The buildings at the lower part of our engraving are imaginary, but they are by no means improbable. Among them may be distinguished the wide flights of steps and inclined planes by which the platform on which the temple stood was reached.[467] At the foot of the temple on the right of the engraving there is a palace, on the left two obelisk-shaped steles and a small temple of a type to be presently described. Behind the tower stretch away the waters of a lake. Nebuchadnezzar, in one of his inscriptions, speaks of surrounding the temple he had built with a lake.
Figs. 174-176.—Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a square, single-ramped, Chaldæan Temple.
Figs. 177-179.—Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a square, double-ramped Chaldæan Temple.
In seeking to vary the effect produced by these external ramps, the idea of a more complicated arrangement than the one last noticed may have occurred to the Chaldees. This M. Chipiez has embodied in his restoration of a Square Double-ramped Chaldæan Temple ([Plate III.] and [Figs. 177, 178,] and [179]). As in the last model, there are seven stages, each stage being square on plan, but the difference consists in the use of two ramps leading from base to summit. Each of these keeps to its own side of the building, only approaching the other on the front and back façades at the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages (see ([Plate III]). In order that the building as a whole should have a symmetrical and monumental appearance, it was necessary that all its seven stages—with the exception of the first, to which a rather different rôle was assigned—should be of equal height. But their length and width differed in proportion to their height in the building. The continual shortening of the distance within which the incline had to be packed, would, if we suppose each ramp confined to one side of the tower, have required the slope to become steeper with each story. Such a want of parallelism would have been very ugly, and there was but one means of avoiding it, and that was to continue the ramps nearly to the centre of the front at the fourth and sixth stages, and to the centre of the posterior façade at the fifth. The advantages of such an arrangement are obvious. Banished mostly to the flanks the double ramp left four stages clear both at front and back, providing an ample promenade. On the other three it showed itself just sufficiently to "furnish" the building and diversify its aspect without in any way encumbering it. The whole structure terminated in a chapel placed on the central axis of the tower, and surmounted by a cupola. The inscriptions mention the dome covered with leaves of chiselled gold which crowned at Babylon that temple "to the foundations of the earth" which was restored by Nebuchadnezzar.[468]