To the north of the Palace was the deep dry moat which bounded both the city and the royal quarter; and which the Processional Way crossed, most probably by a bridge, though of this no evidence remains. The German excavators consider that this moat, or at all events some part of it, was the “den of lions” of the King of Babylon. There is evidence in parallel instances that such was the case elsewhere.
Of course the great temples of Bel-Merodach, Ishtar, and other gods, form a feature of the city, and have been most carefully excavated. They were constructed on a plan that seems strange to the Western; for they have no precinct, or have lost what they had, and the houses of the poorest quarter of the town actually abutted on the walls of the holiest of them.
Herodotus speaks of “courts two stadia square,” but one cannot reconcile this with the facts. In design they[{355}] seem to have followed the local type of house; for they consist of a series of comparatively small chambers, built round a small court. The shrine (which has usually an “ante-shrine” before it) is no more than an inner chamber at one end of this court; and has usually a secret passage behind it, communicating with the chambers where the priests lodged, and which it is difficult to believe was not intended for the production of “miraculous” oracles. Strangest of all perhaps is it to find that, while fine material like burnt brick, enamel, alabaster and hewn stone, is lavished on the palaces and secular buildings of the city, the temples of the gods are without exception built of plain sun-dried mud brick.
TEMPLE OF ISHTAR BABYLON
This extends even to the altars, which stand on a small pavement just without the main doorways, and practically in the street. There is no stone anywhere in any of the buildings, save the blocks on which the great doors revolved, which were buried out of sight.[153]