BABYLON, The word is used in the Hebrew Scriptures to express the city known by that name, and also the country of Baby lonia, as, e.g., in Ps. cxxxvii., By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept ;' 2 Kings xxiv. 1, etc., etc. Cyrus also is termed king of or Babylonia, in Ezra, v. 13, and Artaxerxes in Neh. xiii. 6, after the Babylonian rule, properly so called, had given place to that of the Persians. There seems to be no good reason for giving up the ety mology of the word indicated in Gen. xi. 9, from to mix, confound ; ' because the Lord did there confound the speech of all the earth.' Ge senius gives instances of words similarly formed, v. his Thesaurus, s. v. Some, indeed, have sug gested that the origin of the name is to be sought in the Arabic J. (__,U the gate or court of Eel; or, supposing t, to be used for (v. examples given by Gesenius), the house or temple of Eel. Others say that it means the gate of the god or the gate of God, the term gate being here used in a sense analogous to that in which we speak now-a days of the sublime Porte. But it appears to us that, though the foundation of the Babel kingdom by Nimrod is related in Gen. x. to, and the build ing of the tower of Babel is not mentioned till the following chapter, yet that this was really the earlier event in point of time, and that most pro bably Nimrod took what he found of the unfinished city in the plains of Shinar, and made that ' the beginning of his kingdom,' consequently he would adopt the name which he already found in vogue, and of which the origin is what it is said to have been at Gen. xi. 9. To make the narrative con sistent with itself, it seems necessary to understand it thus.
description of Babylon given by Herodotus, who appears to have known it from having been there, is not easy to be reconciled with the statements of other ancient writers who visited it, or with the character and position of those remains which are now supposed to repre sent this famous city. The description of Hero dotus is to this effect : The city stood on a broad plain, and was exactly square, being 120 furlongs in length each way, so that the circumference of it was 480 furlongs. It was surrounded by a broad
and deep moat, which was kept full of water, and beyond this there was a high wall, no less than so royal cubits in width, and 200 in height It must be borne in mind that there are other state ments somewhat different from these. Ctesias gives the circumference as 36o stadia, and others make it 365, 368, and 385. Also with respect to the walls, Ctesias makes them to he 200 common cubits in height, there being the difference of three fingers' breadth between the royal and common cubit. This measurement in Pliny becomes 200 feet, and in Strabo 75. Jeremiah makes allusion to the height and breadth of the walls of Babylon. Col. Rawlinson has recorded it as his opinion that they did not exceed 6o or 7o English feet.
It seems perfectly incredible to suppose that a city so large as Babylon could have been sur rounded with walls which would have been higher than St. Paul's Cathedral, and yet that no vestige of these walls can be discovered. M. Oppert, how ever, believes that he has found traces of them, or at least of the gates and towers of them, in some of the tels or mounds which are common on both sides of the Euphrates. Herodotus affirms also that of the soil which was taken out of the moat surrounding the city, bricks were made of which the walls were built, and that, instead of cement, they used hot bitumen, brought from the Is, a small stream which flows into the Euphrates at the point where the city of the same name stands, eight days' journey from Babylon. This place is probably the same with that which is now called Hit, and Col. Rawlinson supposes it to be identical with the Abava of Ezra viii. IS, 21. Upon the top of the walls, and along the edges of them, they constructed buildings of a single chamber, facing one another, leaving room between them for a four-horse chariot to turn.