King Kurigalzu (II.), about 1300 B.C., had, in his reign, searched for this foundation, but had failed to find it, and he had left this record: “The foundation of Eulmash I sought, but did not find it.” Later on, Esarhaddon, king of Assyria and Babylonia (681–669 B.C.), searched for it, but without success. Again, Nebuchadrezzar (605–561 B.C.) mobilized his large armies, and ordered them to search for the foundation stone, or threshold, but all his efforts were in vain. Finally Nabunaʾid, the last king of Babylon before its fall under Cyrus, gathered his many soldiers, and ordered them to search for the foundation stone. For “three years in the tracks of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon,” says Nabunaʾid, “I sought right and left, before and behind, but did not find it.” Encouraged by a prompting from the moon-god Sin, Nabunaʾid tried at another time and in another place, and this time with success. He found the inscription of King Shagarakti-Buriash (1350 B.C.), which tells that he had laid a new foundation exactly upon the old one of King Zabû (about 2300 B.C.). Then Nabunaʾid made sure to preserve the exact outline of the old shrine. He laid the foundation, and restored the ancient temple, so that “it did not deviate an inch to the outside or the inside.”[441] There are indications of the same high value set upon the primal foundation of a temple in the records of ancient Egypt. A temple at its highest grandeur is in the location of a prehistoric sanctuary. “The site on which it is built is generally _holy ground_,[442] that is, a spot on which since the memory of man an older sanctuary of the god had stood. Even those Egyptian temples which seem most modern have usually a long history,–the edifice may have seemed very insignificant, but as the prestige of the god increased larger buildings were erected, which again, in the course of centuries, were enlarged and rebuilt in such a way that the original plan could no longer be traced. This is the history of nearly all Egyptian temples, and explains the fact that we know so little of the temples of the Old and of the Middle Empire; they have all been metamorphosed into the vast buildings of the New Empire.”[443] While early Vedic and Brahmanic religion makes no mention of temples as such, fire from an ancestral altar was borne to a newly erected altar, in order to secure a continuance of the sacred influences issuing from that original family threshold.[444] And Vishnooism takes old temples from Booddhism for its centers of worship, prizing the old sacred foundation.