winter, however short, with its frost and rain, and the long summer with
the torrid heat of the sun, split, shattered, and pulverised all that
still clung together and turned it to a light powdery dust, which was
easily whirled away by the strong recurrent summer winds and deposited
in the lower-lying parts. Thus the heights were continually denuded and
lowered and the depths were gradually raised (Fig. 153). The heavier
objects, such as pieces of burnt brick and fragments of pots and
sarcophagi, were thus sifted as it were and left exposed on the surface,
and the higher the mound had been in which they lay scattered, the
closer they would now lie together. Thus on the surface of ancient
mounds that were not inhabited later we find small objects in very large
numbers. Clay coffins, which at the time of burial were laid deep in the
ground, are now on the surface, and as the process continues they form a
small heap of sherds. A specially striking example is the appearance of
the wells and sunk shafts, which consist of pottery rings placed one
above another. Originally, of course, they all ended at the level of the
pavement of the buildings to which they belonged. When these fell to
pieces and were blown away and disappeared with a large part of the
earth on which they stood, the lower part of the well which was in the
ground was covered over with a small heap of fragments from the broken
upper part, which stood out above the surrounding ground as an exposed
drum (Fig. 154).
[Illustration:
FIG. 154.—Schematic diagram of section through Babylonian house ruins,
with wells.
]
The longer the ruin as such had remained fallow the more marked are the
traces of this abrasion of the fallen material and the emergence of the
harder objects. In Merkes and in Ishin aswad we can, on the whole,
scarcely count on more than one wind-swept stratum of habitations. At
Fara (Shuruppak) there were more of them, and at Surgul and El-Hibbah
there were many. Every new inhabited stratum, so long as the mounds
rose, joined on new wells to the old ones as the latter disappeared from
sight, while on every denuded dwelling site the well appeared on the
surface together with those of the preceding layer. This is the reason
why the well rings visible on very ancient ruins, such as Surgul and
El-Hibbah, are so exceedingly numerous, a fact which is unintelligible
to those who do not understand their origin. Many erroneous explanations
have been given, among others that they were drains intended to keep the
hill dry, whereas they had absolutely nothing to do with that purpose.
XLII
MERKES
_Merkes_, which means a city as a trade centre in distinction to a
village, is the name given by the Arabs to the line of mounds to the
north of Ishin aswad (Fig. 155). Here the houses of the citizens of
Babylon are easier of access than in the lower quarters of the town.
They occupy in different levels, one above another, the entire mass of
the hill, which rises to 10 metres above zero. Our excavations cut
through the layers down to a depth of 12 metres below the surface, where
the water-level stopped farther progress, although the ruins themselves
continued lower. Thus the water must now stand at a higher level than in
ancient times.
As it did not seem advisable to accumulate great masses of rubbish in
the vicinity where occupied town area was everywhere to be expected, we
worked over the site with a system of pits 7 metres square, with
gangways between them 3 metres wide. Thus when the first pit had been
sunk completely to water-level the earth from the next one could be
thrown into it, thus avoiding any possible damage to the ruins, for the
upper layers at any rate had to be removed in order to reach the lower
ones. I need not say that all the walls, graves, and separate finds were
recorded in the drawings and sections we made of the site.
In the 2 to 3 upper metres lay the scanty ruins of the Parthian period,
thin house walls of mud brick or of brick rubble, with wide spaces
between them, which may be regarded as gardens or waste land.
The 4 metres below this represent the brilliant time of the city under
the Neo-Babylonian kings on into the Persian and Greek periods. The
houses are closely crowded together in the narrow streets. There was
little open ground, and what was at first a court or the garden of a
house was increasingly required for house building. It was at this time
that the population was richest and most numerous. The houses have
strong walls of mud brick, good brick floorings, and numerous circular
wells and sunk shafts, which bear witness to the comparatively high
level of the requirements demanded by the culture of that time. Greek
sherds and tablets with dates of the Persian period lay at the height of
7 metres above zero, and bricks with the stamps of Nabonidus and
Nebuchadnezzar at 5.5 metres.
