THE PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ASSYRO-CHALDAEAN ARCHITECTURE.
Sec. 1.--_Materials._
Chaldaea was the cradle of the civilization, and consequently of the art,
whose characteristics we have to define. Now the soil of Chaldaea to a great
depth beneath the surface is a fine loose earth, similar to that of the
Nile Delta. At a few points only on the plain, and that near the Persian
Gulf, are there some rocky eminences, the remains of ancient islands which
the gradual encroachment of the two great rivers has joined to the mainland
of Asia. Their importance is so slight that we may fairly ignore their
existence and assert generally that Chaldaea has no stone. Like all great
rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates in the upper and middle parts of their
courses carry down pieces of rock from their native mountains, but after
they enter upon the alluvial ground near the boundary between Assyria and
Chaldaea their streams become sluggish, and these heavy bodies sink to the
bottom and become embedded in the soil; the water no longer carries on with
it anything but the minute particles which with the passage of centuries
form immense banks of clay. In the whole distance between Bagdad and the
sea you may take a spade, and, turn up the soil wherever you please, you
will not find a stone as big as a nut.
In this absence of a natural stone something had to be found to take its
place, and the artificial material we call brick was invented. The human
intellect refuses to give up the contest with nature before the first
obstacles that seem to bar its progress; if it cannot brush them aside it
turns their flank. The least accident is often enough to suggest the
desired expedient. The origin of almost all the great discoveries that are
studded over the history of civilization may be traced to some lucky
chance. The first inhabitants of Chaldaea fashioned rude kitchens for the
cooking of their simple food out of moist and plastic clay, the fires of
reed and broken wood lighted on these simple hearths reddened and hardened
the clay till it became like rock. Some bystander more observant than the
rest noted the change and became the father of ceramics. We use the word in
its widest, in its etymological sense. _Ceramics_ is the art of fashioning
clay and burning it in the fire so as to obtain constructive materials,
domestic utensils, or objects of luxury and ornament.[127]
Even before the first brick or pottery kiln was erected it must have been
recognized that in a climate like that of Chaldaea the soil when dried in
the sun was well fitted for certain uses. Among the _debris_ left by the
earliest pioneers of civilization we find the remains of vases which seem
to have been dried only in the sun. But porous and friable pottery like
this could only be used for a few purposes, and it was finally renounced as
soon as the art of firing the earth, first in the hot ashes of the domestic
hearth, and afterwards in the searching flames of the close oven, was
discovered. It was otherwise with brick. The desiccation produced by the
almost vertical sun of Mesopotamia allowed it to be used with safety and
advantage in certain parts of a building. In that condition it is called
crude brick, to distinguish it from the harder material due to the direct
heat of wood fires.
In any case the clay destined for use as a building material was subject to
a first preparation that never varied. It was freed from such foreign
bodies as might have found their way into it, and, as in Egypt, it was
afterwards mixed with chopped or rather pulverized straw, a proceeding
which was thought to give it greater body and resistance. It was then mixed
with water in the proportions that experience dictated, and kneaded by foot
in wide and shallow basins.[128] The brickmakers of Mossoul go through the
same process to this day.
As soon as the clay was sufficiently kneaded, it was shaped in almost
square moulds. In size these moulds surpassed even those of Egypt: their
surfaces were from 15-1/4 to 15-1/2 inches square, and their thickness was
from 2 to 4 inches.[129] It would seem that these artificial blocks were
given this extravagant size to make up for the absence of stone properly
speaking; the only limit of size seems to have been that imposed by
difficulties of manufacture and handling.
Crude brick never becomes hard enough to resist the action of water. In
Greek history we read how Agesipolis, King of Sparta, when besieging
Mantinea, directed the stream of the Ophis along the foot of its walls of
unburnt brick, and so caused them to crumble away. Cimon, son of Miltiades,
attacked the defences of Eion, on the Strymon, in the same fashion. When
desiccation was carried far enough, such materials could be used, in
interiors at least, so as to fulfil the same functions as stone or burnt
brick. Vitruvius tells us that the magistrates who had charge of building
operations at Utica would not allow brick to be used until it was five
years old.[130] It would seem that neither in Chaldaea nor still less in
Assyria was any such lengthy restriction imposed. It is only by exception
that crude bricks of which the desiccation has been carried to the farthest
possible point have been found in the palaces of Nineveh; almost the only
instance we can give is afforded by the bricks composing the arches of the
palace doorways at Khorsabad. They are rectangular, and into the
wedge-shaped intervals between their faces a softer clay has been poured to
fill up the joints.[131] As a rule things were done in a much less patient
fashion. At the end of a few days, or perhaps weeks, as soon, in fact, as
the bricks were dry and firm enough to be easily handled, they were carried
on to the ground and laid while still soft.
This we know from the evidence of M. Place, who cut many exploring shafts
through the massive Assyrian buildings, and could judge of the condition in
which the bricks had been put in place by the appearance of his
excavations. From top to bottom their sides showed a plain and uniform
surface; not the slightest sign of joints was to be found. Some might think
that the bricks, instead of being actually soft, were first dried in the
sun and then, when they came to be used, that each was dipped in water so
as to give it a momentary wetness before being laid in its place. M. Place
repels any such hypothesis. He points out that, had the Assyrian
bricklayers proceeded in that fashion, each joint would be distinguishable
by a rather darker tint than the rest of the wall. There is nothing of the
kind in fact. The only things that prove his excavations to have been made
through brick and not through a mass of earth beaten solid with the rammer
are, in the first place, that the substance cut is very homogeneous and
much more dense than it would have been had it not been kneaded and pressed
in the moulds; and, secondly, that the horizontal courses are here and
there to be distinguished from each other by their differences of
tint.[132]
The art of burning brick dates, in the case of Chaldaea, from a very remote
epoch. No tradition subsisted of a period when it was not practised. After
the deluge, when men wished to build a city and a tower which should reach
to heaven, "they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn
them throughly; and they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
mortar."[133]
The Babylonian bricks were, as a rule, one Chaldaean foot (rather more than
an English foot) square. Their colour varies in different buildings from a
dark red to a light yellow,[134] but they are always well burnt and of
excellent quality. Nearly all of them bear an inscription to the following
effect: "Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, restorer of the pyramid and the
tower, eldest son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, I." In laying the brick
the face bearing this inscription was turned downwards. The characters were
impressed on the soft clay with a stamp. More than forty varieties have
already been discovered, implying the existence of as many stamps (see Fig.
32). In Assyria these inscriptions were sometimes stamped, sometimes
engraved with the hand (Fig. 33).
Most of the bricks are regular in shape, with parallel and rectangular
faces, but a few wedge-shaped ones have been found, both in Chaldaea and
Assyria. These must have been made for building arches or vaults. Their
obliquity varies according to their destined places in the curve.[135]
The body of the enamelled bricks differs from that of the ordinary kind. It
is softer and more friable, appearing to be scarcely burnt.[136] This
difference, at which M. Place was so much surprised, had its reason. The
makers understood that their enamel colours when vitrified would penetrate
deeper into and be more closely incorporated with the material upon which
they were placed were the latter not so completely hardened.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.--Babylonian brick; from the Louvre. 16 inches
square on face, and 4 inches thick.]
Crude brick, burnt brick, and brick enamelled, those were the only
materials at the command of the architect, in the cities, at least, of
Chaldaea. A few fragments of basalt and diorite have certainly been found in
their ruins, especially at Tello, recently excavated by M. de Sarzec; but
we can easily tell from the appearance of these blocks that they played a
very subordinate part in the buildings into which they were introduced.
Some of them seem to have been employed as a kind of decoration in relief
upon the brick walls; others, and those the most numerous, appear to have
been used in the principal entrances to buildings. Upon one face a
semicircular hollow or socket may be noticed, in which the foot of the
bronze pivots, or rather the pivot shod and faced with bronze, upon which
the heavy timber doors and their casings of metal were hung, had to turn.
The marks of the consequent friction are still clearly visible.[137] The
dimensions of these stones are never great, and it is easy to see that
their employment for building purposes was always of the most restricted
nature. They had indeed to be brought from a great distance. The towns upon
the Persian Gulf might get them from Arabia.[138] Babylon and Nineveh must
have drawn them from the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.[139]
But quarrying and transport involved an expenditure that prevented any
thought of bringing these volcanic rocks into common use.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.--Brick from Khorsabad; Louvre. 12-2/3 inches
square, and 4-4/5 inches thick.]
Compared with the towns of the lower Euphrates, Babylon was not far from
mountains whence, by means of canals and rivers, she might have easily
obtained a limestone of good quality. Even in these days, when commerce and
industry have fallen so low in those regions, the gypseous alabaster from
the neighbourhood of Mossoul is transported in no unimportant quantities as
far as Bagdad. It is used for lining baths and those _serdabs_ to which the
people retreat in summer.[140]
The remains of the great capital show no trace of dressed stone. And yet it
was used during the second empire in some of the great public works
undertaken by Nabopolassar and more especially by Nebuchadnezzar.
Herodotus, who saw Babylon, declares this in the most formal manner in his
description of the bridge which then united, for the first time, the two
banks of the Euphrates. While the river was bordered by quays of burnt
brick, the bridge, says the historian, "was built of very large stones,
bound together with iron clamps embedded in lead."[141]
That, however, was but one exception, and it was necessitated by the very
nature of the work to be carried out. No cement was to be had which could
resist the action of water for an indefinite period and maintain the
coherence of brickwork subjected to its unsleeping attacks. In order to
obtain piers capable of withstanding the current during the great floods,
it was better too to use blocks of considerable weight, which could be held
together by metal tenons or clasps.
It was but at rare intervals that buildings had to be erected in which the
habits of ages had to be thus abandoned. Why is it that such works have
perished and left no sign? The question may be easily answered. When the
ruins of Babylon began to be used as an open quarry, the stone buildings
must have been the first to disappear. This material, precious by its
rarity and in greater request than any other, was used again and again
until no trace of its original destination or of the buildings in which it
was found remained.
In Assyria long chains of hills traversed the plain and stretched here and
there as far as the borders of the two rivers, besides which the last
buttresses of the mountains of Kurdistan came very near the left bank of
the Tigris. These hills all contained limestone. Two sorts were found: one
fine, hard, close grained, and a little shelly, the other softer and more
friable.
