ARCHAEOLOGY. 



canals and the highways were raised by duties 

 on the land, the date and corn crops, and on 

 cattle. There were large quantities of temple 

 lands held in mortmain, like the mosque prop- 

 erty in the Turkish Empire. From the pal- 

 aces of Babylon Rassam has recovered records 

 which cover the period from the reign of Na- 

 bonidus to the capture of the city by Cyrus. 



Babylon was built almost entirely of brick. 

 Chambers and corridors of the Palace of the 

 Kings, with decorations of plaster and painted 

 bricks, were found. Extensive hydraulic works, 

 consisting of wells and conduits connected 

 with the river, seem to indicate the locality of 

 the hanging gardens. One of tho kings, ac- 

 cording to a discovered document, had sixty 

 gardens or paradises made for him near the 

 city. The ruins of the traditional site of the 

 Tosver of Babel are probably the seven-story 

 tower of the Temple of Nebo. 



Rassam has identified and explored the sites 

 of two cities of higher antiquity than Babylon. 

 These are Sippara, the city of the Sun-god, 

 which was, according to Berosus, more ancient 

 than Ur, having been founded before the flood, 

 and Cutha, one of the great temple-cities of 

 Babylonia. The modern name of the site of 

 Sippara is Abbu Hubba. The mounds cover 

 an area of over two miles in circumference. 

 The buildings were placed with their angles to 

 the cardinal points of the compass. The south- 

 west wall of an immense building was first 

 uncovered. It was fifteen hundred feet long, 

 and broken at regular intervals by projecting 

 buttresses, which were ornamented by grooved 

 panels. The edifice consisted of many long, 

 narrow rooms, with exceedingly thick walls,' 

 arranged around a central court. This build- 

 ing was the Temple of the Sun-god. In a 

 large gallery were the remains of the sacrificial 

 altar, nearly thirty feet square ; and in a con- 

 necting chamber were the records of the tem- 

 ple. One of the records is a votive tablet 

 commemorating the victory of the Babylonian 

 king Nabupallidina over the Sutu tribe of 

 Elamites, and dating from about the year 852 

 B. o. It contains a figure in relief of the god 

 and of the king and priests performing wor- 

 ship. It was the cult of the solar disk and 

 rays, a form of which was introduced into 

 Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty. A list of the 

 six solar festivals is inscribed, two of them cor- 

 responding to the spring and autumn equinoxes. 

 Sheep, oxen, rams, and fruits of the earth are 

 mentioned as the sacrificial offerings, as in the 

 Bible. This most ancient of the cities of Mes- 

 opotamia, and a neighboring place, whose ruins 

 yielded records of minor importance, are in all 

 probability identical with the cities of Sephar- 

 vaim mentioned in 2 Kings, xvii, 24-31, in 

 connection with Outha, whose site was also 

 identified and partially explored by Rassam. 

 The British Museum, which receives the ob- 

 jects recovered by Rassatn, already contains 

 over three thousand of these tablets of the 

 earlier period, including the large collection 



secured from the Arabs by the late George 

 Smith. 



The excavations at Olympia, which have been 

 prosecuted since 1875 with means furnished 

 by the German Government, have revealed the 

 whole plan of this most interesting city, which 

 remained for many centuries the center of 

 Hellenic civilization and the scene of the na- 

 tional festivals. The walled inclosure called 

 the Sacred Grove, in which were the Temple 

 of Zeus and the other shrines and sanctuaries 

 and the official buildings connected with the 

 Olympic games, was about four thousand feet 

 long, and extended back from the river to the 

 foot of the mountain about two thousand feet. 

 The Temple of Zeus was a simpler, more massive 

 and more imposing edifice than the Parthenon, 

 built in a purer Doric style. The group of 

 twenty-one colossal figures by Paionios, rep- 

 resenting the battle between Oinomaos and 

 Pelops, with Zeus as arbiter in the middle, 

 which adorned the eastern pediment, have all 

 been recovered in various states of preservation. 

 Statues of the river-gods Alpheios and Kladeos 

 flanked the pediment. The western pediment 

 contained a group by Alkmenes representing a 

 contest at the wedding of Peirithoos arrested 

 by the intervention of the young Apollo, 

 showing drunken Centaurs carrying off the 

 women and Hellenes coming to the rescue, 

 with weeping female slaves on the ground. 

 This composition consists likewise of twenty- 

 one figures, of thirteen of which the heads re- 

 main. At both ends of the temple are sculpt- 

 ures in high relief representing the labors of 

 Herakles. They are pronounced by Curtius 

 to belong to the same school of sculpture as 

 the pediments. The pediments can be intel- 

 ligibly reconstructed, and surpass any pedi- 

 ments before known. Curtius assigns the 

 sculptures of the temple to the school of 

 Kalamis, which immediately preceded the 

 highest development of Attic art in the age of 

 Phidias. In the representation of Apollo the 

 conventional traditions were adhered to, while 

 in the forms of the men and Centaurs com- 

 plete freedom was exercised. The Heraion, 

 which comes next in size to the Temple of 

 Zeus, dates from an earlier period. It illus- 

 trates the growth of a Greek temple, which 

 was originally a temporary wooden structure 

 for the reception of votive offerings, but was 

 gradually built up by the replacement of one 

 group after another of the wooden pillars by 

 stone columns. The ground-plan of another 

 temple surrounded by pillars has also been 

 discovered. It is the Metroon, or sanctuary 

 of the mother of the gods. The treasuries have 

 been exposed to view in the northern part of 

 the Altis, or sacred inclosnre. They resemble 

 temples, and stand in a row. The two larg- 

 est, the thesauri of the Syracusans and of the 

 Megareans, have been identified. The latter 

 contains sculptures representing the war of 

 the giants, of an age preceding the ^Eginitce. 

 One of the most interesting monuments of the 



