Tower of Babel.
Tower of Babel (Fig. 2).
"Birs Nimrûd, about 2½ hours from Hillah, is a vast ruin crowned apparently by the ruins of a tower rising to a height of 153½ ft. above the plain, and having a circumference of rather more than 2000 feet. The Birs, which was situated within the city of Borsippa, has been wrongly identified with the Tower of Babel. It is the temple of Nebo, called the 'Temple of the seven spheres of Heaven and Earth,' and was a sort of pyramid built in seven stages, the stairs being ornamented with the planetary colours, and on the seventh was an ark or tabernacle. The Birs was destroyed by Xerxes and restored by Antiochus Soter. The Tower of Babel was possibly the Esagila of the inscriptions, or the E-Temenanki—a tower not yet identified. Not far from Birs Nimrûd are the ruins of Hashemieh, the first residence of the Abbaside Khalifs."
Brown would have none of this. Anything is anathema to Brown which destroys topographical romance. He is a fierce enemy to "higher criticism," which does away with the whale in the book of Jonah or the snow-clad summit of Mount Ararat as the resting-place of the ark. It is quite exciting, he maintains, to picture the ark stuck on the perilous ice-peaks of a glacier, with Noah and his family endeavouring to get the elephants and giraffes safely down a ravine like the Mer de Glace to the more temperate regions of the plains below. How much better than thinking of it stuck fast on some wretched mound by the Euphrates, 30 feet high.