For the decoration of his monumental doorways and the lining of his richest
apartments, the architect chose and committed to the sculptor those fine
slabs of gypseous alabaster of which so many examples are to be seen in the
Louvre and British Museum. In the plains gypsum serves as a base or
foundation for the wide banks of clay that spread over the country, and are
much less thick than in the south of Chaldaea. Alabaster is there to be met
with in great quantities, often but little below the surface of the
soil.[142] It is a sulphate of chalk, gray in colour, soft and yet
susceptible of polish. But it has many defects; it breaks easily and
deteriorates rapidly on exposure to the air. The Assyrians, however, did
not fear to use it in great masses, as witness the bulls in the Louvre and
British Museum. Before removal these carved man-headed animals weighed some
thirty-five tons, and some of those remaining at Khorsabad and Kouyundjik
are still larger.
In Assyria as in Chaldaea the dark and hard volcanic rocks have only been
found in a few isolated fragments. They were used by the statuary and
ornamentist rather than by the architect, and we cannot say for certain
where they got them. We know, however, that basalt and other rocks of that
kind were found in the upper valleys of the streams that flowed into the
two great rivers.[143]
The Assyrian architect had therefore only to stretch out his hand to win
stone of a sufficiently varied nature from the soil of his own country or
the flanks of its mountains. It was, of course, mediocre in quality but it
had powers of resistance that fitted it for use in certain positions. At
the first glance it is difficult to understand why so little use was made
of it. But in truth stone was for the Assyrian no more than an accessory
and complementary material; the bodies of his structures were never
composed of it; it was mainly confined to plinths, pavements, and the
internal linings of walls.
In spite of its apparent singularity this determined exclusion is to be
easily explained. The Assyrian invented nothing. His language and his
writing, his religion and his science, came from Chaldaea, and so did his
art. When the kings of Resen, of Calech, and Nineveh, took it into their
heads to build palaces, they imported architects, painters, and sculptors,
from the southern kingdom. Why, it may be asked, did those artists remain
so faithful to the traditions in which they had grown up when they found
themselves planted among such different surroundings? The answer is, that
nothing is more tenacious of life than those professional habits that are
transmitted from one generation to another by the practical teaching of
more or less close corporations, besides which we must remember that the
Chaldaean methods were excellently well fitted for the satisfaction of those
impatient princes at whose orders the works were undertaken. For the
quarrying, dressing, and fixing of stone, a special and rather tedious
education was required. The manufacture and laying of bricks was
comparatively easy. A few weeks were sufficient to learn all that was to be
learnt about the kneading and moulding of the earth, its desiccation in the
sun or burning in the kiln. Provided that experienced men were forthcoming
to superintend the latter operation, millions of good bricks could be made
in the year.[144] All this required no lengthy apprenticeship. Their
arrangement in horizontal courses or grouping at stated intervals, into
those lines of battlements with which every wall was crowned, was done by
the men of the _corvee_. Certain parts of the building, such as arches and
vaults, required more care and skill, and were left, no doubt, to
experienced masons and bricklayers, but, with these exceptions, the whole
work could be confided to the first-comers, to those armies of captives
whom we see in the bas-reliefs labouring in chained gangs like convicts.
Working in this fashion, even the most formidable works could be completed
with singular rapidity. In Assyria, as in Chaldaea, a prince was no sooner
seated firmly upon the throne than his architects set about erecting a
palace which should be entirely his own. He had no wish that any name but
his should be read upon its walls, or that they should display any deeds of
valour but those due to his own prowess. In the life of constant war and
adventure led by these conquering sovereigns, speed was everything, for
they could never be sure of the morrow.
That considerations like these counted for much in the determination of the
Assyrian architects to follow a system that the abundance of durable
materials invited them to cast aside can hardly be doubted. They did not
dare to rouse the displeasure of masters who disliked to wait; they
preferred rather to sacrifice the honour and glory to be won by the
erection of solid and picturesque buildings than to use the slowly worked
materials in which alone they could be carried out.
Assyria was in all respects better provided than Chaldaea. Nature itself
seemed to invite her to throw off her too docile spirit of imitation and to
create an art of her own. Her possession of stone was not her only
advantage over her southern neighbour, she had timber also; at least the
Ninevite architect had to go a much shorter distance than his Babylonian
rival in order to find it. From the summits of the lofty mounds, at whose
feet he established his workshops, he could catch a distant view of
mountain chains, whose valleys were clothed with forests of oak and beech,
pine and cypress. There was nothing of the kind within reach of Lower
Mesopotamia. The nearest mountains, those which ran parallel to the left
bank of the Tigris but at a considerable distance, were more naked, even in
ancient times, than those of Kurdistan and Armenia. From one side of the
plain to the other there were no trees but the palm and the poplar from
which timbers of any length could be cut. The soft and fibrous date-palm
furnishes one of the worst kinds of wood in the world; the poplar, though
more useful, is not much less brittle and light. From materials like these
no system of carpentry could be developed that should allow great spaces to
be covered and great heights to be reached. When Nineveh and, after her,
Babylon, had conquered all Western Asia, she drew, like Egypt before her,
upon the forests of Lebanon. There she obtained the beams and planks for
the ceilings and doors of her sumptuous palaces.[145] The employment,
however, of these excellent woods must always have been rare and
exceptional. Moreover, other habits had become confirmed. When these new
resources were put at the disposition of architecture, the art was too old
and too closely wedded to its traditional methods to accept their aid. In
the use of wood, as in that of brick, Assyria neglected to make the best of
the advantages assured to her by her situation and her natural products.
If Chaldaea was ill-provided with stone and timber, she had every facility
for procuring the useful and precious metals. They were not, of course, to
be found in her alluvial plains, but metals are easy of transport,
especially to a country whose commerce has the command of navigable
highways. The industrial centres in which they are manufactured are often
separated by great distances from the regions where they are won from the
earth. But to procure the more indispensable among them the dwellers upon
the Tigris and Euphrates had no great distance to cover. The southern
slopes of Zagros, three or four days' journey from Nineveh, furnished iron,
copper, lead, and silver in abundance. Mines are still worked in Kurdistan,
or, at least, have been worked in very recent times, which supply these
metals in abundance. The traces of abandoned workings may be recognized
even by the hasty and unlearned traveller, and a skilful engineer would,
no doubt, make further discoveries.[146] Mr. Layard was unable to learn
that any gold had been won in our days; but from objects found in the
excavations, from inscriptions in which the Assyrians boast of their wealth
and prodigality, from Egyptian texts in which the details of tributes paid
by the Roten-nou, that is by the people of Syria and Mesopotamia, are
given, it is clear that in the great days of Nineveh and Babylon those
capitals possessed a vast quantity of gold, and employed it in a host of
different ways. In the course of several centuries of war, victory, and
pillage, princes, officers, and soldiers had amassed enormous wealth by the
simple process of stripping the nations of Western Asia of every object of
value they possessed. These accumulations were continually added to, in the
case of Babylon, by the active commerce she carried on with the
mineral-producing countries, such as the Caucasus, Bactriana, India, and
Egypt.
There are some architectures--that of the Greeks for example--that preserve
a rare nobility even when deprived of their metal ornaments and
polychromatic decoration. The architects of Babylon and Nineveh were
differently situated. Deprived of metals some of their finest effects would
have been impossible. The latter could be used at will in flexible threads
or long, narrow bands, which could be nailed or riveted on to wood or
brick. They may be beaten with the hammer, shaped by the chisel, or
engraved by the burin; their surfaces may be either dead or polished; the
variety of shades of which they are capable, and the brilliance of their
reflections, are among the most valuable resources of the decorator, and
the colouring principles they contain provide the painter and enameller
with some of his richest and most solid tones. In Chaldaea the architect was
condemned by the _force majeure_ of circumstances to employ little more
than crude or burnt brick and bad timber; in Assyria he voluntarily
condemned himself to the limitations they imposed. By the skilful and
intelligent use of metals, he managed to overcome the resulting
disadvantages in some degree, and to mask under a sumptuous decoration of
gold, silver, and bronze, the deficiencies inherent in the material of
which his buildings were mainly composed.
NOTES:
[127] G. CURTIUS is of opinion that the word keramos, and consequently its
derivatives (kerameus, kerameia, kerameike, &c.,) springs rather from a
root CRA, expressive of the idea to _cook_, than from the word kerannumi,
to mix, knead (_Grundzuege der Griechischen Etymologie_, p. 147, 5th
edition).
[128] See _Nahum_ iii. 14.
[129] Even these dimensions were sometimes passed. The Louvre possesses an
Assyrian brick rather more than 17-1/2 inches square. See DE LONGPERIER,
_Notice des Antiquites Assyriennes_ (3rd edition, 1854, 12mo), No. 44.
[130] VITRUVIUS, 1. ii. ch. 3.
[131] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. i. p. 225. The vault of the
gallery discovered by LAYARD in the centre of the tower that occupied a
part of the mound of Nimroud was constructed in the same fashion.
_Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 126.
[132] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. i. pp. 211-224.
[133] _Genesis_ xi. 3.
[134] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 506 and 531.
[135] See, for Chaldaea, LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 133; and for
Assyria, PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. i. p. 250, and vol. ii. plates
38 and 39. As an example of the varieties of section presented by these
bricks, we may cite those found by M. de Sarzec in the ruins of Tello,
which belonged to a circular pillar. This pillar was composed of circular
bricks, placed in horizontal courses round a centre of the same material.
Elsewhere triangular bricks, which must have formed the angles of buildings
have been found. TAYLOR, _Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_ (_Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. xv. p. 266). At Abou-Sharein, this same
traveller found convex-sided bricks (_Journal_, &c., vol. xv. p. 409).
[136] PLACE, _Ninive_, &c., vol. i. p. 233.
[137] Some of these fragments are in the Louvre. They are placed on the
ground in the Assyrian Gallery. Their forms are too irregular to be fitted
for reproduction here. But for the hollow in question, one might suppose
them to be mere shapeless boulders. LAYARD noticed similar remains among
the ruins of Babylon, _Discoveries_, &c., p. 528.
[138] M. OPPERT is even inclined to think that some of them came from the
peninsula of Sinai and the eastern shores of Egypt (_Revue Archeologique_,
vol. xlii. p. 272). The formation of the Arabian hills is not yet very well
known, and we are not in a position to say for certain whence these rocks
may have come. It seems probable however, that they might have been
obtained from certain districts of Arabia, from which they could be carried
without too great an effort to within reach of the canals fed by the
Euphrates, or of some port trading with the Persian Gulf.
