FORTIFIED WALLS. chambers separated from the corridor by walls three feet four inches thick .... they are backed against the hill of Byrsa and their end walls are three feet four inches thick at their thinnest parts. The chambers themselves are fourteen feet deep and twelve feet eight inches wide ; they are separated from one another bv walls three feet eicrht inches thick. These chambers
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form a continuous series and their small size allows the wall to remain practically as strong as if they did not exist." These last words contain a mistake which has already been pointed out. 2 A wall little more than six feet thick would oppose but a slender resistance to a great ram put in motion by thousands of vigorous arms. It is likely that the section of the wall found intact by Beule represents not the first of the two stories of chambers indicated by Appian, 3 but the very foundations, the substructures of the rampart. Sunk into soft rock which supported FIG, 251. Plan of the wall of Byrsa. Carthage. From Beule. them on two faces, they must have escaped the destruction which overtook the rest of the building. The upper part of the wall must have been solid or nearly so for the whole of its thirty feet of thickness if it was to resist the ram. The chambers must have been in the upper part of the structure, and beyond the reach of that murderous engine. At Thapsus Daux found that above the ground the wall had a solid thickness of twenty-one feet four inches ; and Thapsus was only a town of the second class, so that we should find nothing to surprise us in an excess of one-third in all the measurements of the Carthaginian ramparts. Beule" thought the vaulted chambers above mentioned (Fig. 251) 1 BEULE, Fouilles a Carthage, pp. 59, 60. - DAUX, Reclurches sur les origines et I emplacement des emporia pheniciens, pp. 194-196. 3 APPIAN, viii. 98. VOL. I. 3 A
