How Many Miles to Babylon?

Off to Ancient Worlds? - Is the Desert a Fit Habitat for These Rabbits?

Mother Goose (in a fitted cap) rides in an old fashioned open car with a bunny king apparently waving to an adoring crowd, some of whom are holding candles, as he passes. The car is escorted by a motorcycle brigade apparently leading the car into a passage between two cliffs carved with Assyrian figures. The bottom half of the image is filled with the soft colors of many characters while the top half is dominated by the dark cliffs lightened only by what appears to be a string of colored lights and the characters on the top who are small in the distance. Perhaps these are visual references to the two vast walls, three hundred and thirty-five feet in height and eighty-five feet broad at the top, believed to have enclosed the city of Babylon on the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. The scene is at dusk, the sky a teal blue with a crescent moon above. The palm tree, the sand-colored appearance of the background, and the Pharaoh-like image the procession is passing situate the illustration in the Middle East. The colorful clothing of the crowd seen from behind and the smiles on the faces of the procession give the illustration a child friendly appearance.

Note the inferences from this relief to the illustrations in this rhyme. The "great and honorable Ashurbanipal" (Ezra 4:10), soldier, hunter scholar, is shown carrying a basket for the rebuilding of a temple in Babylon. The relief if from the north palace of Ashurbanipal (668-633 B.C.) at Nineveh.