Lehmann-Haupt. XXXII THE BRIDGE GATEWAY Between the land pier of the bridge, and the first river pier, a gateway was inserted that lay in the line of a long fortification wall that stretches to the north with stamped bricks in it of Nabonidus. As usual with city gateways, it had an inner court and two massive fronting towers. The bricks, so far as we can see, have Nebuchadnezzar’s stamp, and, like the wall itself, are laid in asphalt. In the entrance lies a brick pavement of many courses, and also the great southern door socket of the west door. In the middle of the east doorway there is a brick set upright, which projects slightly above the pavement and served as a stop for the leaves of the door. The pavement is 3.10 metres above zero, rather higher than that of the Procession Street, and above it 12 metres of the rubbish of the Amran hill is still piled. The gateway was inserted partly in the land and partly in the river pier, and both are cut away to some extent to accommodate the later building. As we have followed the Arachtu wall from the Southern Citadel up to the peribolos, and as this is the first great gateway in this vicinity after the Ishtar Gate, this building must, I think, according to the inscription just referred to, be the Urash Gate. It is, therefore, a matter of indifference whether our building is the same that existed in Nebuchadnezzar’s time, or whether it is later and dates from Nabonidus, for in the latter case a gateway that bore the name of the Urash Gate existed previously and in much the same place if not on exactly the same spot. It is possible that the massive brickwork that lies immediately to the west of the land pier belonged to this earlier gateway. This consists of two projections, between which there is a stepped wall. The excavations here are still incomplete.