[139] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c., p. 528.
[140] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 116.
[141] HERODOTUS, i. 186. DIODORUS (ii. viii. 2), quoting Ctesias, speaks in
almost the same terms of this stone bridge, which he attributes to
Semiramis.
[142] BOTTA, _Monuments de Ninive_, vol. v. p. 3.
[143] In the valley of the Khabour, the chief affluent of the Euphrates,
LAYARD found volcanoes whose activity seemed only to have been extinguished
at a very recent epoch. Long streams of lava projected from their sides
into the plain. _Discoveries_, p. 307.
[144] As for the simple and rapid nature of the process by which crude
bricks are manufactured to the present day in Persia, see TEXIER,
_L'Armenie et la Perse_, vol. ii. p. 64.
[145] As to the employment in Assyria of cedar from the Lebanon, see
FRANCOIS LENORMANT, _Histoire Ancienne_, vol. ii. p. 191, and an
inscription of Sennacherib, translated by OPPERT, _Les Sargonides_, pp. 52,
53. Its use in Babylon is proved by several passages of the great text
known as the _Inscription of London_, in which Nebuchadnezzar recounts the
great works he had caused to be carried out in his capital (LENORMANT,
_Histoire_, vol. ii. pp. 228 and 233). We find this phrase among others, "I
used in the chamber of oracles the largest of the trees transported from
the summits of Lebanon." LAYARD (_Discoveries_, pp. 356-7) tells us that
one evening during the Nimroud excavations, his labourers lighted a fire to
dry themselves after a storm, which they fed with timbers taken from the
ruins. The smell of burning cedar, a perfume which so many Greek and Latin
poets have praised (_urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum_, VIRGIL,
_AEneid_, vii. 13), apprised him of what was going on. In the British Museum
(Nimroud Gallery, Case A), fragments of recovered joists may be seen. They
are in such good preservation that they might be shaped and polished anew,
so as to again bring out the markings and the fine dark-yellow tone which
contributed not a little to make the wood so precious. It was sought both
for its agreeable appearance and its known solidity; and experience has
proved that the popular opinion which declared it incorruptible had some
foundation.
[146] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. i. p. 223, and vol. ii. pp. 415-418.
Sec. 2.--_The General Principles of Form._
If in our fancy we strip the buildings of Chaldaea and Assyria of all their
accessories, if we take from them their surface ornament and the salience
of their roofs, the bare edifice that remains is what geometricians call a
_rectangular parallelopiped_.
Of all the types created by this architecture, the only one of which we
still possess a few fairly well preserved examples is that of the palace.
It is therefore the best known of them all, and the first to excite
attention and study. Now, upon the artificial mound, the wide terrace, over
which its imposing mass is spread, the palace may be likened to a huge box
whose faces are all either horizontal or vertical (Plate V.). Even in the
many-storied temples, whose general aspect is modified of course to a great
extent by their height, the same element may be traced. We have endeavoured
to restore some of these by collating the descriptions of the ancient
writers with the remains that still exist in many parts of Mesopotamia
(Plates II., III., and IV.). Their general form may be described as the box
to which we have compared the palace repeated several times in vertical
succession, each box being rather smaller than the one below it. By these
means their builders proposed to give them an elevation approaching the
marvellous. The system was in some respects similar to that of the pyramid,
but the re-entering angles at each story gave them a very different
appearance, at least to one regarding them from a short distance. Only now
and then do we find any inclination like that of the sides of a pyramid,
and in those cases it applies to bases alone (Plate IV.). As a rule the
walls or external surfaces are perpendicular to their foundations.
We may, perhaps, explain the complete absence from Chaldaea of a system of
construction that was so universal in Egypt by the differences of climate
and of the materials used. Doubtless it rains less in Mesopotamia than even
in Italy or Greece. But rain is not, as in Upper Egypt, an almost unknown
phenomenon. The changes of the seasons are ushered in by storms of rain
that amount to little less than deluges.[147] Upon sloping walls of
dressed stone these torrents could beat without causing any great damage,
but where brick was used the inconveniences of such a slope would soon be
felt. Water does not fall so fast upon a slope as upon a perpendicular
wall, and a surface made up of comparatively thin bricks has many more
joints than one in which stones of any considerable size are employed. As a
rule the external faces of all important buildings were revetted with very
hard and well burnt bricks. But the rain, driven by the wind, might easily
penetrate through the joints and spread at will through the core of mere
sun-dried bricks within. The verticality of Assyrian and Chaldaean walls was
necessary, therefore, for their preservation. Without it the thin covering
of burnt brick would have been unable to do its proper work of protecting
the softer material within, and the sudden storms by which the plains were
now and again half drowned, would have been far more hurtful than they
were.
The Chaldaean palace, like the Egyptian temple, sought mainly for lateral
development. Its extent far surpassed its elevation, and horizontal lines
predominated in its general physiognomy. There was here a latent harmony
between the architecture of nature and that of man, between the great
plains of Mesopotamia, with their distant horizons, and the long walls,
broken only by their crenellated summits, of the temples and palaces. There
must, however, have been a certain want of relief, of visibility, in
edifices conceived on such lines and built in such a country.
This latter defect was obvious to the Mesopotamians themselves, who raised
the dwellings of their gods and kings upon an artificial mound with a
carefully paved summit.[148] Upon this summit the structure properly
speaking rested, so that, in Chaldaea, the foundations of a great building
instead of being, as elsewhere, sunk beneath the soil, stand so high above
it that the ground line of the palace or temple to which they belong rises
above the plain to a height that leaves the roofs of ordinary houses and
even the summits of the tallest palms far below. This arrangement gave a
clearer salience and a more imposing mass to structures which would
otherwise, on account of their monotony of line and the vast excess of
their horizontal over their vertical development, have had but little
effect.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Temple; from a Kouyundjik bas-relief. Rawlinson,
vol. i. p. 314.]
Such an arrangement would appear superfluous in the case of those towers in
the shape of stepped pyramids, whose summits could be carried above the
plain to any fanciful height by the simple process of adding story to
story. But the Mesopotamian constructor went upon the same system as in the
case of his palaces. It was well in any case to interpose a dense, firm,
and dry mass between the wet and often shifting soil and the building, and
to afford a base which by its size and solidity should protect the great
accumulation of material that was to be placed upon it from injury through
any settling in the foundations. Moreover, the paved esplanade had its
place in the general economy. It formed a spacious court about the temple,
a sacred _temenos_ as the Greeks would have called it, a _haram_ as a
modern Oriental would say. It could be peopled with statues and decorated
with mystic emblems; religious processions could be marshalled within its
bounds.
[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Tell-Ede, in Lower Chaldaea. From Rawlinson's _Five
Great Monarchies_.]
The general, we may almost say the invariable, rule in Mesopotamia was that
every structure of a certain importance should be thus borne on an
artificial hill. An examination of the ruins themselves and of the
monuments figured upon the bas-reliefs shows us that these substructures
did not always have the same form. Their faces were sometimes vertical,
sometimes inclined; sometimes again they presented a gentle outward curve
(see Fig. 34); but these purely external differences did not affect the
principle. In all the river basins of Mesopotamia, whether of the
Euphrates, the Tigris, or the smallest affluents of the Persian Gulf,
whenever you see one of these _tells_, or isolated mounds, standing above
the general surface of the plain, you may be sure that if you drive a
trench into it you will come upon those courses of crude brick that
proclaim its artificial origin. Rounded by natural disintegration and
scarred by the rain torrents, such a hillock is apt to deceive the
thoughtless or ignorant traveller, but an instructed explorer knows at a
glance that many centuries ago it bore on its summit a temple, a fortress,
or some royal or lordly habitation (Fig. 35).
The distinguishing feature of the staged towers is their striving after the
greatest possible elevation. It is true that neither from Herodotus nor
Diodorus do we get any definite statements as to the height of the most
famous of these monuments, the temple of Belus at Babylon;[149] Strabo
alone talks of a stade (616 feet), and it may be asked on what authority he
gives that measurement, which has been freely treated as an exaggeration.
In any case we may test it to a certain extent by examining the largest and
best preserved of the artificial hills of which we have spoken,[150] and we
must remember that all the writers of antiquity are unanimous in asserting
its prodigious height.[151] We run small risk of exaggeration, therefore,
in saying that some of these Chaldaean temples were much taller than the
highest of the Gizeh Pyramids. Their general physiognomy was the reverse of
that of the Mesopotamian palaces, but it was no less the result of the
natural configuration of the country. Their architect sought to find his
effect in contrast; he endeavoured to impress the spectator by the strong,
not to say violent, opposition between their soaring lines and the infinite
horizon of the plain. Such towers erected in a hilly country like Greece
would have looked much smaller. There, they would have had for close
neighbours sometimes high mountains and always boldly contoured hills and
rocks; however far up into the skies their summits might be carried, they
would still be dominated on one side or the other. Involuntarily the eye
demands from nature the same scale of proportions as are suggested by the
works of man. Where these are chiefly remarkable for their height, much of
their effect will be destroyed by the proximity of such hills as
Acrocorinthus or Lycabettus, to say nothing of Taygetus or Parnassus.
It is quite otherwise when the surface of the country stretches away on
every side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days none
of the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved more
than a half of their original height;[152] all that remains is a formless
mass encumbered with heaps of _debris_ at its foot, and yet, as every
traveller in the country has remarked, these ruined monuments have an
extraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They give
an impression of far greater height than they really possess (Fig. 36). At
certain hours of the day, we are told, this illusion is very strong: in the
early morning when the base of the mound is lost in circling vapours and
its summit alone stands up into the clear sky above and receives the first
rays of the sun; and in the evening, when the whole mass rises in solid
shadow against the red and gold of the western sky. At these times it is
easy to comprehend the ideas by which the Chaldaean architect was animated
when he created the type of these many-storied towers and scattered them
with such profusion over the whole face of the country. The chief want of
his land was the picturesque variety given by accidents of the ground to
its nearest neighbours, a want he endeavoured to conceal by substituting
these pyramidal temples, these lofty pagodas, as we are tempted to call
them, for the gentle slopes and craggy peaks that are so plentiful beyond
the borders of Chaldaea. By their conspicuous elevation, and the enormous
expenditure of labour they implied, they were meant to break the uniformity
of the great plains that lay about them; at the same time, they would
astonish contemporary travellers and even that remote posterity for whom no
more than a shapeless heap of ruins would be left. They would do more than
all the writings of all the historians to celebrate the power and genius of
the race that dared thus to correct and complete the work of nature.
