320 
TOWER OF BABEL 
god being supposed to inhabit it at will; and neither was any 
person ever permitted to pass the night there, excepting some 
one of those beautiful damsels whom Jupiter Belus, at different 
times, selected for that mysterious honour.” Such was the in¬ 
formation, communicated by the priests of this favourite deity of 
the despot and the libertine ; and, surely we cannot read the 
account in the pages of the venerable Greek, without under¬ 
standing the just indignation of that Almighty Being, “ who is 
of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,” hurling his thunders, 
whether by his own arm or human agency, against such blas¬ 
phemous assumptions of his dignity, attended with practices 
which levelled the divine character to that of the grossest and 
vilest of men. 
Strabo is the only writer who speaks decidedly of the altitude 
of the tower, which he calls a pyramid of one stadium in height, 
while he agrees with Herodotus in the extent of its base ; namely, 
that the amount of its four sides would produce 2000 feet. 
On compassing the base, as it at present presents itself, I found 
it to measure 2082 feet in circumference. But this includes 
the projection towards the east, which throws the usually received 
form of an exact square, into an irregularly oblong figure. In 
numbers, therefore, there does not appear much difference 
between the ancient and modern estimation of its basement 
circumference. But the former speak specifically, as if they 
confined their observations to the square base of the tower alone, 
making it 500 feet on each side; while my measurement in¬ 
cludes the eastern projection, which transforms the quadrangular 
shape into an oblong figure, and yet produces only 82 feet more 
by that elongated addition, than is presented by the ancients as 
the result of the simple tower itself. Here, then, is a difficulty 
