It is an important point that Sargon mentions the position of his wall: on the side of the Ishtar Gate to the bank of the Euphrates. This shows that in Sargon’s time the Euphrates flowed here.
Fig. 88.—Stamped brick of Nabopolassar’s Arachtu wall.
The Nabopolassar inscriptions on the bricks of his wall that directly adjoins the Sargon wall are, some of them stamped, some chiselled, and some written. They are, however, placed without any sort of method, mixed together in close proximity in all three periods of the wall. In the stamped legend (Fig. [88]) the king states that he had bright burnt bricks struck, and with them made the wall of the Arachtu. Thus in the time of Nabopolassar the Arachtu must have flowed here, and indeed at exactly the same place where, according to the Sargon bricks, the Euphrates flowed. The difficulties raised by this circumstance, as well as by a number of statements in the Babylonian literature, may be overcome in two different ways. Either Arachtu is only another term for Euphrates, or we must arrive at the somewhat involved conclusion that in course of time the Euphrates frequently changed its bed and had interchanged with that of the Arachtu. In this case the ancient Euphrates must be supposed to have described a curve or bow towards the west, the chord of which was the Arachtu in its straight southward course, thus forming an island of half-moon shape. This would have been the position of affairs which Sennacherib happened upon when he cast the zikurrat Etemenanki into the Arachtu.
In Sargon’s time, on the contrary, the western bed of the Euphrates would have been sanded up, and its waters would have flowed directly in the bed of the earlier Arachtu, and thus past our Sargon wall. Nabopolassar, on the other hand, would have restored the Arachtu, for by his time the Euphrates must have once more resumed its earlier western channel, while Nebuchadnezzar would have destroyed the Arachtu, and extended his citadel actually to the Euphrates. As already said, this is a very perplexing theory, but it is the only one that remains for those who reject the complete identity of the Euphrates and the Arachtu.
The building of the Southern Citadel destroyed the Arachtu wall at this point, but immediately to the south of the Southern Citadel the excavations have once more laid it bare and followed it up nearly to the Amran mound. Here also there are numerous Arachtu bricks of Nabopolassar in the brick masonry.
Fig. 89.—Inscribed brick of Nabopolassar’s Arachtu wall.
On the inscribed bricks (Fig. [89]) it is stated that “Nabopolassar, etc., the restorer of Esagila and Babylon, made the wall of the Arachtu for Marduk, his lord.” In this the explicit placing together of Babylon and Esagila as two parallel names of equal importance is very striking. It entirely agrees, however, with what has been already said of the original and actual Babylon, in its narrowest meaning, that in the earliest period Esagila was independent of it (cf. p. [87] et seq.).
The inscriptions chiselled on the burnt brick (Fig. [90]) state that “Nabopolassar, etc., surrounded the Dûr of Babylon with a wall of burnt brick for protection.” Of this we have found only four examples, and they are all in the walls to the north of the Southern Citadel.