In places coffins are piled upon coffins, certainly to the depth of 30, probably to the depth of 60 feet; and for miles on every side of the ruins the traveller walks upon a soil teeming with the relics of ancient, and now probably extinct, races.
Sometimes these relics manifestly belong to a number of distinct and widely separate eras; but there are places where it is otherwise.
However we may account for it--and no account has been yet given which is altogether satisfactory--it seems clear, from the comparative homogeneousness of the remains in some places, that they belong to a single race, and if not to a single period, at any rate to only two, or, at the most, three distinct periods, so that it is no longer very difficult to distinguish the more ancient from the later relics.

Such is the character of the remains at Mugheir, which are thought to contain nothing of later date than the close of the Babylonian period, B.C.
538; and such is, still more remarkably, the character of the ruins at Abu-Shahrein and Tel-el-Lahm, which seem to be entirely, or almost entirely, Chaldaean.

In the following account of the coffins and mode of burial employed by the early Chaldaeans, examples will be drawn from these places only; since otherwise we should be liable to confound together the productions of very different ages and peoples.
[Illustration: PLATE 11] The tombs to which an archaic character most certainly attaches are of three kinds-brick vaults, clay coffins shaped like a dish-cover, and coffins in the same material, formed of two large jars placed mouth to mouth, and cemented together with bitumen.

The brick vaults are found chiefly at Mugheir.

[PLATE XI., Fig.