Its summit, except where some slight remains of the second story constitute an interruption, is "perfectly flat," and probably continues very much in the condition in which it was when the lower stage was first built.

This stage, being built of crude brick, was necessarily weak; it is therefore supported by four massive buttresses of baked brick, each placed exactly in the centre of one of the sides, and carried to about one-third of the height.

Each buttress is nineteen feet high, six feet one inch wide, and seven and a half feet in depth; and each is divided down the middle by a receding space, one foot nine inches in width.

All the bricks composing the buttresses are inscribed, and are very firmly cemented together with bitumen, in thick layers.

The buttresses were entirely hidden under the mass of rubbish which had fallen from the building, chiefly from the upper story, and only became apparent when Mr.
Loftus made his excavations.
It is impossible to reconstruct the Bowariyeh ruin from the facts and measurements hitherto supplied to us even the height of the first story is at present uncertain; and we have no means of so much as conjecturing the height of the second.