Page:Herodotus and the Empires of the East.djvu/34

28 circumference at 360 stades; Strabo, at 385; Clitarch, at 365; Curtius, at 368. Simply to imagine, as Brüll does, that Herodotus exaggerated is not a sufficient explanation of these differences. We must remember that Herodotus is an eyewitness, and the oldest eyewitness of the Greek writers. Even if the walls had suffered great injury in his day, yet their ruins remained, and from these an observer could obtain quite an accurate estimate. It is hard to believe that Herodotus, in a superficial reckoning, could have erred a quarter of the whole amount. We might rather suppose that he had not seen the whole ruins of the walls, and that his voucher, a Persian, had exaggerated. To show the accuracy of the accounts of Herodotus we have to-day at our disposal two means, the ruins of Babylon and the cuneiform inscriptions. The ruins of Babylon were first investigated by Rich, who published an account of his researches under the title: "Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811." We learn that he made a subsequent visit to the same place from a second memoir on Babylon published at London in 1818. Investigations were also made by Ker Porter in 1818, by Loftus and Taylor under the direction of Rawlinson (1849–1855), by the French expedition under Jules Oppert (1851–54), by Layard in 1851, by George Smith in 1876, by Rassam in three expeditions (1877–78, 1878–79, 1880–81).

As soon as Oppert had examined the ruins of