When the house was built, the entire area was first surrounded by a sloping wall without any toothed projections, filled up inside with earth, this forming a substantial terrace on which the actual building stood (Fig. 239). The top of the terrace was 1½ metres higher than the brick pavement of the street on the north. The terrace wall is not so thick as the outer walls of the superstructure, but it projects out on the outer side about as far as the toothed projections above it stand out, and thus forms a kind of plinth. Owing to the constant raising of the street level this is little observable; the plinth disappeared with the subsequent heightening of the street. The outer wall itself had more than 90 of those toothed projections, to which we have frequently referred, and is provided with a system of wooden braces, intended to strengthen the projections. A beam lies on the outside, parallel with each wall face, about the length of one projection, in the next brick course this is gripped at one end by a beam placed more or less at right angles to it. The outside must have appeared very much as it is figured in the reconstruction (Fig. 235). The frontage of another house in Merkes is given in Fig. 240. [Illustration: FIG. 240.—Façade of house with doorway, brick grave in front, Merkes. ] For comparison we also give a ground-plan from Fara of about the fifth millennium (Fig. 241). It will show how few changes the internal arrangements of a Babylonian house underwent during the lapse of thousands of years. Nothing shows more conclusively than these ground-plans the immense age of Babylonian civilisation; for even in this remote period, which is in part prehistoric, they give clear indications of a yet earlier development from a presumably simpler and more primitive building. [Illustration: FIG. 241.—Ground-plan of house in Fara (Shuruppak). E, Entrance. H, Court. R, Principal chamber. V, Vestibule. ] The original Babylonian house, as we may assume it to have been from the present state of our knowledge, was probably a rectangular roofed-in space within a walled court. It is most desirable that we should obtain explicit evidence as to the form of the early Babylonian house in one of the prehistoric sites, but to do this is attended with difficulties. They occur generally in narrow crosscuts, or in deep trenches where the limited space renders the following up of these ancient sites very difficult. It would be necessary to open up a much wider area down to a considerable depth to afford sufficient material for arriving at conclusions, and at Surgul and El-Hibba, as well as at Fara, there was not time to do this. [Illustration: FIG. 242.—Ground-plan from Telloh. ]