[175] Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 279. "The bricks had no mortar but the mud from which they had been made," says Botta (Monuments de Ninive, vol. v. p. 30).
[176] Layard, Discoveries, &c. p. 503.
[177] Layard, Discoveries, pp. 499 and 506.
[178] Taylor, Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 261). This mortar is still employed in the country; it is called kharour.
[179] The most plentiful springs occur at Hit, on the middle Euphrates. They are also found, however, farther north, as at Kaleh-Shergat, near the Tigris. Over a wide stretch of country in that district the bitumen wells up through every crack in the soil (Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 46). As for the bituminous springs of Hammam-Ali, near Mossoul, see Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol. i. p. 236.
[180] Genesis xi. 3.
[181] Herodotus, i. 179.
[182] Warka, its Ruins and Remains, by W. Kenneth Loftus, p. 9. (In the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, second series, Part I.) According to Sir Henry Rawlinson this introduction of layers of reeds or rushes between the courses of brick continued in all this region at least down to the Parthian epoch. Traces of it are to be found in the walls of Seleucia and Ctesiphon (Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. i. p. 300 note 1).
[183] Loftus, Travels and Researches, i. p. 169. The abundance of bitumen in the ruins of Mugheir is such that the modern name of the town has sprung from it; the word means the bituminous (Taylor, Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir).
[184] Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie, vol. i. p. 236; Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 261.