FIG. 35.—Canal to the south of the Kasr. ] The eastern canal, Libil-ḫigalla, was restored by Nebuchadnezzar, according to _K.B._ iii. 2, p. 61: “Libil-ḫigalla, the eastern canal of Babylon, which a long time previously had been choked (?) with downfallen earth (?), and filled with rubbish, I sought out its place, and I laid its bed with baked bricks and bitumen from the banks of the Euphrates up to Ai-ibur-šabû. At Ai-ibur-šabû, the street of Babylon, I added a canal bridge and made the way broad for the procession of the great lord Marduk” (trans. by Winckler and Delitzsch). Neriglissar also says of himself (_K.B._ i. 1, p. 75): “The eastern arm, which an earlier king (indeed) dug, but had not constructed its bed, (this) arm I dug (again) and constructed its bed with bricks and kiln bricks; beneficent, inexhaustible water I led to the land” (trans. by Winckler). To the north of the Citadel there is a similar canal constructed after the same fashion, of which the vaulting still exists. My opinion is that this canal conveyed to the east the water of the Euphrates, which was probably still called “Arachtu” there, and that possibly it flowed round the Kasr in somewhat irregular fashion, even in the Neo-Babylonian period. This easterly body of water would then return to the Euphrates by means of the canal just described. At the south-west corner of the Kasr buildings, where they joined the wall of Nabonidus, the openings through which the water escaped are still preserved in this wall. To the south of our water-channel the street appears once more, but at a much lower level. It is paved with brick, plastered with asphalt, and is of the same breadth as the southern Kasr Street. It passes between the houses of Merkes and the sacred peribolos of Etemenanki, keeping close to the latter, but at a sufficient distance from the secular dwellings of the Babylonians. The first part of the street, as far as the great gate of Etemenanki, had a flooring of kiln bricks overlaid with paving-stones of turminabanda, which still lie undisturbed on the branch leading to the gate (Fig. 36). They bear the same dedicatory inscription as that on the Kasr: some of them, however, have in addition on the underside the name of Sennacherib, the bloodthirsty Assyrian who while still well disposed to the city often beautified it, only at last to destroy it utterly, as he emphatically states in his Bavian inscription.