Verse 58
58. Broad walls… high gates See the descriptions of Babylon by Strabo and others. According to Herodotus the walls were eighty-five feet thick and three hundred and thirty-seven and a half feet high. Ctesias makes them three hundred feet high. Strabo, seventy-five feet high and thirty-two feet thick. Xenophon saw in Babylon walls a hundred and fifty feet in height. Duncker concludes that these walls must have had a height of two hundred feet above the ditch, and a proportionate breadth of from thirty to forty feet. This breadth would be sufficient to permit of teams being drawn along the rampart between the battlements, as Herodotus and Strabo inform us, without touching. The rampart on the walls of Nineveh is said to have afforded room for the driving abreast of three chariots. As to the “gates,” Herodotus represents them as most elaborately constructed and ornamented; the posts, the folding doors, and the thresholds being of bronze. Oppert quotes an inscription in which Nebuchadrezzar says, “In the thresholds of the great gates, I inserted folding doors of brass, with very strong palings and gratings.” There were one hundred of these gates, twenty-five in each of the four sides of the wall. (The remainder of the verse is quoted from Habakkuk.)
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