Below, the signs of dwellings are again more scanty until the level of
2.4 above zero is reached, when there are once more thick house walls
similar to those of the Neo-Babylonian level, though at wider distances
apart. At this level there were tablets with the dates of
Merodach-Baladan, Belnadinshum, Melishikhu, and others. Thus the stratum
dates from about 1300 to 1400 B.C.
Deeper down the strata were irregular. Here they do not lie throughout
in one solid uniform line. At 1 metre below zero we came once more on a
uniform, clearly marked stratum with houses lying rather closely
together, in which were found tablets with dates of the time of the
first Babylonian kings, the immediate successors of Hammurabi (2250
B.C.), Samsuiluna, Ammiditana, Samsuditana, etc. The mud-brick walls of
the houses are not very thick, but all of them rest on a foundation of
burnt brick. They show numerous traces of a conflagration in which they
were destroyed. The tablets lay among these undisturbed ashes, so there
can be no doubt that they were contemporary (see section on Fig. 237).
[Illustration:
FIG. 155.—Plan of Merkes.
]
This is a bare outline of the find in the north of Merkes. If we dig
farther in the plain, we find the Nebuchadnezzar stratum nearer the
surface, and the Hammurabi stratum disappears below water-level. This
means undoubtedly that as far back as the latter period the town level
here was rising in the form of a mound, and that at the Parthian period
no substantial buildings stood in the plain.
The streets, though not entirely regular, show an obvious attempt to run
them as much in straight lines as possible, so that Herodotus (i. 180)
was able to describe them as straight (ἰθέαι). They show a tendency to
cross at right angles, about 16 degrees west of north, and therefore as
many degrees north of east. The Procession Street on the whole follows
the same direction, and so do the inner city walls and all the temples,
including Esagila, which may perhaps be held mainly responsible for this
orientation. Only the Palace buildings on the Kasr and the mound Babil
face exactly towards the astronomical north. The lower and more ancient
levels also maintain this direction, in general with very slight
deviations in the lines of the streets. Too little is known of the
Hammurabi period at present to give any general valid rule with
certainty; the house walls that have been excavated face somewhat
accurately to the north, as do those of the upper levels. It was this
fact, in conjunction with the usual inexact rectangular arrangement of
the plots of land, and the exact rectangles of the inner chambers that
gave rise to the peculiar construction of the street walls, which on
their whole length were furnished with projecting corners or steps, an
extraordinary characteristic of Neo-Babylonian architecture, which we
have already met with at the Southern Citadel (Fig. 156).
Where there was a house door the corner is advanced so that the door
might be placed in a sufficiently wide wall surface. As the corners
frequently lie very close together, we may conclude that there were no
windows toward the street. Also we observe no stalls for selling or
other trade facilities, although this is no proof that they may not
exist in other parts of the city, not yet excavated. For this reason it
is much to be wished that the streets of Babylon could be laid bare to a
much larger extent than has hitherto been possible, so that we might be
able to study the entire plan of a very wide area. Outside Babylon it is
only in Fara and Abu-Hatab that a small part of the town has been
unearthed, and there the streets are noticeably more irregular and
crooked than those of the metropolis. Of other Babylonian towns nothing
is known of the planning of the streets.
[Illustration:
FIG. 156.—View of street in Merkes.
]
The latest researches do not uphold the statement that is to be found in
modern literature of some years back, that the Babylonian buildings were
orientated with their corners towards the four points of the compass.
The orientation is different in every town, and in every case the
circumstances determining it must be studied separately.
With the exception of the Procession Street and a few streets in other
quarters, such as to the south of the Ninib temple, the streets are
usually unpaved. Remains of systems of drainage, such as those to the
south of the “great house” of Merkes, are rare.
