About 16 metres in height, and with somewhat steep sides, the most northern of the mounds of Homera (w 13 on plan, Fig. 249) occupies a dominating position above the whole of the adjacent surroundings, and forms a remarkable object from a very considerable distance. In order to discover its nature we carried a trench through it, from east to west, cutting the mound in half like an apple; with the surprising result that the mound proved to contain no building such as we might have expected, judging from the Kasr. The entire mass from the top to 1 metre below zero consists of brick rubble, which has been intentionally and artificially heaped up. The layers (Fig. 255), which are alternately coarse and finer, are fairly horizontal at the base, but above they fall in the natural slope of about 45 grades towards the north-east. The mound must, therefore, have been gradually heaped up with débris thrown on it from the south-west.

The broken bricks have, for the most part, ancient asphalt or lime mortar clinging to them. Some of them also are unburnt, and the finer layers more especially contain much clay. The Nebuchadnezzar stamps have been found there, but no potsherds, a few Greek terra-cottas, and a fragment of a cylinder of Nebuchadnezzar with an inscription referring to the building of Etemenanki, the tower of Babylon. It is a duplicate of the cylinder: Neb. Hilp. iii. l. 18–24, and iv. l. 15–19 (M’Gee, Zur Topographie von Babylon, vi.).

Thus the mass of débris comes from a Babylonian building brought here in Greek times, and contains a document belonging to Etemenanki. At the ruins of Etemenanki the absence of débris had already struck us as remarkable. What is to be seen there at the present time—low banks round the deep trenches—is merely the result of modern digging by Arab brick robbers. Before this Arab disfigurement of the place, the site of the tower was completely level. At the Kasr and the hill of Babil, as elsewhere, the huge mounds of rubbish bear witness to the immensity of the ruins they represent. In Sachn we have the insignificant remains of a colossal building without débris, and in Homera a colossal mass of rubbish without a building, and we may therefore safely conclude with the greatest possible certainty that the débris of Etemenanki lies in Homera. This agrees admirably with the statement of Greek authors (Strabo, xvi. 1, 5), according to which Alexander the Great intended to replace the tower which had fallen in his time, and expended 600,000 days’ wages on having the débris removed: “ἦν δὲ πυραμὶς ... ἣν Ἀλέξανδρος ἐβούλετο ἀνασκευάσαι, πολὺ δ’ ἦν ἔργον καὶ πολλοῦ χρόνου (αὐτὴ γὰρ ἡ χοῦς εἰς ἀνακάθαρσιν μυρίοις ἀνδράσι δυεῖν μηνῶν ἔργον ἦν), ὤστ’ οὐκ ἔφθη τὸ ἐγχειρηθὲν ἐπιτελέσαι.” The mass of rubbish that lies in Homera—the middle and southern groups also consist of exactly similar broken material—may be roughly estimated at 300,000 cubic metres, which corresponds well with the amount of wages quoted above. As the Euphrates flowed westward close to Etemenanki, and also between the Kasr and Homera, in the Greek period we can suppose that the transport was effected by water.

It may be supposed that the work of piling up débris in this place would not be undertaken without some object. The heaps might well have served good purpose in the erection of new buildings, such as were undoubtedly planned by Alexander. It is true that the northern mound was never utilised, but we have already seen that the southern one was used as the substructure for a theatre, and the central group we will now observe more closely.