[Illustration: FIG. 36.--Haman, in Lower Chaldaea. From Loftus.]
When the king and his architect had finished one of these structures, they
might calculate upon an infinite duration for it without any great
presumption, and that partly because Chaldaean art, even when most ambitious
and enterprising, never made use of any but the simplest means. The arch
was in more frequent use than in Egypt, but it hardly seems to have been
employed in buildings to which any great height was to be given. Scarcely a
trace of it is to be discovered either in the parts preserved of these
structures or in their sculptured representations. None of those light and
graceful methods of construction that charm and excite the eye, but must be
paid for by a certain loss of stability, are to be found here. Straight
lines are the inflexible rule. The few arches that may be discovered in the
interior exercise no thrust, surrounded as they are on every side by
weighty masses. In theory the equilibrium is perfect; and if, as the event
has proved, the conditions of stability, or at least of duration, were less
favourable than in the pyramids at Memphis or in the temples at Thebes, the
fault lies with the inherent vices of the material used and with the
comparatively unfavourable climate.
* * * * *
In the absence of stone the Chaldaean builder was shut off from many of the
most convenient methods of covering, and therefore of multiplying, voids.
Speaking generally, we may say that he employed neither _piers_, nor
_columns_, nor those beams of limestone, sandstone, or granite, which we
know as _architraves_; he was, therefore, ignorant of the _portico_, and
never found himself driven by artistic necessities to those ingenious,
delicate, and learned efforts of invention by which the Egyptians and
Greeks arrived at what we call _orders_. This term is well understood. By
it we mean supports of which the principal parts, base, shaft, and capital,
have certain constant and closely defined mutual relations. Like a
zoological species, each order has a distinctive character and personal
physiognomy of its own. An art that is deprived of such a resource is
condemned to a real inferiority. It may cover every surface with the luxury
of a sumptuous decoration, but, in spite of all its efforts, a secret
poverty, a want of genius and invention, will be visible in its creations.
The varied arrangements of the portico suggested the _hypostyle hall_, with
all the picturesque developments it has undergone at the hands of the
Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the people of modern Europe. In
their ignorance of the pier and column, the Chaldaeans were unable to give
their buildings those spacious galleries and chambers which delight the eye
while they diminish the actual mass of a building. Their towers were
artificial mountains, almost as solid and massive from base to summit as
the natural hills from which their lines were taken.[153] A few small
apartments were contrived within them, near their outer edges, that might
fairly be compared to caves hollowed in the face of a cliff. The weight
upon the lower stories and the substructure was therefore enormous, even to
the point of threatening destruction by sheer pulverisation. The whole
interior was composed of crude brick, and if, as is generally supposed,
those bricks were put in place before the process of desiccation was
complete, the shrinkage resulting from its continuance must have had a bad
effect upon the structure as a whole, especially as the position of the
courses and the more or less favourable aspects of the different external
faces must have caused a certain inequality in the rate at which that
operation went on. The resistance would not be the same at all points, and
settlements would occur by which the equilibrium of the upper stages might
be compromised and the destruction of the whole building prepared.
Another danger lay in the violence of the sudden storms and the diluvial
character of the winter rains. Doubtless the outsides of the walls were
faced with well burnt bricks, carefully set, and often coated with an
impenetrable enamel; but an inclined plane of a more or less gentle
gradient wound from base to summit to give access to the latter. When a
storm burst upon one of these towers, this plane became in a moment the bed
of a torrent, for its outer edge would, of course, be protected by a low
wall. The water would pour like a river over the sloping pavement and
strike violently against each angle. Whether it were allowed to flow over
the edges of the inclined plane or, as seems more probable, directed in its
course so as to sweep it from top to bottom, it must in either case have
caused damage requiring continual watchfulness and frequent repairs. If
this watchfulness were remitted for an instant, some of the external burnt
and enamelled bricks might become detached and leave a gap through which
the water could penetrate to the soft core within, and set up a process of
disintegration which would become more actively mischievous with every year
that passed. The present appearance of these ruins is thus, to a great
extent, to be explained. Travellers in the country agree in describing them
as irregular mounds, deeply seamed by the rains; and the sides against
which the storms and waterspouts that devastate Mesopotamia would chiefly
spend their force are those on which the damage is most conspicuous (see
Fig. 37).
Even in antique times these buildings had suffered greatly. In Egypt, when
the supreme power had passed, after one of those periods of decay that were
by no means infrequent in her long career, into the hands of an energetic
race of princes like those of the eighteenth or twenty-sixth dynasties, all
traces of damage done to the public monuments by neglect or violence were
rapidly effaced. The pyramids could take care of themselves. They had seen
the plains at their feet covered again and again with hordes of barbarians,
and yet had lost not an inch of their height or a stone of their polished
cuirass. Even in the temples the setting up of a few fallen columns, the
reworking of a few bas-reliefs, the restoration of a painting here and
there, was all that was necessary to bring back their former splendour.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.--Babil, at Babylon. From Oppert.]
In Chaldaea the work undertaken by Nabopolassar and his dynasty was far more
arduous. He had to rebuild nearly all the civil and religious buildings
from their foundations, to undertake, as we know from more than one text, a
general reconstruction.[154] A new Babylon was reared from the ground.
Little of her former monuments remained but their foundations and
materials. Temples richer than the first rose upon the lofty mounds, and,
for the sake of speed, were often built of the old bricks, upon which
appeared the names of forgotten kings. Nothing was neglected, no expense
was spared by which the solidity of the new buildings could be increased,
and yet, five or six centuries afterwards, nothing was left but ruins.
Herodotus seems to have seen the great temple of Bel while it was still
practically intact, but Diodorus speaks of it as an edifice "which time had
caused to fall,"[155] and he adds that "writers are not in accord in what
they say about this temple, so that it is impossible for us to make sure
what its real dimensions were." It would seem, therefore, that the upper
stories had fallen long before the age of Augustus. Even Ctesias, perhaps,
who is Diodorus's constant guide in all that he writes on the subject of
Chaldaea and Assyria, never saw the monument in its integrity. In any case,
the building was a complete ruin in the time of Strabo. "The tomb of
Belus," says that accurate and well-informed geographer, "is now
destroyed."[156] Strabo, like Diodorus, attributes the destruction of these
buildings partly to time, partly to the avenging violence of the Persians,
who, irritated by the never-ending revolts of Babylon, ruined the proudest
and most famous of her temples as a punishment. That the sanctuary was
pillaged by the Persians under Xerxes, as Strabo affirms, is probable
enough, but we have some difficulty in believing that they troubled
themselves to destroy the building itself.[157] The effort would have been
too great, and, in view of the slow but sure action of the elements upon
its substance, it would have been labour thrown away. The destruction of an
Egyptian monument required a desperate and long continued attack, it had to
be deliberately murdered, if we may use such a phrase, but the buildings of
Mesopotamia, with their thin cuirasses of burnt brick and their soft
bodies, required the care of an architect to keep them standing, we might
say of a doctor to keep them alive, to watch over them day by day, and to
stop every wound through which the weather could reach their vulnerable
parts. Abandoned to themselves they would soon have died, and died natural
deaths.
Materials and a system of construction such as those we have described
could only result, in a close style of architecture, in a style in which
the voids bore but a very small proportion to the solids. And such a style
was well suited to the climate. In the long and burning summers of
Mesopotamia the inhabitants freely exchanged light for coolness. With few
and narrow openings and thick walls the temperature of their dwellings
could be kept far lower than that of the torrid atmosphere without.[158]
Thus we find in the Ninevite palaces outer walls of from fifteen to
five-and-twenty feet in thickness. It would have been very difficult to
contrive windows through such masses as that, and they would when made have
given but a feeble light. The difficulty was frankly met by discarding the
use of any openings but the doors and skylights cut in the roofs. The
window proper was almost unknown. We can hardly point to an instance of its
use, either among Assyrian or Chaldaean remains, or in the representations
of them in the bas-reliefs. Here and there we find openings in the upper
stories of towers, but they are loop-holes rather than windows (Fig.
38).[159]
[Illustration: FIG. 38.--A Fortress. From Layard.]
At first we are inclined to pity kings shut up within such blind walls as
these. But we must not be betrayed into believing that they took no
measures to enjoy the evening breeze, or to cast their eyes over the broad
plains at their feet, over the cities that lay under the shadows of the
lofty mounds upon which their palaces were built. At certain times of the
year and day they would retire within the shelter of their thickest walls
and roofs; just as at the present moment the inhabitants of Mossoul,
Bassorah, and Bagdad, take refuge within their _serdabs_ as soon as the sun
is a little high in the heavens, and stay there until the approach of
evening.[160]
When the heat was less suffocating the courtyards would be pleasant, with
their encircling porticoes sustaining a light covering inclined towards the
centre, an arrangement required by the climate, and one which is to be
found both at Pompeii and in the Arab houses of Damascus, and is sure to
have been adopted by the inhabitants of ancient Chaldaea. Additional space
was given by the wide esplanades in front of the doors, and by the flat
roofs, upon which sleep was often more successfully wooed than in the rooms
below. And sometimes the pleasures given by refreshing breezes, cool
shadows, and a distant prospect could be all enjoyed together, for in a
certain bas-relief that seems to represent one of those great buildings of
which we possess the ruins, we see an open arcade--a _loggia_ as it would
be called in Italy--rise above the roof for the whole length of the facade
(Fig. 39).[161] There are houses in the neighbourhood of Mossoul in which a
similar arrangement is to be met with, as we may see from Mr. Layard's
sketch of a house in a village of Kurdistan inhabited by Nestorians (Fig.
40). It includes a modified kind of portico, the pillars of which are
suggested or rather demanded by the necessity for supporting the ceiling.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.--View of a Town and its Palaces. Kouyundjik. From
Layard.]
Supposing such an arrangement to have obtained in Mesopotamia, of what
material were the piers or columns composed? Had they been of stone their
remains would surely have been found among the ruins; but no such things
have ever come to light, so we may conclude that they were of timber or
brick; the roof, at least, must have been wood. The joints may have been
covered with protecting plates of metal by which their duration was
assured. We have a curious example of the use of these bronze sheaths in
the remains of gilded palm-trees found by M. Place in front of the _harem_
at Khorsabad. He there encountered a cedar trunk lying upon the ground and
incased in a brass coat on which all the roughnesses of cedar bark were
imitated. The leaves of doors were also protected by metallic bands, which
were often decorated with bas-reliefs.
