Travels in Chaldaea; Including a Journey from Bussorah to Bagdad, Hillah, and Babylon, Performed on Foot in 1827 - With Observations on the Sites and R (English, French, Paperback)

Ce livre historique peut contenir de nombreuses coquilles et du texte manquant. Les acheteurs peuvent generalement telecharger une copie gratuite scannee du livre original (sans les coquilles) aupres de l'editeur. Non reference. Non illustre. 1829 edition. Extrait: ... of solid brickwork, sloping towards the top and rising from a confused heap of rubbish. The chief material forming this fabric appeared similar to that composing the ruin called Akerkouff--a mixture of chopped straw, with slime used as cement; and regular layers of unbroken reeds between the horizontal courses of the bricks. The base is greatly injured by time, and the elements; particularly to the south-east, where it is cloven into a deep furrow from top to bottom. whose substance were mixed bruised reeds and straw, and which were laid in clay mortar, compose the great mass of the building; but other bricks were also perceived at certain intervals, especially where the strongest buttresses stood, of the same size, but burned in a kiln, and set in good lime and bitumen."--Vide Pietro Delia Valle's Travels, vol. ii. let. 17. " And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." Genesis, chap. i. v. 4.--The cement, here mentioned by the nameof slime, was probably what the ancients called asphaltus, or bitumen; Assyria abounds with it. Herodotus, and many ancient authors affirm, that the walls of Babylon were cemented with it. Arrian says, " The temple of Belus, in the midst of the city of Babylon, was made of brick, cemented with asphaltus." The sides of the ruin exhibit hollows worn partly by the weather, but more generally formed by the Arabs, who are incessantly digging for bricks, and hunting for antiquities. Several of these excavations I entered, and have no reason to suppose that they are inhabited by such ferocious animals as the generality of travellers assert. There certainly was an offensive smell, and the caves were strewed with bones of sheep and goats, devoured..."