The Rev. Edwaed Hincks on a Tablet hi the British Museum. 39 



conjecture were this. The colophon to Bellino's inscription proves that the 

 monogram ^y denoted a suss, or sixty. As a measure of length it should 

 accordingly be sixty cubits, the cubit being notoriously the principal measure 

 of length. Now the palace mentioned on Michaux'b stone is said to have been 

 " three suss" long, and " one suss, fifty gars" broad. I conjectured that this 

 palace was twice as long as it was broad ; which gave fifty gars, equal to thirty 

 cubits ; or the gar equal to three-fifths of a cubit. A discovery which 

 Dr. Oppert made at Babylon verified this conjecture of mine, and, at the same 

 time, led me to see the origin of the name gar; verifying in fact the reading of 

 the name of this measure, as well as its value. Dr. Opfert's discovery was 

 that the length of the side of the Babylonian brick was always three-fifths of a 

 cubit. Now I had previously discovered that the word gar signifies, in the 

 Assyrio-Babylonian language, " the side of a square." lu the passages above 

 quoted from the great inscription mention is made of two squares, which were 

 respectively 4000 and 490 ammat garri " cubits to the side," as I rendered it. 

 Dr. Oppeet read the last word gagari. It is written i^'^ iz^ t""!!-*.!' ^^^^ 

 first and second characters in the word being alike ; but the character admits 

 the two values ga and ar, as appears from the word jyalar ; which terminates 

 with it in viii. 39, R. 1, 12, and 2, 9, but with <y^^|y^|, the ordinary charac- 

 ter for ar, in Gr. 2, 6 ; while in vi. 28 we have palri in the genitive. The 

 word gagari would be of a very strange form ; whereas garri is the regular 

 genitive oi gar. Dr. Oppeet imagined that he had here the linear dimensions 

 of the wall of Babylon ; and by comparing them with what had been stated 

 by Herodotus (and reading 480 for 490) he inferred that the " ammat-gagar" 

 was 360 cubits, and that this was the length of a stadium. 



I believe that no such measure as an " avimat-gagar" existed, and that 

 Nebuchadnezzar does not give the dimensions of Babylon at all. What Dr. 

 Oppeet has really discovered, in relation to measures, is that the gar was three- 

 fifths of the cubit, and that the lengths of these two measures were 525 and 

 315 millimetres, or about 20,675 and 12,405 inches. The reading of the name 

 gar, and its signification as " a side," viz., of a square brick, are now made 

 known for the first time. 



Two other words denoting small measures of length are used in the 

 Khorsabad inscriptions. It is stated (Botta, 151, 19, and 111,2) that Merodach 