[Illustration: FIG. 40.--House in Kurdistan; from Layard.]
Must we conclude that stone columns were unknown in Chaldaea and Assyria? As
for Chaldaea, we have no positive information in the matter, but we know
that she had no building stone of her own. The Chaldaean sculptor might
indeed import a few blocks of diorite or basalt, either from Arabia, Egypt,
or the valleys of Mount Zagros, for use in statues which would justify such
expense; but the architect must have been restricted to the use of material
close at hand. In Assyria limestone was always within reach, and yet the
Assyrians never succeeded in freeing themselves from traditional methods
sufficiently to make the column play a part similar to that assigned to it
by the peoples of Egypt and Greece. Their habits, and especially the habit
of respect for the practices and traditions of Chaldaea, were too strong for
them. Their use of the column, though often tasteful and happy, is never
without a certain timidity. One is inclined to think they had an inkling of
the possibilities latent in it, but that they lacked the courage necessary
to give it full play in the interiors and upon the facades of their large
palaces and towers. In the bas-reliefs we find columns used in the kiosques
built upon the river banks (Fig. 41), and in the pavilions or chapels
studded over the royal gardens (Fig. 42). The excavations, moreover, have
yielded pedestals and capitals which, rare as they are, have a double claim
to our regard. The situations in which they have been discovered seem to
show that columns were sometimes used in front of doorways, to support
porches or covered ways extending to the full limits of the esplanade;
secondly, their forms themselves are interesting. Close study will convince
us that, when copied by neighbouring peoples who made frequent and general
use of stone supports, they might well have exercised an influence that
was felt as far as the AEgaean, and had something to do with one of the
fairest creations of Greek art.
We thus catch side glimpses of the column, as it were, in small buildings,
in the porches before the principal doors of palaces, and in the open
galleries with which some of the latter buildings were crowned (Fig. 39).
In all these cases it is nothing but a more or less elegant accessory; we
might if we pleased give a sufficiently full description of Mesopotamian
architecture without hinting at its existence.
[Illustration: FIG. 41.--Temple on the bank of a river, Khorsabad; from
Botta.]
We cannot say the same of the arch, which played a much more important
_role_ than it did in Egypt. There it was banished, as we have seen, to the
secondary parts of an edifice. It hardly entered into the composition of
the nobler class of buildings; it was used mainly in store-rooms built near
the temples, in the gateways through the outer walls of tombs, and in
underground cellars and passages.[162] In Mesopotamia, on the other hand,
the arch is one of the real constituent elements of the national
architecture.
[Illustration: FIG. 42.--Temple in a Royal Park, Kouyundjik; from the
British Museum.]
That the Chaldaean architects were early led to the invention of the arch is
easily understood. They were unable to support the upper parts of their
walls, their ceilings or their roofs, upon beams of stone or timber, and
they had to devise some other means of arriving at the desired result. This
means was not matured all at once. With most peoples the first stage
consisted probably in those corbels or off-sets by which the width of the
space to be covered was reduced course by course, till a junction was
effected at the top; and sometimes this early stage may have been dispensed
with. In some cases, the workman who had to cover a narrow void with small
units of construction may, in trying them in various positions and
combinations, have hit upon the real principle of the arch. This principle
must everywhere have been discovered more or less accidentally; in one
place the accident may have come sooner than in another, and here it may
have been turned to more profit than there. We shall have to describe and
explain these differences at each stage of our journey through the art
history of antiquity, but we may at once state the general law that our
studies and comparisons will bring to light. The arch was soonest
discovered and most invariably employed by those builders who found
themselves condemned, by the geological formation of their country, to the
employment of the smallest units.
The Chaldaeans were among those builders, and they made frequent use of the
arch. They built no long arcades with piers or columns for supports, like
those of the Romans, and that simply because such structures would have
been contrary to the general principles of their architecture. They made no
use, as we have already explained, of those isolated supports whose
employment resulted in the hypostyle halls of Egypt and Persia, in the
naves of Greek temples and Latin basilicas. The want of stone put any such
arrangement out of the question. We have, then, no reason to believe that
their arches ever rested upon piers or upon the solid parts of walls freely
pierced for the admission of light. The type from which the modern east has
evolved so many fine mosques and churches was unknown in Chaldaea. In every
building of which we possess either the remains or the figured
representation the archivolts rest upon thick and solid walls.
Under these conditions the vault was supreme in certain parts of the
building. Its use was there so constant as to have almost the character of
an unvarying law. Every palace was pierced in its substructure by drains
that carried the rain water and the general waste from the large population
by which it was inhabited down into the neighbouring river, and nearly all
these drains were vaulted. And it must not be supposed that the architect
deliberately hid his vaults and arches, or that he only used them in those
parts of his buildings where they were concealed and lost in their
surroundings; they occur, also, upon the most careful and elaborate
facades. The gates of cities, of palaces and temples, of most buildings, in
fact, that have any monumental character, are crowned by an arch, the curve
of which is accentuated by a brilliantly coloured soffit. This arch is
continued as a barrel vault for the whole length of the passage leading
into the interior, and these passages are sometimes very long. Vaults would
also, in all probability, have been found over those narrow chambers that
are so numerous in Assyrian palaces were it not for the universal ruin that
has overtaken their superstructures. Finally, certain square rooms have
been discovered which must have been covered with vaults in the shape of
more or less flattened domes.
[Illustration: FIG. 43.--View of a group of buildings; Kouyundjik; from
Layard.]
We must here call attention to the importance of a bas-relief belonging to
the curious series of carved pictures in which Sennacherib caused the
erection of his palace at Nineveh to be commemorated. Look well at this
group of buildings, which seems to rise upon a platform at the foot of a
hill shaded with cypresses and fruit-laden vines (see Fig. 43). The
buildings on the right have flat roofs, those on the left, and they seem
the most important, have, some hemispherical cupolas, and some tall domes
approaching cones in shape. These same forms are still in use over all that
country, not only for public buildings like baths and mosques, but even
here and there for the humblest domestic structures. Travellers have been
often surprised at encountering, in many of the villages of Upper Syria
and Mesopotamia, peasants' houses with sugar-loaf roofs like these.[163]
We need not here go further into details upon this point. In these general
and introductory remarks we have endeavoured to point out as concisely as
possible how the salient characteristics of Assyrian architecture are to be
explained by the configuration of the country, by the nature of the
materials at hand, and by the climate with which the architect had to
reckon. It was to these conditions that the originality of the system was
due; that the solids were so greatly in excess over the voids, and the
lateral over the vertical measurements of a building. In this latter
respect the buildings of Mesopotamia leave those of all other countries,
even of Egypt, far behind. They were carried, too, to an extraordinary
height without any effort to give the upper part greater lightness than the
substructure; both were equally solid and massive. Finally, the nature of
the elements of which Mesopotamian architects could dispose was such that
the desire for elegance and beauty had to be satisfied by a superficial
system of decoration, by paint and carved slabs laid on to the surface of
the walls. Beauty unadorned was beyond their reach, and their works may be
compared to women whose attractions lie in the richness of their dress and
the multitude of their jewels.
NOTES:
[147] OPPERT (_Expedition scientifique_, vol. i. p. 86) gives a description
of one of these storms that he encountered in the neighbourhood of Bagdad
on the 26th of May.
[148] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii. p. 119. When one of these
mounds is attacked from the top, the excavators must work downwards until
they come to this paved platform. As soon as it is reached no greater depth
need be attempted; all attention is then given to driving lateral trenches
in every direction. In Assyria the mass of crude bricks sometimes rests
upon a core of rock which has been utilized to save time and labour
(LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c., p. 219).
[149] See HERODOTUS, i. 181-184; and DIODORUS, ii. 9.
[150] By such means M. OPPERT arrives at a height of 250 Babylonian feet,
or about 262 feet English for the monument now represented by the mound in
the neighbourhood of Babylon known as Birs-Nimroud. _Expedition
scientifique de Mesopotamie_, vol. i. pp. 205-209, and plate 8.
[151] Homologeitai d' hupselon gegenesthai kath' huperbolen.--DIODORUS, ii.
9, 4.
[152] The mound called Babil on the site of Babylon (Plate I. and Fig. 37)
is now about 135 feet high, but the Birs-Nimroud, the highest of these
ruins, has still an elevation of not less than 220 feet (LAYARD,
_Discoveries_, p. 495).
[153] See LAYARD'S account of his excavation in the interior of the
pyramidal ruin occupying a part of the platform which now surmounts the
mound of Nimroud. From two sides trenches were cut to the centre; neither
of them encountered a void of any kind (_Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. ii.
p. 107). At a later period further trenches were cut and the rest of the
building explored (_Discoveries_, pp. 123-129). The only void of which any
trace could be found was a narrow, vaulted gallery, about 100 feet long, 6
wide, and 12 high. It was closed at both ends, and appeared never to have
had any means of access from without.
[154] See LENORMANT, _Histoire Ancienne_, vol. ii. pp. 228 and 233.
Translations of several texts in which these restorations are spoken of are
here given.
[155] tou kataskeuasmatos dia tou chronou diapeptokotos (ii. 9, 4).
[156] STRABO, xvi. 5.
[157] DIODORUS, after describing the treasures of the temple, confines
himself to saying generally, "all this was afterwards spoiled by the king
of Persia" (ii. 9, 19).
[158] According to the personal experience of M. Place, the ancient
arrangements were more suited to the climate of this country than the
modern ones that have taken their place. The overpowering heat from which
the inhabitants of modern Mossoul suffer so greatly is largely owing to the
unintelligent employment of stone and plaster in the construction of
dwellings. During his stay in that town the thermometer sometimes rose, in
his apartments, to 51 deg. Centigrade (90 deg. Fahrenheit). The mean temperature of
a summer's day was from 40 deg. to 42 deg. Centigrade (from 72 deg. to about 76 deg.
Fahrenheit).
[159] See LAYARD, _Monuments of Nineveh_, 2nd series, plates 21 and 40.
[160] The _serdab_ is a kind of cellar, the walls and floor of which are
drenched periodically with water, which, by its evaporation, lowers the
temperature by several degrees.
