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him, the errors of popery, and became a member of a church which you know to be free from error. I am glad of it; you do us great honor.' The subject then changed; but it was evident that Mr. Sheldon did not sit quite easy. At length, the third of the morning hours arrived; Mr. Sheldon took his watch from his pocket, and holding it forth to Mr. Sheridan, 'See,' he said to him,' what the hour is: you know our host is a very early riser.' 'Damn your apostate watch!' exclaimed Mr. Sheridan; ' put it into your

• Protestant fob.'"

The remainder of the volume contains remarks on Mr. Burke ; the author of Junius; the late Bishop of Durham; Erasmus and Grotius; the Revelations of Sister Nativité, with an interesting essay on MYSTICISM of Religion, a compendium of much interest between Mr. Butler and Dr. Parr, and the proposed Reform of the Court of Equity.

From this part we cannot afford room for extracts, and we must indeed hasten to take our leave of the Author, with an expression of the highest esteem and respect for his virtues and talents, and a fervent wish that his gentle and temperate spirit could so influence the hearts of his fellow religionists, as to give hopes that the boon which Mr. Butler has so long and earnestly contended for, might be granted with safety, in time to gild the declining years of the amiable Reminiscent.

Travels in Mesopotamia, including a Journey from Aleppo, across the Euphrates to Orfah, (the Ur of the Chaldees,) through the Plains of the Turcomans, to Diarbekr, in Asia Minor; from thence to Mardin, on the Borders of the Great Desert, and by the Tigris to Mousul and Bagdad: with Researches on the Ruins of Babylon, Nineveh, Arbela, Ctesiphon, and Seleucia. By J. S. Buckingham. London. Colburn. 1827. pp. 571. We are most happy to meet Mr. Buckingham once more in his legitimate sphere: to speak the truth, his late controversy had given us rather more than a quantum suff." High praise is due to this enterprising gentleman for the contents of this superb volume. The descriptions are lucid and interesting, the routes well depicted, and the style of the volume, though never eloquent, is at all times pleasing, and now and then approaching to elegance. He is far more exact in his remarks on the Ruins of Babylon than Captain Keppel : there is, indeed, no comparison between the two volumes. The illustrative cuts at the head of each chapter, are most beautifully introduced, and the whole volume is a perfect model of the typographical art.

There is no room for minute criticism in works of this description; we therefore at once proceed to our extracts; in the selection of which, we have catered as well as possible for the amusement of our readers.

"At their giving the word, a halt was made, till they could ride round the caravan to survey it; when, one of them remaining behind to prevent escapes, and the other preceding us, we were conducted, like a flock of sheep by a shepherd and his dog, to one of the stations of their encampment, called El Mazar.

"It was near noon before we reached this place, as it lay about two hours north of the road from which we had turned off, and was just midway between the common routes to Diarbekr and Mardin, being therefore a good central station from which to guard the passage to both. There were other local advantages which rendered it eligible to these tribute-gatherers, and occasioned it to be a frequently-occupied and often-contested spot.

The first of these advantages was a spring of good water, forming a running stream, and fertilizing a fine pasture-ground on each side of it. The next was a high and steep hill, which, if artificial, as, from its abruptness of ascent and regularity of form, it appeared to be, must have been a work of great labor, and served the double purpose of an elevated post of observation, from which the view could be extended widely on all sides round, and a place of security for the flocks at night, it being quite inaccessible to mounted horsemen. The last peculiarity, which recommended this place as a station for a tribe exacting tribute, was, that the passage to one particular part, at the foot of the hill, was so exceedingly difficult, either for horses or foot passengers, even in the day-time, that it could not be gained but very slowly, step by step, and under constant exposure and disadvantage. This last spot had been chosen for the tents of the Arabs themselves, where they were as secure as in the most regularly fortified garrison; and we were ordered to encamp in the pasture-ground below, at the distance of about a quarter of a mile from them.

"The first tent was scarcely raised, before we were visited by three of the chief's dependants, mounted on beautiful horses, richly caparisoned, and dressed in the best manner of Turkish military officers, with their cloth garments highly embroidered, and their swords, pistols, and khandjars, such as Pashas themselves might be proud to wear. Every one arose at their entry, and the carpets and cushions of the Hadjee, which had been laid out with more care than usual, were offered to the chief visitor, while the rest seated themselves beside him. All those of the caravan who were present, not excepting the Hadjee himself, assumed the humiliating position of kneeling and sitting backward on their heels, which is done only to great and acknowledged superiors.

