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The existing analytical models for predicting earth pressures based on the kinematical approach of limit analysis are limited to soil masses with homogeneous internal frictional angles. To overcome this drawback, this work proposes a discretised failure mechanism to calculate the location of earth forces and evaluate the active and passive earth pressures against inclined retaining walls with horizontal backfills for the first time. Comparisons with other existing analytical solutions, numerical simulations and experimental tests are made to verify the proposed method for the cases of single-layer and multi-layer backfills. Practical design tables are presented for a two-layer case. Application of the proposed model to three-layer backfills with a middle weak layer is presented. The influence of the position of the weak layer on the critical earth pressures and failure mechanisms is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]