[161] The town represented on the sculptured slab here reproduced is not
Assyrian but Phoenician; it affords data, however, which may be
legitimately used in the restoration of the upper part of an Assyrian
palace. We can hardly believe that the Mesopotamian artists, in
illustrating the wars of the Assyrian kings, copied servilely the real
features of the conquered towns. They had no sketches by "special artists"
to guide their chisels. They were told that a successful campaign had been
fought in the marshes of the lower Euphrates, or in some country covered
with forests of date trees, and these they had no difficulty in
representing because they had examples before their eyes; so too, when
buildings were in question, we may fairly conclude that they borrowed their
motives from the architecture with which they were familiar.
[162] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. ii. pp. 77-84.
[163] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 112; GEO. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p.
341.
Sec. 3.--_Construction._
As might have been expected nothing that can be called a structure of
dressed stone has been discovered in Chaldaea;[164] in Assyria alone have
some examples been found. Of these the most interesting, and the most
carefully studied and described are the walls of Sargon's palace at
Khorsabad.
Even there stone was only employed to case the walls in which the mound was
inclosed--a cuirass of large blocks carefully dressed and fixed seemed to
give solidity to the mass, and at the same time we know by the arrangement
of the blocks that the outward appearance of the wall was by no means lost
sight of. All those of a single course were of one height but of different
depths and widths, and the arrangement followed a regular order like that
shown in Fig. 46. Their external face was carefully dressed.[165]
[Illustration: FIG. 44.--Plan of angle, Khorsabad; from Place.]
[Illustration: FIG. 45.--Section of wall through AB in Fig. 44; from
Place.]
The courses consist, on plan, of "stretchers" and "headers." We borrow from
Place the plan of an angle (Fig. 44), a section (Fig. 45), and an elevation
(Fig. 46). Courses are always horizontal and joints properly bound. The
freestone blocks at the foot of the wall are very large. The stretchers are
six feet eight inches thick, the same wide, and nine feet long. They weigh
about twenty-three tons. It is astonishing to find the Assyrians, who were
very rapid builders, choosing such heavy and unmanageable materials.
The supporting wall became gradually thinner towards the top, each course
being slightly set back from the one below it on the inner face (see Fig.
45). This arrangement is general with these retaining-walls. The average
diminution is from seven to ten feet at the base, to from three to six at
the top.
The constructor showed no less skill in the use he made of his stretchers
and headers. They not only gave him an opportunity of safely diminishing
the weight of his structure and economising his materials, they afforded a
ready means of adapting his wall exactly to the work it had to do. The
headers penetrated farther into the crude mass within than the stretchers,
and gave to the junction of the two surfaces a solidity similar to that
derived by a wall from its through stones or perpenders.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.--Elevation of wall, Khorsabad; from Place.]
In describing this wall, M. Place also calls attention to the care with
which the angles are built. "The first course," he says, "is composed of
three 'headers' with their shortest side outwards and their length engaged
in the mass behind. Two of these stones lie parallel to each other, the
third crosses their inner extremities."[166] Thanks to this ingenious
arrangement, the weakest and most exposed part of the wall is capable of
resisting any attack.
The surface in contact with the core of crude brick was only roughly
dressed, by which means additional cohesion was given to the junction of
the two materials; but the other sides were carefully worked and squared
and fixed in place by simple juxtaposition. The architect calculated upon
sufficient solidity being given by the mere weight of the stones and the
perfection of their surfaces.[167]
[Illustration: FIG. 47.--Section in perspective through the south-western
part of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad; compiled from Place.]
The total height of this Khorsabad wall was sixty feet--nine feet for the
foundations, forty-six for the retaining-wall, and five for the parapet,
for the wall did not stop at the level of the roofs. A row of battlements
was thought necessary both as a slight fortification and as an
ornament.[168] These were finished at the top with open crenellations in
brick, along the base of which ran apparently a frieze of painted rosettes.
A reference to our Fig. 47 will explain all these arrangements better than
words. It is a bird's-eye view in perspective of the south-western part of
the palace. The vertical sections on the right of the engraving show how
the stones were bonded to the crude brick. The crenellations are omitted
here, but they may be seen in place on the left.
The great size of the stones and the regularity of the masonry, the height
of the wall and the long line of battlements with which it was crowned, the
contrast between the brilliant whiteness of its main surface and the bright
colours of the painted frieze that, we have supposed, defined its
summit--all this made up a composition simple enough, but by no means
devoid of beauty and grandeur.
In the _enceinte_ surrounding the town, stone was also employed, but in a
rather different fashion. It was used to give strength to the foot of the
wall, which consisted of a limestone plinth nearly four feet high,
surmounted by a mass of crude brick, rising to a total height of about
forty-four feet. Its thickness was eighty feet. The bed of stone upon which
the brick rested was made up of two retaining walls with a core of rubble.
In the former, large blocks, carefully dressed and fixed, were used; in the
latter, pieces of broken stone thrown together pell-mell, except towards
the top, where they were so placed as to present a smooth surface, upon
which the first courses of brick could safely rest.[169]
When Xenophon crossed Assyria with the "ten thousand," he noticed this
method of constructing city walls, but in all the _enceintes_ that
attracted his attention, the height of the plinth was much greater than
that of Khorsabad. At Larissa it was twenty, and at Mespila fifty feet, or
respectively a fifth and a third of the total height of the walls.[170]
These figures can only be looked upon as approximate. The Greeks did not
amuse themselves, we may be sure, with measuring the monuments they
encountered on their march, even if Tissaphernes gave them time. But we may
fairly conclude from this evidence that in some of the Assyrian town-walls
the proportion between the plinth and the superstructure was very different
from what it is in the only example that has come down to us.
At Khorsabad, then, stone played a much more important part in the palace
wall than in that of the town, but even in the latter position it is used
with skill and in no inconsiderable quantity; on the other hand, it is only
employed in the interior of the palace for paving, for lining walls, for
the bases, shafts and capitals of columns, and such minor purposes. In the
only palace that has been completely excavated, that of Sargon at
Khorsabad, everything is built of brick. Layard alone speaks of a
stone-built chamber in the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyundjik, but he
gives no details.
It would seem as if the Assyrians were content with showing themselves
passed-masters in the art of dressing and fixing stone, and, that proof
given, had never cared to make use of the material in the main structures
of their buildings. Like the Chaldaeans, they preferred brick, into the
management of which, however, they introduced certain modifications of
their own. The crude brick of Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used while
damp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pise.[171] Spread
out in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one to
another by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with which
they were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the courses
above.[172] The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single huge
block. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorways
and drains, that were constructed on rather different principles, shut your
eyes to the merely decorative additions, and you will have a huge mass of
kneaded earth which might have been shaped by giants in a colossal mould.
The masons of Babylon and of other southern cities made a much more
extensive use of burnt brick than those of the north. In Assyria the masses
of pise have as a rule no other covering than the slabs of alabaster and
limestone, and above, a thin layer of stucco. In Chaldaea the crude walls of
the houses and towers were cuirassed with those excellent burnt bricks
which the inhabitants of Bagdad and Hillah carry off to this day for use in
their modern habitations.[173] The crude bricks used behind this protecting
epidermis have not lost their individuality, as at Nineveh they seem to
have been used only after complete dessication. They are of course much
more friable than those burnt in the kiln; when they are deprived of their
cuirass and exposed to the weather they return slowly to the condition of
dust, and their remains are seen in the sloping mounds that hide the foot
of every ancient ruin (see Fig. 48), and yet if you penetrate into the
interior of a mass built of these bricks, you will easily distinguish the
courses, and in some instances the bricks have sufficient solidity to allow
of their being moved and detached one from another. They are, in fact,
bricks, and not pise. But in Chaldaea, as in Assyria, the mounds upon which
the great buildings were raised are not always of crude brick. They are
sometimes made by inclosing a large space by four brick walls, and filling
it with earth and the various _debris_ left by previous buildings.[174] Our
remarks upon construction must be understood as applying to the buildings
themselves, and not to the artificial hills upon which they stood.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Temple at Mugheir; from Loftus.]
The Assyrians seem never to have used anything analogous to our mortar or
cement in fixing their materials. On the comparatively rare occasions when
they employed stone they were content with dressing their blocks with great
care and putting them in absolute juxtaposition with one another. When they
used crude brick, sufficient adherence was insured by the moisture left in
the clay, and by its natural properties. Even when they used burnt or well
dried bricks they took no great care to give them a cohesion that would
last, ordinary clay mixed with water and a little straw, was their only
cement.[175] Even in our own day the masons and bricklayers of Mossoul and
Bagdad are content with the same simple materials, and their structures
have no great solidity in consequence.
In Chaldaea, at least in certain times and at certain places, construction
was more careful. In the ruin known as _Babil_, a ruin that represents
one of the principal monuments of ancient Babylon, there is nothing between
the bricks but earth that must have been placed there in the condition of
mud.[176] These bricks may be detached almost without effort. It is quite
otherwise with the two other ruins in the same neighbourhood, called
respectively _Kasr_ and _Birs-Nimroud_. Their bricks are held together by
an excellent mortar of lime, and cannot be separated without breaking.[177]
Elsewhere, at Mugheir for instance, the mortar is composed of lime and
ashes.[178]
[Illustration: PLATE I. BABYLON
FROM AN UNPUBLISHED DRAWING BY FELIX THOMAS.]
Finally, the soil of Mesopotamia furnished, and still furnishes, a kind of
natural mortar in the bituminous fountains that spring through the soil at
more than one point between Mossoul and Bagdad.[179] It is hardly ever used
in these days except in boatbuilding, for coating the planks and caulking.
In ancient times its employment was very general in the more carefully
constructed buildings, and, as it was found neither in Greece nor Syria, it
made a great impression upon travellers from those countries. They noted it
as one of the characteristics of Chaldaean civilization. In the Biblical
account of the Tower of Babel we are told: "They had brick for stone, and
slime had they for mortar."[180] Herodotus lays stress upon the same detail
in his description of the way in which the walls of Babylon were built: "As
they dug the ditches they converted the excavated earth into bricks, and
when they had enough, they burnt them in the kiln. Finally, for mortar they
used hot bitumen, and at every thirty courses of bricks they put a layer of
reeds interlaced."[181]
Those walls have long ago disappeared. For many centuries their ruins
afforded building materials for the inhabitants of the cities that have
succeeded each other upon and around the site of ancient Babylon, and now
their lines are only to be faintly traced in slight undulations of the
ground, which are here and there hardly distinguishable from the banks
that bordered the canals. But in those deserts of Lower Chaldaea, where the
nomad tent is now almost the only dwelling, structures have been found but
little damaged, in which layers of reeds placed at certain intervals among
the bricks may be easily distinguished. As a rule three or four layers are
strewn one upon the other, the rushes in one being at right angles to those
above and below it. Here and there the stalks may still be seen standing
out from the wall.[182] Fragments of bitumen are everywhere to be picked up
among the _debris_ about these buildings, upon which it must have been used
for mortar. It never seems to have been employed, however, over the whole
of a building, but only in those parts where more than the ordinary
cohesive power was required. Thus, at Warka, in the ruin called
_Bouvariia_, the buttresses that stand out from the main building are of
large burnt bricks set in thick beds of bitumen, the whole forming such a
solid body that a pickaxe has great difficulty in making any impression
upon it.[183]
Travellers have also found traces of the same use of bitumen in the ruins
of Babylon. It seems to have been in less frequent employment in Assyria.