"This is one of the most painful of the Mohammedan attitudes, and exceedingly difficult to be acquired, as it is performed by first kneeling on both knees, then turning the soles of the feet upward, and lastly, sitting back on these in such a manner, as that they receive the whole weight of the body, while the knees still remain pressed to the ground. I at first assumed this attitude with the rest, but an incapacity to continue it for any great length of time obliged me to rise and go out of the tent, on pretence of drinking; which simple incident, though I returned in a very few minutes afterwards to resume my seat, from its being thought a disrespectful liberty to rise at all in the presence of so great a man, without a general movement of the whole party, gave rise to very earnest inquiries regarding a person of manners so untutored.

The answers to these enquiries were highly contradictory. Some asserted that I was an Egyptian of Georgian parents, and of the race of the Mamlouks of Cairo, from their knowing me to be really from Egypt, and from my speaking the Arabic with the accent of that country, where I had first acquired it, while they attributed my fairer complexion than that of the natives to the same cause. Others said that I was a doctor from Damascus, and suggested that I had probably been in the service of the Pasha there, as I had given some medicines to a little slave-boy of my protector, by which he had recovered from an attack of fever; coupled with which, they had heard me talk much of Damascus as a beautiful and delightful city, and therefore concluded this to be the attachment of a native. Some again insisted that I was a Muggrebin, or Arab of Morocco, acquainted with all sorts of magical charms and arts, and added, that I was certainly going to India to explore hidden treasures, to open mines of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds; to fathom seas of pearls, and hew down forests of aloes-wood and cinnamon, since I was the most inquisitive being they had ever met with, and had been several times observed to write much in a small book; and in an unknown tongue; so that, as it was even avowed by myself that I was going to India, and had neither merchandize nor baggage with me of any kind, it could be for no other purposes than these that I could have undertaken so long a journey. Lastly, some gave out that I was a man of whom nobody knew the real religion; for, although I was protected under the tent of Hadjee Abd-el-Rakhman, and treated as an equal with himself, I was certainly not a Moslem of the true kind; because, at the hours of prayer, I had always been observed to retire to some other spot, as if to perform my devotions in secret, and never had yet prayed publicly with my companions. A Christian they were sure I was not, because I ate meat, and milk, and butter, on Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as on the other days; and a Jew I could not be, because I wore no side locks, and trimmed the upper edge of my beard, after the manner of the Turks, which the Israelites or Yahoudis are forbidden to do. As I had been seen, however, at every place of our halt, to retire to a secluded spot and wash my whole body with water, to change my inner garments frequently, to have an aversion to vermia which was quite unnatural, and a feeling of disgust towards certain kinds of them, amounting to something like horror, as well as

carefully to avoid being touched or lain upon by dirty people, and at night to sleep always aloof from and on the outskirts of the caravan, they concluded, that I was a priest of some of those idolatrous nations of whom they had heard there were many in India, the country to which I was going, and who, they had also understood, had many of these singular aversions, so constantly exhibited by myself."

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"JUNE 21st. We set out at a later hour than usual this morning, as the sky was lowering, and the sun at its rising obscured by a red mist. The air was calm, but a disagreeable and suffocating heat prevailed, all which were considered symptoms of an approaching southern wind. Two hours after sun-rise the heat was insupportable, and, even from the people of the country, the general cry was to halt.

"It was about this time when the wind began to be felt by us, coming in short and sudden puffs, which, instead of cooling or refreshing, oppressed us even more than the calm, each of these blasts seeming like the hot and dry vapour of an oven just at the moment of its being opened. The Southern Desert was now covered with a dull red mist, not unlike the sun-rise skies of our northern climates on a rainy morning, and soon after we saw large columns of sand and dust whirled up into the air, and carried along in a body over the plain with a slow and stately motion. One of these passed within a few hundred yards of us to the northward, having been driven along a long tract of stony land, to a distance of perhaps twenty miles from the place of its rising. It was apparently from eighty to a hundred feet in diameter, and was certainly of sufficient force, by its constant whirling motion, to throw both men and animals off their legs, so that if crossing a crowded caravan, and broken by the interruption of its course, the danger of suffocation to those buried beneath its fall would be very great, though, if persons were prepared for it, it might not perhaps be fatal. The wind now grew into a steady southern storm, and blew with a violence which rendered our march confused and difficult, till at last we were obliged to encamp, before the usual number of hours' march had been performed.