The smaller temples, “Z,” the Ninib temple, and the temple of Ishtar of
Agade to the north of our excavations in Merkes, lay in the midst of the
bustle of the houses, except that in front of the latter the street
widened somewhat on its southern façade.
At the south end of the excavations in Merkes, on the street which
broadens at that place, there is a quadrilateral block of mud-brick
building, which in default of a better explanation might be regarded as
the altar. On three sides it has broad ornamental grooves, and on the
west side it has two narrow ones. Similar blocks, which perhaps were
built for the same purpose, have been found in Telloh. There they
consist of semicircular fillets (de Sarzec, _Fouilles de Telloh_), of
which the elements, though they only project from the main building as
semicircles, are in reality built completely round like pillars, for
which they have been mistaken. The mouldings in the ruin called Wuswas
in Warka are treated in the same way, with this difference, that there
the working of one course is semicircular, and the succeeding one is
round.
XLIII
THE SMALL OBJECTS, PRINCIPALLY FROM MERKES
Among the small objects, the tablets take the first place. Our
predecessors merely turned over the upper layers, the middle and more
especially the lower ones were untouched. Of the inscriptions found we
shall learn more of the contents when they have been worked through by
experts. The most ancient, those of the time of Hammurabi, consist, as
do many of the middle and upper levels, of business documents (Fig.
157). Letters also are frequently found still in the clay cases which,
by some, are regarded as the equivalents of our envelopes; if this be
right, it is extraordinary to observe how very large a percentage of
these letters can never have been opened in ancient days. There were
also numerous specimens of omen-literature. According to Weber
(_Literatur der Babylonier und Assyrer_, p. 189), these include “all
texts that had for their object the observation and meaning of signs, of
whatever nature they might be, which were sent to men by the gods as
indications of their wishes, and form perhaps the most extensive group
of cuneiform texts that still exists.” To the same class we must
certainly ascribe some of our tablets, which bear curious groups of
linear scroll-work interspersed with script (Fig. 158). A series of
designs on tablets of horses and chariots, fights between wild beasts
(Fig. 159), etc., and some charming reliefs are interesting from an
artistic point of view.
[Illustration:
FIG. 157.—Tablets of the first dynasty.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 158.—Labyrinthine lines on a tablet.
]
When these tablets were found in their original position they were in
jars, which appears to have been the usual method of storing tablets
that were not too large (Fig. 160). In Fara, in a room of a house that
was destroyed by fire, there was a number of larger tablets lying
together in disorder, not on the floor-level but on a heap of rubbish,
so that their original storage-place could not be identified with
certainty. It appeared that they were lying above the fragments of the
ruined ceiling of the room, and that they had fallen from the storey
above, or from the roof, on which they may perhaps have been laid out to
dry at the time when the house was burnt down.
[Illustration:
FIG. 159.—Drawing on a tablet.
]
We found the tablets far more frequently in an early secondary position
than in the original one, a fact which clearly proves that these
documents were often thrown away when they were of no further use. They
are found in groups, either in the street or inside the houses. The
Hammurabi tablets in room 25 _þ_ (cf. Fig. 155) lay immediately under
the floor in the filling of the foundations, and had been laid level
with some care; that these were cancelled documents is shown by certain
examples which were struck through across and across, and also that
besides those that were complete a very large proportion were
[Illustration:
FIG. 160.—Pottery urn with tablets.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 161.—Bowls.
]
in fragments. In the house in Fara just mentioned there were a number of
smaller ones in good condition embedded in the mud mortar between the
courses of mud brick. It seems as though a certain reverence for written
documents frequently led the Babylonians, the graphomaniacs of the
ancient world, to cherish the specimens of their beloved art even after
they were no longer needed and had to be put out of the way, for a later
period unforeseen by them, when after thousands of years the lucky
people of to-day can gain the information conveyed by them.
[Illustration:
FIG. 162.—Aramaic incantation bowl.