It has there been found only under the two layers of bricks that constitute
the ordinary pavement of roofs, courts, and chambers. The architect no
doubt introduced this coat of asphalte for two purposes--partly to give
solidity to the pavement, partly to keep down the wet and to force the
water in the soil to flow off through its appointed channels. A layer of
the same kind was also spread under the drains.[184]
In spite of all their precautions time and experience compelled the
inhabitants of Mesopotamia to recognize the danger of crude brick as a
building material; they endeavoured, therefore, to supplement its strength
with huge buttresses. Wherever the ruins have still preserved some of their
shape, we can trace, almost without exception, the presence of these
supports, and, as a rule, they are better and more carefully built than the
structures whose walls they sustain. Their existence has been affirmed by
every traveller who has explored the ruins of Chaldaea,[185] and in Assyria
they are also to be found, especially in front of the fine retaining wall
that helps to support the platform on which the palace of Sargon was
built.[186] The architect counted upon the weight of his building, and upon
these ponderous buttresses, to give it a firm foundation and to maintain
the equilibrium of its materials. As a rule there were no foundations, as
we understand the word. At _Abou-Sharein_, in Chaldaea, the monument
described by Taylor and the brick pavement that surrounds it are both
placed upon the sand.[187] Botta noticed something of the same kind in
connection with the palace walls at Khorsabad: "They rest," he says, "upon
the very bricks of the mound without the intervention of any plinth or
other kind of solid foundation, so that here and there they have sunk below
the original level of the platform upon which they are placed."[188]
This was not due to negligence, for in other respects these structures
betray a painstaking desire to insure the stability of the work, and no
little skill in the selection of means. Thus the Chaldaean architect pierced
his crude brick masses with numerous narrow tunnels, or ventilating pipes,
through which the warm and desiccating air of a Mesopotamian summer could
be brought into contact with every part, and the slight remains of moisture
still left in the bricks when fixed could be gradually carried off. These
shafts have been found in the ruins of Babylon and of other Chaldaean
cities.[189] Nothing of the kind has been discovered in Assyria, and for a
very simple reason. It would have been impossible to preserve them in the
soft paste, the kind of pise, we have described.
Another thing that had to be carefully provided for was the discharge of
the rain water which, unless it had proper channels of escape, would filter
through the cracks and crevices of the brick and set up a rapid process of
disintegration. In the Assyrian palaces we find, therefore, that the
pavements of the flat roofs of the courtyards and open halls had a decided
slope, and that the rain water was thus conducted to scuppers, through
which it fell into runnels communicating with a main drain, from which it
was finally discharged into the nearest river.
It rained less in Chaldaea than in Assyria. But we may fairly conclude that
the Chaldaean architects were as careful as their northern rivals to provide
such safeguards as those we have described; but their buildings are now in
such a condition that no definite traces of them are to be distinguished.
On the other hand, the ruins in Lower Chaldaea prove that even in the most
ancient times the constructor had then the same object in view; but the
means of which he made use were much more simple, although contrived with
no little ingenuity. We shall here epitomize what we have learnt from one
of those few observers to whom we owe all our knowledge of the earliest
Chaldaean civilization.
Mr. J. E. Taylor, British vice-consul at Bassorah, explored not a few of
the mounds in the immediate neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf which mark
the sites of the burying places belonging to the most ancient cities of
Chaldaea.
The summits of these mounds are paved with burnt brick; their mass consists
of heaped up coffins separated from one another by divisions of the same
material. To insure the preservation of the bodies and of the objects
buried with them liquids of every kind had to be provided with a ready
means of escape. The structures were pierced, therefore, with a vast number
of vertical drains. Long conduits of terra-cotta (see Fig. 49) stretched
from the paved summit, upon which they opened with very narrow mouths, to
the base. They were composed of tubes, each about two feet long and
eighteen inches in diameter. In some cases there are as many as forty of
these one upon another. They are held together by thin coats of bitumen,
and in order to give them greater strength their sides are slightly
concave. Their interiors are filled in with fragments of broken pottery,
which gave considerable support while they in no way hindered the passage
of the water. These potsherds are even placed around the outsides of the
tubes, so that the latter are nowhere in contact with the brick; they have
a certain amount of play, and with the tubes which they encase they form a
series of shafts, like chimneys, measuring about four feet square. Every
precaution was taken to carry off the water left by the storms. They were
not contented with the small opening at the head of each tube. The whole of
its dome-shaped top was pierced with small holes, that made it a kind of
cullender. Either through this or through the interstices of the potsherd
packing, all the moisture that escaped the central opening would find a
safe passage to the level of the ground, whence, no doubt, it would be
carried off to the streams in conduits now hidden by the mass of _debris_
round the foot of every mound.
[Illustration: FIG. 49.--Upper part of the drainage arrangements of a
mound.]
That these arrangements were well adapted to their purpose has been proved
by the result. Thanks to the drains we have described, these sepulchral
mounds have remained perfectly dry to the present day. Not only the
coffins, with the objects in metal or terra-cotta they contained, but even
the skeletons themselves have been preserved intact. A touch will reduce
the latter to powder, but on the first opening of their coffins they look
as if time had had no effect upon their substance.[190]
By these details we may see how far the art of the constructor was pushed
in the early centuries of the Chaldaean monarchy. They excite a strong
desire in us to discover the internal arrangements of his buildings, the
method by which access was given or forbidden to those chambers of the
Babylonian temples and houses whose magnificence has been celebrated by
every writer that saw them before their ruin. Unhappily nothing has come
down to us of the monuments of Chaldaea, and especially of those of Babylon,
but their basements and the central masses of the staged towers. The
Assyrian palaces are indeed in a better state of preservation, but even in
their case we ask many questions to which no certain answer is forthcoming.
The great difficulty in all our researches and attempts at restoration, is
caused by the complete absence of any satisfactory evidence as to the
nature of the roofs that covered rooms, either small or large. In most
cases the walls are only standing to a height of from ten to fifteen
feet;[191] in no instance has a wall with its summit still in place been
discovered.
The cut on the opposite page (Fig. 50) gives a fair idea of what a Ninevite
building looks like after the excavators have finished their work. It is a
view in perspective of one of the gates of Sargon's city: the walls are
eighty-eight feet thick, to which the buttresses add another ten feet;
their average height is from about twenty-five to thirty feet, high enough
to allow the archway by which the city was entered to remain intact. This
is quite an exception. In no part of the palace is there anything to
correspond to this happy find of M. Place--any evidence by which we can
decide the forms of Assyrian doorways. The walls are always from about
twelve to twenty-eight feet in thickness (see Fig. 46.) Rooms are
rectangular, sometimes square, but more often so long as to be galleries
rather than rooms in the ordinary sense of the word.
The way in which these rooms were covered in has been much discussed. Sir
Henry Layard believes only in flat roofs, similar to those of modern houses
in Mossoul and the neighbouring villages. He tells us that he never came
upon the slightest trace of a vault, while in almost every room that he
excavated he found wood ashes and carbonized timber.[192] He is convinced
that the destruction of several of these buildings was due in the first
instance to fire. Several pieces of sculpture, those from the palace of
Sennacherib, for instance, may be quoted, which when found were black with
soot. They look like castings in relief that have been long fixed at the
back of a fire-place.
Long and narrow rooms may have been roofed with beams of palm or poplar
resting upon the summits of the walls. As for the large halls, in the
centre they would be open to the sky, while around the opening would run a
portico, similar to that of a Roman atrium, whose sloping roof would
protect the reliefs with which the walls were ornamented.[193]
[Illustration: FIG. 50.--Present state of one of the city gates, Khorsabad.
Perspective compiled from Place's plans and elevations.]
As to this, however, doubt had already been expressed by an attentive and
judicial observer like Loftus; who thought that the arch had played a very
important part in the architecture of Mesopotamia.[194] As he very justly
remarked, the conditions were rather different from those that obtained in
the maritime and mountainous provinces of Persia; there was no breeze from
the gulf or from the summits of snowy mountains, to which every facility
for blowing through their houses and cooling their heated chambers had to
be given; the problem to be solved was how best to oppose an impenetrable
shield against a daily and long continued heat that would otherwise have
been unbearable. Now it is clear that a vault with its great powers of
resistance would have been far better fitted to support a roof whose
thickness should be in some reasonable proportion to the massive walls,
than a ceiling of bad timber. In our day the mosques, the baths, and many
of the private houses of Mossoul and Bagdad have dome-shaped roofs. Without
going as far as Mesopotamia, the traveller in Syria may see how
intelligently, even in the least important towns, the native builder has
employed a small dome built upon a square, to obtain a strong and solid
dwelling entirely suited to the climate, a dwelling that should be warm in
winter and cool in summer.
We must also point out that the state in which the interiors of rooms are
found by explorers, is more consistent with the hypothesis of a domed roof
than with any other. They are covered to a depth of from fifteen to twenty
feet with heaps of _debris_, reaching up to the top of the walls, so far as
the latter remain standing.[195] This rubbish consists of brick-earth mixed
with broken bricks, and pieces of stucco. Granting wooden roofs, how is
such an accumulation to be accounted for? Roofs supported by beams laid
across from one wall to the other, could never have safely upheld any great
weight. They must have been thin and comparatively useless as a defence
against the sun of Mesopotamia. On the other hand if we assume that vaults
of pise were the chosen coverings, all the rest follows easily. They could
support the flat roof with ease, and the whole upper structure could be
made of sufficient thickness to exclude both the heat and the rain, while
the present appearance of the ruins is naturally accounted for.
