Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/71

Towns and their Defences. 53 was only in large towns such as Babylon, that they had three or four stories. 1 We need say no more. We have studied the palace in detail, and the palace was only an enlarged, a more richly illustrated edition of the house. It supplied the same wants, but on a wider scale than was necessary in the dwelling of a private individual. To complete our study of civil architecture it is only necessary to give some idea of the fashion in which palaces and houses were grouped into cities, and of the means chosen for securing those cities against hostile assault. § 4. Towns and their Defences. Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has been the most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world ; her name has stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than any other city of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city par excellence, the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that were admired and feared by the Hellenic population even after their political weakness had been proved more than once. In the centuries that have passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and fame of Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of those Hebrew prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and poetic books of the Old Testament with their hatred of the Mesopotamian city, an ardent hate that has found an echo across the ages in the religion which is the heir of Judaism. There is, then, no city of the ancient world in which both our Christian instincts and our classic education would lead us to take "a deeper interest, or to make more patient endeavours towards the recovery of some knowledge of its passed magni- ficence by the interrogation of its site and ruins, than this town of Babylon. At the same time it happens, by a strange series of chances, that of all the great cities of the past Babylon is the least known and the most closely wrapped in mystery. The descriptive passages of ancient writers are full of gaps and exaggerations, while as for the monuments themselves, although 1 Herodotus, i. 180.