"The course we had pursued to-day was nearly east-south-east, and the distance not more than ten miles in five hours of time. Our road still maintained the same character of a fertile plain, and was covered by the same kind of black basalt, now seen in smaller pieces, of a still more porous substance, some of them resembling the ragged cinders formed by the coal and iron of a smith's fire. We passed over a piece of ground where the native rock was visible, pointing its ragged surface above the level of the soil, and forming a bed of pure stone, without any mixture of earth. It was here that I remarked the same appearances as those observed in the basaltic masses of the Hauran, namely, in some places presenting circular and serpentine furrows, as if the matter had been once a fluid, and had suddenly cooled while in the act of a whirling motion; while, in other places, where the masses were of a semi-globular form, and coated like onions, it had the appearance of a fluid matter suddenly becoming solid, while in the act of ebullition, and throwing up thick bubbles, such as are seen on the surface of boiling tar or pitch.'

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"As this pile of the Birs Nimrood is here assumed to be the remains of the celebrated Tower of Belus, the place of which has been long disputed; and as mature consideration, added to a close personal inspection of the monument, has only strengthened and confirmed the original impression of its identity, it may be well to enumerate such features of resemblance between the present ruin and the ancient temple, as are considered to justify the decision of their being one and the same edifice.

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"In recurring to the ancient descriptions of this celebrated monument, Major Rennel justly observes, that all these are very brief, and Strabo is the only one who pretends to give the positive elevation of the tower, though all agree in stating it to be • very great. The square of the temple, says Herodotus, was two stadia, (one thousand 'feet), and the tower itself one stadium, in which Strabo agrees.' The former adds, In the midst, a tower rises, of the solid depth and height of one stadium, upon which, ' resting as a base, seven other turrets are built in regular succession. The ascent is on 'the outside, which, winding from the ground, is continued to the highest tower, and, in the middle of the whole structure, there is a convenient resting-place. Strabo says, that the sepulchre of Belus was a pyramid, of one stadium in height, whose base was a square of like dimensions, and that it was ruined by Xerxes. Arrian agrees in this particular, and Diodorus adds, that on the top was a statue of Belus, forty feet in height, in an upright posture; from which Major Rennel has inferred, by an unobjectionable rule,

* Clio. 181.

that the tower must have been about five hundred feet in height, corresponding to the dimensions assigned by the others. Its destruction by Xerxes must have taken place before any of the writers, whose descriptions are cited, could have seen it, and that destruction must no doubt have been an unusually devastating one, since the Persian monarch is said to have forcibly stripped it of all its treasures, statues, and ornaments, and even to have put its priests to death. Both Strabo and Arrian indeed say, that Alexander wished to restore it; the former asserting that he found it too great a labor, for it was said that ten thousand men were not able to remove the rubbish, in the course of two months; and the latter stating that it had been begun, but that the. workmen made less progress in it than Alexander expected *.

"Here then we collect the following leading facts :-first, that the Tower of Belus was a pyramid, composed of eight separate stages successively rising above, and retiring within, each other; second, that its whole dimensions were a square of one stadium, or five hundred feet at its base, and its height exactly the same; third, that it had around it a square enclosure, of two stadia, or one thousand feet for each of its sides; and, fourthly, that attached to this was a temple, the relative position and dimensions of which are not specified, but the ruins of which were very considerable.

"To all these features, the remains of the monument called the Birs Nimrood perfectly correspond. The form of its ascent is pyramidal, and four of the eight stages of which its whole height was composed are to be distinctly traced, on the north and east sides, projecting through the general rubbish of its face. Its dimensions at the base, as accurately measured by Mr. Rich, give a circumference of seven hundred and sixty-two yards, or two thousand two hundred and eighty-six feet, exceeding the square of a stadium, or two thousand feet, by no more than might be expected from the accumulation of the rubbish around it on all sides. The height of the four existing stages is equal to about half that of the original building, or two hundred and fifty feet; which, as the eight stages are said to have risen above each other in regular succession, may be fairly supposed to represent the four lowermost of them. The square enclosure to be traced around the whole appears, from the summit of the building, to occupy a line of more than three hundred yards for each of its sides, which may be thought to correspond accurately enough with the enclosure of two stadia, or one thousand feet, assigned by the historian t.

"The temple of Belus is situated in the heart of that city (Babylon), a most magnificent and stupendous fabric, built with brick, and cemented together with a bituminous substance instead of mortar. This, with all the rest of the Babylonian temples, was subverted by Xerxes, at his return from his Grecian expedition; whereupon Alexander determined to repair it, or, as some say, rebuild it upon the old foundations; for which reason he had ordered the Babylonians to clear away the rubbish, for he designed to build it in a more august and stately manner than before. But, whereas they had made a much less progress in the work than he expected during his absence, he had some thoughts of employing his whole army about it. Much land had been consecrated and set apart by the Assyrian monarchs for the god Belus, and much gold had been offered to him; from these the temple was formerly rebuilt, and sacrifices to the god provided." ---Arrian's Hist. of Alex. b. vii. c. 17.