]
The specimens of ceramics are so extremely numerous that we cannot
attempt in this place to obtain even an approximate knowledge of them,
and thus we can only occasionally point out the changes in form and
ornamentation of the different periods. We include in the following
observations some finds that occurred on other parts of the site.
The small flattish bowls are innumerable, they have no brim or only a
very simple one, and small inadequate bases (Fig. 161). They have often
owner’s marks made of punctured rows of dots. The deeper round bowls
have generally no base, and the walls of some of them are extremely
thin. In the upper layers there lay Aramaic incantation bowls (Fig. 162)
inscribed with signs resembling letters arranged in a spiral, and with
rough drawings of men and of demons. When found undisturbed, the rims of
two of them are placed together like a small double-urn coffin. Also
birds’ eggs are found with fine Aramaic writing. The beakers are
cylindrical or bell-shaped, with a poorly-worked base (Fig. 163), and
the pointed vases are cylindrical or of cup form (Fig. 164).
[Illustration:
FIG. 163.—Beakers.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 164.—Vases.
]
Small vases have often a white glaze, some of them a yellow or a blue
one, or a blue edge. Such vases occur as early as the old Kassite times,
when they are also made of a coarse frit. The outline is globular, or
like a calyx, or a reversed calyx. Here also the bases are small and
very poor. The larger vases of coloured enamels, which we have already
referred to (cf. Fig. 152), are completely rounded in profile. Their
footless base is sometimes slightly rounded, and is added to the body at
an angle.
[Illustration:
FIG. 165.—Storage jars, on ring stands below.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 166.—Large storage jars.
]
Jars for containing liquids (Figs. 165, 166) are always of a specially
long form, rather like the pupa of an insect. They were pointed below,
and were either leant up against a wall or some other support or were
placed in ring stands. Their rounded throats resembled the profile of an
upright cup, or of a deep bowl turned upside down. During the Greek and
later periods, amphorae, bearing the stamp of the Greek amphora on the
handle (Fig. 167), were used. In the later Parthian period a rounded jar
with a neck and no foot was common, made in two halves, and worked
together. The join is quite obvious on the outside. These jars are often
washed over, inside and outside, with asphalt. The long jars for storage
were also used for drain pipes by cutting off the ends and placing the
jars one inside another. Covers for these jars are found in numbers, in
the form of small bowls either bored through to attach a handle, or with
a projecting knob, an _omphalos_.
[Illustration:
FIG. 167.—Fragments of Greek Vases.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 168.—Flasks.
]
Small jars or flasks for storing liquids have very much the same form,
with a handle, a short neck, and a plain flattened base (Fig. 168). Some
are found still closed with a pottery stopper surrounded by a bit of
rag. On the stopper there is an impressed sealing. As early as the time
of Nebuchadnezzar the alabastron was in general use, both in pottery and
also in white alabaster; they vary from very small dimensions to a
considerable size. The amount of the contents is frequently marked on
them in cuneiform characters. Several fragments of large alabaster vases
bear Egyptian inscriptions. The handles of the alabastron are typical;
they are semicircular pierced discs placed on a small flat surface which
projects slightly, broadening from below, and looks like a rag hanging
down. Flat circular vases, usually glazed, are common both in the late
and early periods (Fig. 169).
[Illustration:
FIG. 169.—Flat circular vases.
]
The early Babylonian lamp consists of a rather high vase with a long
protruding curved nozzle (Fig. 170). It is often represented in this
form on the ancient _kudurru_, for it is the emblem of the god Nusku. In
the later forms the vase is flatter and the nozzle shorter. In both
forms the vase is made on the wheel and the nozzle is fashioned by hand.
The earlier higher form is only found unglazed. Some of the later form
are glazed, and some of them, with their blistered surface, resemble the
ancient enamel. Contemporary with these there are always some poor
examples which were entirely made by hand, as is the case with other
forms of pottery. But even in the most ancient ruins, the deepest levels
of Fara or Surgul, we have never penetrated to depths where the potter’s
wheel was unknown. Occasional instances of hand-made pottery can always
be identified as direct copies of contemporary ware made on the wheel,
so that it would appear that in Babylonia pottery and the potter’s wheel
were invented at the same time.
