KASR, OR PALACE. 
363 
fortified palace on its banks, where finding the brazen gates , not 
as they were wont to be, carefully closed at night, but incau¬ 
tiously left open by the royal guards then engaged in festival, 
he entered with all his train : — “ the Lord of Hosts was his 
leader,” and Babylon, as an empire, was no more. 
For the palace itself, it was splendidly decorated with statues 
of men and animals ; with vessels of gold and silver, and indeed 
luxuries from every quarter of the world, brought thither from 
the conquests of Egypt, Palestine, and Tyre ; but its greatest 
boast were the magnificent hanging gardens, which acquired 
even from Grecian writers the appellation of one of the wonders 
of the world. They are attributed to the gallantry of Nebu¬ 
chadnezzar, in compliance with a wish of his queen Amytis, to 
possess elevated groves in the manner she had enjoyed them 
on the hills around her native Ecbatana. Babylon was all a flat; 
and to accomplish so extravagant a desire, an artificial mountain 
must be constructed: accordingly, we find the plan of this most 
extraordinary exertion of human labour. The foundation of the 
mount presented a square of four plethra (400 feet) on each 
side, while the terraces, one above the other, rose to a height 
that over-topped the walls of the city; consequently must have 
stood more than 300 feet high, the altitude of the walls before 
Darius Hystaspes lowered them. The ascent from terrace to 
terrace was made by answering flights of steps; while the ter¬ 
races themselves, it appears, were reared to their various stages, 
not by solid masses, but on ranges of regular piers ; I cannot 
call them arches, that form never having been found in any 
Babylonian structure. These piers, forming a kind of vaulting, 
rose in succession one over the other, to the required height 
of each terrace ; the whole being bound together by a wall of 
3a 2 
