We have not yet followed the fortification wall connected with the gateway just described far to the south. The ruins here lie deep under the rubbish of the Amran mound, and are difficult to get at. On the north the excavations have laid open this wall as far as the village of Kweiresh.

The wall, which is 7.67 metres thick, with its cavalier towers stands on the river bank upon a massive projecting banquette like the older moat wall, the Arachtu wall, and the north wall of the Principal Citadel. This arrangement can thus be clearly recognised as a peculiarity of walls that lie on a water-channel. Towers, alternately broad and narrow, are placed at a distance of about 19 metres from each other. The broad ones are 7.3, the narrow ones 6.3 metres wide. In some of these towers there are fittings for double doors, from which a somewhat steep ramp leads down to the river. The walls are in very bad condition, and it is impossible to say whether there were similar doors in every tower, or, if not, at what length of interval. The pavement is .47 above zero. In the north, a short distance in front of the Southern Citadel, the wall for two mesopyrgia bends somewhat towards the west to unite by a tower with the Western Outworks (p. 144). In this tower was the outflow of the eastern canal that flowed past the Southern Citadel. The bend is obviously contrived in order to include the Western Outworks of the Southern Citadel in the city area.

Not far from the north-western corner of the peribolos we made a cross-cut through the high mounds that cover the wall, and here we found also the Arachtu wall of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar. The cut has been continued for some length to the north on the other side of the depression caused by the river-bed, and there it yielded walls of burnt-brick buildings of considerable thickness, but the river wall that corresponds with that on the left bank we have not yet uncovered. This excavation is very far from complete. The wall is apparently the same that was called by Herodotus (i. 180) αἱμασιή, which joined on to the wings of the outer city wall, and which Ctesias (Diodorus, ii. 3) called κρηπίς.