The mounds shown are the rubbish covering the palace of Nebuchadnezzar (§ 235). The palms in the background fringe the Euphrates.  The Arab workmen in the foreground have just uncovered part of the pavement of Nebuchadnezzar’s splendid Festival Street, or processional avenue, which connected the palace and the Ishtar Gate (Fig. 110) with one of the great temples. Beneath all these works of Chaldean Babylon (Section 20) should lie the remains of old Babylon of Hammurapi’s age (Section 17); but Sennacherib’s destruction of the city (§ 214) swept away the older Babylon. Since the first day’s work
shown above, eighteen years of excavation at Babylon have uncovered almost nothing older than the city of Nebuchadnezzar.