which surrounded the buildings was twenty stades in circuit, but in height and thickness it surpassed the middle wall. On this and the towers belonging to it animals of all kinds were depicted with considerable skill in form and colour. The whole exhibited a chase, full of many different animals, which were of more than four cubits in size. Among these was a queen on horseback, who threw her dart at a panther; and at hand was the king, who thrust at a lion with his lance. This palace surpassed both in size and beauty the palace on the other side of the Euphrates. Here the exterior wall of burnt tiles was only thirty stades in circumference, and instead of the numerous animals were bronze statues of a king and a queen and of governors, and also a bronze statue of Zeus, whom the Babylonians call Belus. But in the interior were military evolutions and hunting scenes of every kind, which gave varied amusement to the spectator.[416] Ctesias, whom Diodorus followed in his description of the palace on the west bank, as in his account of the treasures in the Tower of Belus (p. 293), has also borrowed, in his description of this castle, the erection of which he ascribes to Ninus, from the Medo-Persian Epos, and this, as I shall show below, endeavoured to place the glory of Ninus and Semiramis in the most brilliant light. Hence, though here, as in the account of the treasures, considerable deductions are to be made, we can nevertheless recognise the fact that the castle of the ancient kings of Babylon on the western bank of the Euphrates was of considerable size, magnificent, and well fortified, although the remains now in existence are fewer and far smaller than those of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, where the painted and glazed tiles also confirm what Diodorus says of the battle and hunting scenes of this palace. If the ancient royal castle lay on the western bank, the Tower of Belus rose opposite it on the eastern bank. This is proved by an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, in which we are told:--"In order to protect Beth-Saggatu more strongly, and secure it from the attack of the enemy, I have erected a second wall, the wall of the rising sun, which no king had built before me."[417] Hence we may with certainty affirm that the most northern of the heaps on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, the heap of Babil, the summit of which still rises 140 feet above the river, is the remains of the great tower of Bel Merodach. The ancient kings of Babylon, Hammurabi and his successors, not only built temples and palaces, but also fortresses. Hammurabi has himself already told us, that he built the fortress of Ummubanit, "the towers of which were as high as mountains." Kurigalzu built the fortress of this name (Akerkuf, p. 262). Of the extensive walls of Ur and Erech we have already spoken, and Sennacherib could boast of having taken eighty-nine fortresses in Babylonia (p. 258).