GREEK TOWN-PLANNING. THE ORIGINS, BABYLON
The beginnings of ideas and institutions are seldom well known or well
recorded. They are necessarily insignificant and they win scant notice
from contemporaries. Town-planning has fared like the rest. Early
forms of it appear in Greece during the fourth and fifth centuries
B.C.; the origin of these forms is obscure. The oldest settlement of
man in town fashion which has yet been explored in any land near
Greece is that of Kahun, in Egypt, dating from about 2500 B.C. Here
Professor Flinders Petrie unearthed many four-roomed cottages packed
close in parallel oblong blocks and a few larger rectangular houses:
they are (it seems) the dwellings of the workmen and managers busy
with the neighbouring Illahun pyramid.[6] But the settlement is very
small, covering less than 20 acres; it is not in itself a real town
and its plan has not the scheme or symmetry of a town-plan. For that
we must turn to western Asia, to Babylonia and Assyria.
[6] W.F. Petrie, _Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob_ (London, 1891), ch.
ii, plate xiv. The plan is reproduced in Breasted's _History of
Egypt_, p. 87, R. Unwin's _Town planning_, fig. 11 (with wrong
scale), &c.
Here we find clearer evidence. The great cities of the Mesopotamian
plains show faint traces of town-planning datable to the eighth and
following centuries, of which the Greeks seem to have heard and which
they may have copied. Our knowledge of these cities is, of course,
still very fragmentary, and though it has been much widened by the
latest German excavations, it does not yet carry us to definite
conclusions. The evidence is twofold, in part literary, drawn from
Greek writers and above all Herodotus, and in part archaeological,
yielded by Assyrian and Babylonian ruins.
The description of Babylon given by Herodotus is, of course,
famous.[7] Even in his own day, it was well enough known to be
parodied by contemporary comedians in the Athenian theatre. Probably
it rests in part on first-hand knowledge. Herodotus gives us to
understand that he visited Babylon in the course of his many
wanderings and we have no cause to distrust him; we may even date his
visit to somewhere about 450 B.C. He was not indeed the only Greek of
his day, nor the first, to get so far afield. But his account
nevertheless neither is nor professes to be purely that of an
eyewitness. Like other writers in various ages,[8] he drew no sharp
division between details which he saw and details which he learnt from
others. For the sake (it may be) of vividness, he sets them all on one
plane, and they must be judged, not as first-hand evidence but on
their own merits.
[7] Hdt. i. 178 foil. The accounts of Ctesias and other ancient
writers seem to throw no light on the town-planning and streets
of Babylon, however useful they may otherwise be.
[8] The Elizabethan description of Britain by William Harrison is
an example from a modern time.
Babylon, says Herodotus, was planted in an open plain and formed an
exact square of great size, 120 stades (that is, nearly 14 miles) each
way; the whole circuit was 480 stades, about 55 miles. It was girt
with immense brick walls, 340 ft. high and nearly 90 ft. thick, and a
broad deep moat full of water, and was entered through 100 gates;
presumably we are intended to think of these gates as arranged
symmetrically, 25 in each side. From corner to corner the city was cut
diagonally by the Euphrates, which thus halved it into two roughly
equal triangles, and the river banks were fortified by brick
defences--less formidable than the main outer walls--which ran along
them from end to end of the city. There was, too, an inner wall on the
landward side. The streets were also remarkable:
'The city itself (he says) is full of houses, three or four
storeys high, and has been laid out with its streets straight,
notably those which run at right angles, that is, those which
lead to the river. Each road runs to a small gate in the brick
river-wall: there are as many gates as lanes.'[9]
[9] Hdt. i. 180 [Greek: To de astu auto, eon plêres ohikieôn
triôrhofôn te kai tetrôrofôn, katatetmêtai tas hodous itheas,
tas te aggas kai tas epikarsias, tas epi ton potamon echousas].
Apparently [Greek: epikarsias] means, as Stein says, those at
right angles to the general course of the river, but this nearly
= at right angles to the other roads. The course of the river
appears to have been straighter then than it is now.
