arms the creation of Nebuchadnezzar, the restored kingdom of Babylon, was overthrown--Cyrus, the Persian, calls himself on the stamp of a tile at Senkereh, "Kuru, supporter of Beth-Saggatu and Beth-Sida, son of Kambuzija."[413] This series of evidence shows that the lofty temple of Belus, which Herodotus has described for us above, was to the Babylonians "the House of the Height," the temple of Bel Merodach (p. 268), and that it was the first of the three temples in which the kings of Assyria sacrificed when they trod the soil of Babylon at the head of their victorious armies, or as sovereigns; and that of these three rich temples, _i.e._ the temple of Nergal at Kutha, Beth-Sida, the temple of Nebo at Borsippa, and Beth-Saggatu, the temple of Merodach at Babel, the latter was certainly the most wealthy. Moreover, the inscriptions show that the foundation goes back as far as the times of king Hammurabi, whose accession we found it possible--on hypothesis only, it is true--to place in the year 1976 B.C. But even the Hebrew narrative of the building of the Tower of Babel, which must have been written down before 1,000 B.C. (below, chap. vii.) proves, in this respect harmonising with the inscriptions, that long before this time there must have been in Babylon a structure of great height, but unfinished. Herodotus, in his description of Babylon, tells us that the Tower of Belus was on one side of the Euphrates, and the royal castle on the other. On which side each of these lay, he does not state. Xenophon speaks of the palace of Babylon, and beside this of special castles.[414] From the accounts of those who accompanied Alexander, it is clear that there were two royal castles in Babylon, one on the right hand and one on the left of the Euphrates, which certainly were not built under the Achæmenids. Berosus tells us that Nebuchadnezzar built himself a palace beside that of his father Nabopolassar. The inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar speak repeatedly of the continuation of the palace at Babylon which his father had begun.[415] As the two great heaps of ruins on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, El Kasr and Amran ibn Ali, exhibit on the tiles found there the stamp of Nebuchadnezzar, this palace of the ruler of the restored kingdom must have lain on the east bank of the Euphrates. Diodorus describes the two castles of Babylon, of which one was on the east and the other on the west bank of the river; while both were adorned with various ornaments. "That in the part lying towards the west" had a circuit of sixty stades, inclosed by lofty and costly walls. These were followed by a second circular wall, on the rude bricks of which various kinds of animals were stamped, and brought into a resemblance with the reality by the painter's art. The circumference was forty stades in length, and the wall was three hundred bricks in thickness; the height, according to Ctesias, was fifty fathoms, and the tower rose to sixty fathoms. The third interior wall