"In a Second Memoir on Babylon, published subsequently to my visit to its ruins, in answer to some remarks of Major Rennel, on Mr. Rich's First Memoir, and which I have only seen since my return to England, this gentleman, to whom I had freely communicated all the results of my researches there, thus alludes to this portion of them: The whole height of the Birs Nemroud, above the plain to the summit of the brick wall, is two hundred and thirty-five feet. The brick wall itself, which stands on the edge of the summit, and was undoubtedly the face of another stage, is thirtyseven feet high. In the side of the pile, a little below the summit, is very clearly to be seen part of another brick wall precisely resembling the fragment which crowns the summit, but which still encases and supports its part of the mound. This is clearly indicative of another stage of greater extent. The masonry is infinitely superior to any thing of the kind I have ever seen; and, leaving out of the question any conjecture relative to. the original destination of this ruin, the impression made by a sight of it is, that it was 3 N

VOL. H.

"The great mound to the eastward of the tower is such as must have been left by the destruction of some spacious but less elevated building attached to it, and is of sufficient magnitude for any temple: while the rubbish formed by the destruction of the whole, including both the tower and the temple which Alexander is said to have wished to restore, is greater than the whole solid contents of the Mujellibé, or Makloube, and would certainly occupy a body of ten thousand men nearly two months in effectually removing.

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"To this may be added a suggestion of little weight perhaps when standing alone, but worthy of sanction when supporting other facts, namely, the probability of the name of Birs, at present applied to this monument, being a corruption of Belus, its original name *. El Birs is the epithet by which it is exclusively called by some; and whenever Nimrood is added, it is merely because the inhabitants of this country are so fond of attributing every thing to this mighty hunter before the Lord,' as the inhabitants of Egypt are to Pharoah, or those of Syria to Solomon. Mr. Rich, whose authority on a point of oriental philology is of great value, says, The etymology of 'the word Birs, would furnish a curious subject for those who are fond of such 'discussions. It appears not to be Arabic, as it has no meaning which relates to this subject in that language, nor can the most learned persons here assign any reason 'for its being applied to this ruin.' The change from Belus to Berus, which requires only the change of a constantly permutable letter, would be less extraordinary than a thousand others which have been insisted on as decisive; and the difference between Berus and Birs is nothing in any of the Semmetic languages, or those written without vowels, since both would be expressed by the same characters, without addition or diminution, and both consequently be the same in sound.

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"The objections which might be urged against the identity of the ruin at the Birs with the Temple and Tower of Jupiter Belus, deserve a moment's consideration. The first may be found in the apparent novelty of the theory, and in the fact that no one who has hitherto visited, described, or written on this ruin, with the single exception of Mr. Rich, has yet assumed it to be the temple in question. This, however, may be easily accounted for. 'All travellers,' says Mr. Rich, since the time a solid pile, composed in the interior of unburnt bricks, and perhaps earth or rubbish; that it was constructed in receding stages, and faced with fine burnt bricks, having inscriptions on them, laid in a very thin layer of lime cement; and that it was reduced by violence to its present ruinous condition. The upper stories have been forcibly broken down, and fire has been employed as an instrument of destruction, though it is not easy to say precisely how or why. The facing of fine bricks has partly been removed, and partly covered by the falling down of the mass which it supported and kept together. I speak with the greater confidence of the different stages of this pile, from my own observations having been recently confirmed and extended by an intelligent traveller, who is of opinion that the traces of four stages are clearly discernible. As I believe it is his intention to lay the account of his travels before the world, I am unwilling to forestall any of his observations; but I must not omit to notice a remarkable result arising out of them. The Tower of Belus was a stadium in height; therefore, if we suppose the eight towers, or stages, which composed the pyramid of Belus, to have been of equal height, according to Major Rennel's idea, which is preferable to that of the Count de Caylus, t we ought to find traces of four of them in the fragment which remains, whose elevation is two hundred and thirty-five feet; and this is precisely the number which Mr. Buckingham believes he has discovered. This result is the more worthy of attention, as it did not occur to Mr. B. himself.'"-Rich's Second Memoir on Babylon, p. 32.

* Pliny says, the Temple of Jupiter Belus was so called from Belus, a prince, the first inventor of astronomy. The city was however gone to decay, and lying waste in Pliny's time, from the vicinity of Seleucia, which had drawn off all its population.-Nat. Hist. b. vị. c. 26.

The Belus of the Assyrians is thought to be the Mahabali of the Hindoos, and the Shah Mahbool of the Persians, the last of the third dynasty of the ancient kings mentioned in the Dabistan.-Hist. of Persia, v. i. p. 248.

† See Mem. de l'Academie, vol. xxxi.

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