In each part of the city (that is, on either bank of the Euphrates)
were specially large buildings, in one part the royal palaces, in the
other the temple of Zeus Belos, bronze-gated, square in outline, 400
yards in breadth and length.
So far, in brief, Herodotus. Clearly his words suggest town-planning.
The streets that ran straight and the others that ran at right angles
are significant enough, even though we may doubt exactly what is meant
by these other streets and what they met or cut at right angles. But
his account cannot be accepted as it stands. Whatever he saw and
whatever his accuracy of observation and memory, not all of his story
can be true. His Babylon covers nearly 200 square miles; its walls are
over 50 miles long and 30 yds. thick and all but 120 yds. high; its
gates are a mile and a half apart. The area of London to-day is no
more than 130 square miles, and the topmost point of St. Paul's is
barely 130 yds. high. Nanking is the largest city-site in China and
its walls are the work of an Empire greater than Babylon; but they
measure less than 24 miles in circuit, and they are or were little
more than 30 ft. thick and 70 ft. high.[10] Moreover, Herodotus's
account of the walls has to be set beside a statement which he makes
elsewhere, that they had been razed by Darius sixty or seventy years
before his visit.[11] The destruction can hardly have been complete.
But in any case Herodotus can only have seen fragments, easily
misinterpreted, easily explained by local _ciceroni_ as relics of
something quite unlike the facts.
[10] L. Gaillard, _Variétés sinologiques_, xvi (plan) and xxiii.
pp. 8, 235 (Chang-hai, 1898, 1903). Others give the figures a
little differently, but not so as to affect the argument.
[11] Hdt. iii. 159. The theory that there were originally two
parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the
other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encycl._ ii. 2696), is
meaningless. There could be no use in razing one and leaving the
other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181). It is, however,
not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were
two outer parallel walls.
Turn now to the actual remains of Babylon, as known from surveys and
excavations. We find a large district extending to both banks of the
Euphrates, which is covered rather irregularly by the mounds of many
ruined buildings. Two sites in it are especially notable. At its
southern end is Birs Nimrud and some adjacent mounds, anciently
Borsippa; here stood a huge temple of the god Nebo. Near its north
end, ten or eleven miles north of Borsippa, round Babil and Kasr, is a
larger wilderness of ruin, three miles long and nearly as broad in
extreme dimensions; here town-walls and palaces of Babylonian kings
and temples of Babylonian gods and streets and dwelling-houses of
ordinary men have been detected and in part uncovered. Other signs of
inhabitation can be traced elsewhere in this district, as yet
unexplored.
Not unnaturally, some scholars have thought that this whole region
represents the ancient Babylon and that the vast walls of Herodotus
enclosed it all.[12] This view, however, cannot be accepted. Quite
apart from the considerations urged above, the region in question is
not square but rather triangular, and traces of wall and ditch
surrounding it are altogether wanting, though city-walls have survived
elsewhere in this neighbourhood and though nothing can wholly delete
an ancient ditch. We have, in short, no good reason to believe that
Babylon, in any form or sense whatever, covered at any time this large
area.
[12] So Baumstark, art. Babylon in Pauly-Wissowa, ii. 2696.
On the other hand, the special ruins of Babil and Kasr and adjacent
mounds seem to preserve both the name and the actual remains of
Babylon (fig. 1). Here, on the left bank of the Euphrates, are vast
city-walls, once five or six miles long.[13] They may be described
roughly as enclosing half of a square bisected diagonally by the
river, much as Herodotus writes; there is good reason to think that
they had some smaller counterpart on the right bank, as yet scantily
explored. Within these walls were the palaces of the Babylonian kings,
Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar (625-561 B.C.), the temples of the
national god Marduk or Merodach and other Babylonian deities, a broad
straight road, Aiburschabu, running north and south from palaces to
temples, a stately portal spanning this road at the Istar Gate, many
private houses in the Merkes quarter, and an inner town-wall perhaps
of earlier date. Street and gate were built or rebuilt by
Nebuchadnezzar. He, as he declares in various inscriptions, 'paved the
causeway with limestone flags for the procession of the Great Lord
Marduk.' He made the Istar Gate 'with glazed brick and placed on its
threshold colossal bronze bulls and ferocious serpent dragons'. Along
the street thus built the statue of Marduk was borne in solemn march
on the Babylonian New Year's Day, when the king paid yearly worship to
the god of his country.[14]
[13] F.H. Weissbach, _Stadtbild von Babylon_ (_Der alte Orient_,
fasc. 5); R. Koldewey, _Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa_, plates
i, ii; S. Langdon, _Expositor_, 1909, pp. 82, 142; Hommel,
_Geogr. des alten Orients_, pp. 290, 331; E. Meyer, _Sitzungsber.
