To strengthen it against the menace of invasion from Media, and to plug the open flatlands that lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a great stretch of fortifications had been constructed, eight meters wide and ten meters high, their crenellations proudly visible across the drear of the plains. Even sixty years after its construction, this “Median Wall” still bore witness to the monarch who had raised it, Nebuchadnezzar II, whose greatness had been the dread of the world. Nor, indeed, could a more fitting location for such a display of royal power have been imagined.