Those who have lived in the East, those, even, who have extended a visit to
Athens as far as Eleusis or Megara, must have stretched themselves, more
than once, under the stars, and, on the flat roofs of their temporary
resting-places, sought that rest that was not to be found in the hot and
narrow chambers within. They must then have noticed, as I have more than
once, a large stone cylinder in one corner. In Greece and Asia Minor, it
will be in most cases a "drum" from some antique column, or a funerary
_cippus_, abstracted by the peasantry from some neighbouring ruin. This
morsel of Paros or Pentelic has to perform the office of a roller. When
some heavy fall of rain by wetting and softening the upper surface of the
terrace, gives an opportunity for repairing the ravages of a long drought,
the stone is taken backwards and forwards over the yielding pise. It closes
the cracks, kills the weeds that if left to themselves would soon transform
the roof into a field, and makes the surface as firm as a threshing-floor.
The roofs of Assyrian buildings must have required the same kind of
treatment, and we know that in the present day it is actually practised. M.
Place mentions rollers of limestone, weighing from two to three
hundredweight, pierced at each end with a square hole into which wooden
spindles were inserted to facilitate their management.[196] A certain
number of these rollers were found within the chambers, into which they
must have fallen with the roofs. As soon as the terraces ceased to receive
the care necessary for keeping down the weeds and shrubs and keeping out
the water, the process of disintegration must have been rapid. The rains
would soon convert cracks into gaping breaches, and at the end of a few
years, every storm would bring down a part of the roof. A century would be
enough to destroy the vaults, and with them the upper parts of the walls to
which they were closely allied by the skill of the constructor. The
disappearance of the archivolts and the great heaps of _debris_ are thus
accounted for. The roof materials were too soft, however, to damage in
their fall the figures in high relief or in the round that decorated the
chambers beneath, or the carved slabs with which their walls were lined. In
spreading itself about these sculptures and burying them out of sight and
memory, the soft clay served posterity more efficiently than the most
careful of packers.
Among the first observers to suspect the truth as to the use of the vault
in Mesopotamia, were Eugene Flandin, who helped Botta to excavate the
palace of Sargon,[197] and Felix Thomas,[198] the colleague of M. Place.
The reasons by which M. Thomas was led to the conclusion that the rooms in
the Ninevite palaces were vaulted, are thus given by M. Place, who may be
considered his mouthpiece.[199]
He does not deny that some of the Khorsabad reliefs bear the marks of fire,
but he affirms, and that after the experience of four digging campaigns,
that the conflagration was much less general than might be supposed from
the statements of some travellers. He failed to discover the slightest
trace of fire in the hundred and eighty-four rooms and twenty-eight courts
that he excavated. The marvellous preservation of the reliefs in many of
the halls is inconsistent, in his opinion, with the supposition that the
palace was destroyed by fire; and if we renounce that supposition the mere
action of time is insufficient to account for the disappearance of such an
extent of timber roofing, for here and there, especially near the doorways,
pieces of broken beams and door panels have been found. "The wood is not
all in such condition as the incorruptible cedar of the gilded palm-trees,
but wherever it certainly existed, traces of it may be pointed out. In
advanced decomposition it is no more consistent than powder, it may be
picked up and thrown aside, leaving a faithful cast of the beam or post to
which it belonged in the more tenacious clay."
[Illustration: FIG. 51.--Fortress; from the Balawat gates, in the British
Museum.]
All this, however, was but negative evidence. The real solution of the
problem was first positively suggested by the discovery of vaults in place,
in the drains and water channels, and in the city gates. The bas-reliefs in
which towns or fortresses are represented also support the belief that
great use was made of arched openings in Assyria, and the countries in its
neighbourhood (see Fig. 51). As soon as it is proved that the Assyrians
understood the principle of the arch, why should it any longer be denied
that they made use of it to cover their chambers? It is obvious that a
vault would afford a much better support for the weight above than any
timber roof.
In the course of the explorations, a probable conjecture was changed into
complete certainty. The very vaults for which inductive reasoning had shown
the necessity were found, if not in place, at least in a fragmentary
condition, and in the very rooms to which they had afforded a cover--and
here we must quote the words of the explorers themselves.
In the most deeply buried quarters of the building, the excavations were
carried on by means of horizontal tunnels or shafts. "I was often obliged,"
says M. Place, "to drive trenches from one side of the rooms to another in
order to get a clear idea of their shape and arrangement. On these
occasions we often met with certain hard facts, for which, at the time, we
could give no explanation. These facts were blocks of clay whose under
sides were hollowed segmentally and covered with a coat of stucco. These
fragments were found sometimes a few feet from the walls, sometimes near
the middle of the rooms. At first I was thoroughly perplexed to account for
them. Our trenches followed scrupulously the inner surfaces of the walls,
which were easily recognizable by their stucco when they had no lining of
carved slabs. What then were we to make of these arched blocks, also coated
with stucco, but found in the centre of the rooms and far away from the
walls? Such signs were not to be disregarded in an exploration where
everything was new and might lead to unforeseen results. Wherever a trace
of stucco appeared I followed it up carefully. Little by little the earth
under and about the stuccoed blocks was cleared away, and then we found
ourselves confronted by what looked like the entrance to an arched cellar.
Here and there these portions of vaulting were many feet in length, from
four to six in span, and three or four from the crown of the arch to the
level upon which it rested. At the first glance the appearance of a vault
was complete, and I thought I was about to penetrate into a cellar where
some interesting find might await me. But on farther examination this
pleasant delusion was dispelled. The pretended cellar came to an abrupt
end, and declared itself to be no more than a section of vaulting that had
quitted its proper place.... The evidence thus obtained was rendered still
more conclusive by the discovery on the under side of several fragments of
paintings which had evidently been intended for the decoration of a
ceiling."[200]
It is clear that these curvilinear and frescoed blocks were fragments of a
tunnel vault that had fallen in; and their existence explains the great
thickness given by the Assyrian constructor not only to his outer walls,
but to those that divided room from room. The thinnest of the latter are
hardly less than ten feet, while here and there they are as much as fifteen
or sixteen. As for the outer walls they sometimes reach a thickness of from
five and twenty to thirty feet.[201] The climate is insufficient to account
for the existence of such walls as these. In the case of the outer walls
such a reason might be thought, by stretching a point, to justify their
extravagant measurements, but with the simple partitions of the interior,
it is quite another thing. This apparent anomaly disappears, however, if we
admit the existence of vaults and the necessity for meeting the enormous
thrust they set up. With such a material as clay, the requisite solidity,
could only be given by increasing the mass until its thickness was
sometimes greater than the diameter of the chambers it inclosed.
M. Place lays great stress upon the disproportion between the length and
width of many of the apartments. There are few of which the greater
diameter is not at least double the lesser, and in many cases it is four,
five, and even seven times as great. He comes to the conclusion that these
curious proportions were forced on the Assyrians by the nature of the
materials at their disposal. Such an arrangement must have been destructive
to architectural effect as well as inconvenient, but a clay vault could not
have any great span, and its abutments must perforce have been kept within
a reasonable distance of each other.
Taken by itself, this argument has, perhaps, hardly as much force as M.
Place is inclined to give it. Doubtless the predilection for an exaggerated
parallelogram agrees very well with the theory that the vault was in
constant use by Mesopotamian architects, but it might be quoted with equal
reason by the supporters of the opposite hypothesis, that of the timber
roof.
Our best reason for accepting all these pieces of evidence as corroborative
of the view taken by MM. Flandin, Loftus, Place, and Thomas is, in the
first place, the incontestable fact that the entrances to the town of
Khorsabad were passages roofed with barrel vaults; secondly, the presence
amid the debris of the fragmentary arches above described; thirdly, the
depth of the mass of broken earth within the walls of each chamber;
finally, the singular thickness of the walls, which is only to be
satisfactorily explained by the supposition that the architect had to
provide solid abutments for arches that had no little weight to carry.
It is difficult to say how the Assyrians set about building these arches of
crude brick, but long practice enabled their architects to use that
unsatisfactory material with a skill of which we had no suspicion before
the exhumation of Nineveh. Thanks to its natural qualities and to the
experienced knowledge with which it was prepared, their clay was tough and
plastic to a degree that astonished the modern explorers on more than one
occasion. The arched galleries cut during the excavations--sometimes
segmental, sometimes pointed, and often of a considerable height and
width--could never have stood in any other kind of earth without strong and
numerous supports. And yet M. Place tells us that these very galleries,
exactly in the condition in which the mattock left them, "provided lodging
for the labourers engaged and their families, and ever since they have
served as a refuge for the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages.
Workmen and peasants have taken shelter under vaults similar to those of
the ancient Assyrians. Sometimes we cut through the accidental
accumulations of centuries, where the clay, far from having been carefully
put in place, had rather lost many of its original qualities. Even there,
however, the roof of our galleries remained suspended without any signs of
instability, as if to bear witness that the Assyrian architect knew what he
was about when he trusted so much to the virtues of a fictile
material."[202]
We may refer those who are specially interested in constructive methods to
M. Place's account of the curious fashion in which the workmen of Mossoul
will build a pointed vault without the help of any of those wooden
centerings in use in Europe. In our day, certainly, the masons of Mossoul
use stone and mortar, but their example none the less proves that similar
results may once have been obtained in different materials.[203] A vault
launched into mid-air without any centering, and bearing the workmen who
were building it on its unfinished flanks, was a phenomenon calculated to
astonish an architect. Taking everything into consideration the clay vaults
of Khorsabad are no more surprising than these domes of modern
Mossoul.[204]
We cannot say for certain that the Assyrian builders made use of domes in
addition to the barrel vaults, but all the probabilities are in favour of
such an hypothesis.
A dome is a peculiar kind of vault used for the covering of square,
circular, or polygonal spaces. As for circular and polygonal rooms, none
have been found in Assyria, but a few square ones have been disinterred. On
the principal facade of Sargon's palace there are two of a fair size, some
forty-eight feet each way. Thomas did not believe that a barrel vault was
used in these apartments; the span would have been too great. He sought
therefore for some method that would be at once well adapted to the special
conditions and in harmony with the general system. This he found in the
hemispherical dome.
All doubts on the subject were taken away, however, by the discovery of the
bas-relief (Fig. 43) reproduced on page 145, in which we find a group of
buildings roofed, some with spherical vaults, some with elliptical domes
approaching a cone in outline. This proves that the Mesopotamian architects
were acquainted with different kinds of domes, just as they were with
varieties of the barrel vault.