preuss. Akad_. 1912, p. 1102. I am indebted to Dr. Langdon for
references to some of the treatises cited here and below. I
cannot share the unfavourable view which is taken by Messrs. How
and Wells, the latest good editors of Herodotus, of the views of
these writers.
[14] Koldewey, _Pflastersteine von Aiburschabu_ (Leipzig, 1901).
Some of the streets of Babylon are much older than 600 B.C., but
this point needs to be worked out further.
[Illustration: FIG I. BABYLON]
Such are the remains of the city of Babylon, so far as they are known
at present. They do not fit ill with the words of Herodotus. We can
detect in them the semblance not indeed of one square but of two
unequal half-squares, divided by the river; we can trace at least one
great street parallel to the river and others which run at right
angles to it towards the river. If the brick defences along the
water-side have vanished, that may be due to their less substantial
character and to the many changes of the river itself. To the student
of Babylonian topography, the account of Herodotus is of very little
worth. But it is as good as most modern travellers could compile, if
they were let loose in a vast area of buildings, without plans,
without instruments, and without any notion that a scientific
description was expected of them.
The remains show also--and this is more to our purpose--the idea of
the sacred processional avenue which recurs in fifth-century
Greece--and is indeed beloved of architects in the most modern times.
Here is a germ of town-planning. But whether this laying out of
streets extended beyond the main highways, is less clear. The Merkes
excavations occasionally show streets meeting at right angles and at
least one roughly rectangular _insula_, of 150 x 333 ft. But the
adjoining house-blocks agree neither in size nor shape, and no hint
seems to have yet come to light of a true chess-board pattern.[15]
[15] _Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft_ 42, Dec.
1909, pp. 7, 19; 44, Dec. 1910, p. 26.
A little further evidence can be drawn from other Mesopotamian sites.
The city of Asshur had a long, broad avenue like the sacred road of
Babylon, but the one _insula_ of its private houses which has yet been
excavated, planned and published, shows no sign of rectangular
planning.[16] There is also literary evidence that Sanherib (765-681
B.C.) laid out a 'Kingsway' 100 ft. wide to promote easy movement
through his city of Nineveh, and Delitzsch has even credited the
Sargonid dynasty generally (722-625 B.C.) with a care for the
dwellings of common men as well as of gods and of kings.[17]
[16] _Mitt, deutsch. Orient-Gesell._ 28, Sept. 1905; 31, May
1906.
[17] F. Delitzsch, _Asurbanipal und die assyr. Kultur seiner
Zeit_ (_Der alte Orient_, Leipzig, 1909), p. 25.
In conclusion, the mounds of Babil and Kasr and others near them seem
to represent the Babylon alike of fact and of Herodotus. It was a
smaller city than the Greek historian avers; its length and breadth
were nearer four than fourteen miles. But it had at least one
straight, ample, and far-stretching highway which gave space for the
ceremonies and the processions, if not for the business or the
domestic comforts, of life. In a sense at least, it was laid out with
its streets straight. Nor was it the only city of such a kind in the
Mesopotamian region. Asshur and Nineveh, both of them somewhat earlier
in date than Babylon, possessed similar features. These towns, or at
least Babylon, seem to have been known to Greek travellers, and
probably suggested to them the adornment of their Hellenic homes with
similar streets. The germ of Greek town-planning came from the east.