[Illustration:
FIG. 170.—Lamps.
]
The older higher form of lamp which, like the bowls, has often owner’s
marks punctured in groups of dots, is not intended to stand, and the
base is always rounded while the later lower form has a small flattened
base. Handles first make their appearance on the shallow glazed lamps,
often in the form of a separate piece added on. On these lamps also the
usual ornamentation of rows of dots and beads first appears. In this and
in the development of shape, the influence of the Greek lamp that came
in about this period is not to be ignored. This was a shallow pottery
lamp with a short semi-cylindrical nozzle, always well glazed and of the
finest clay, and combined an elegance of appearance with a high level of
practical utility such as had not been approached in Babylonia during
the course of thousands of years. In the later Parthian forms the nozzle
became less and less distinct from the body of the lamp, which was then
moulded in two separate pieces, an upper and a lower half. They were
rarely unornamented and were invariably glazed. Green glazed polylychnae
were also produced in Greek fashion with several nozzles on one side, or
with many all round them. All of these are apparently oil lamps.
In yet later Sassanide times a lamp was in use which consisted of a
small saucer in which the nozzle was formed by pinching it together with
the fingers into the shape of a trefoil; this was intended to contain
solid fat, and has generally a separate foot worked on to it. It was
always glazed blue or green with a black edge. Of a period at present
undetermined, and of unknown origin, is a boat-shaped lamp of black
stone. The wick passed through a hole in the solid prow, and in the
other rounded end there was also a solid piece left, in which a vertical
hole was bored to contain the stick that formed the handle.
All the earlier vases, which are distinguished by very poorly-formed
flattened bases, are adapted for a state of culture in which a table was
not reckoned among the household furniture of the ordinary folk. It was
Greek civilisation that first brought the table into general use.
The great storage vessels for dry goods are of semi-globular form with
an annular roll for the foot. Inside one of these and half-way up its
height there are three projecting brackets, on which a second jar could
be placed for special purposes. The great Pithos which played so
important a part in western culture does not appear here.
Hellenistic vases are found in abundance, but always in fragments, and
also an earlier form with black figures and a Greek inscription (see
Fig. 167). The shape cannot always be made out, but beside plates there
are the cylix, the aryballos, the alabastron, and others. This ware,
which is always highly polished, is not found in the graves, and we may
therefore conclude that the Greeks of that period had a special cemetery
which we have not yet found. A green glazed rhyton (Fig. 171) in the
form of a calf’s head lay in the upper levels of Merkes. The masses of
pottery and glass fragments of the Sassanide and Arab levels of Amran
still await examination by specialists.
[Illustration:
FIG. 171.—Glazed rhyton.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 172.—Glass goblet and jug.
]
Several transparent glass goblets profusely decorated with polished
concave facets lay near the rhyton. At the same Seleucid-Parthian level
there were numerous fragments of transparent colourless or pale-blue
glass vessels, among them finely-formed handles of oinochoae and
amphorae moulded while the material was still soft (Fig. 172). The
earlier glass is invariably opaque and multi-coloured. The usual form is
the small alabastron either pointed or rounded at the base. The
ornamentation consists of a web of multi-coloured glass lines encircling
the vase, which is made of a rough gritty frit. The lines while still
hot are broken first from above and then from below, thus forming lines
roughly S-shaped (Fig. 173). These vases certainly date back here to the
same early period as in Egypt (cf. Kisa, _Glas im Altertum_, i. p. 9,
“about 1500 B.C.”). We need not necessarily regard them as imports,
however, for the older the civilisations the more their products
resemble one another. Thus the pottery vases of Nagada resemble those of
Surgul. From the time of the Sargonids onwards, the importation of
Egyptian glass and other wares may first be observed without any doubt,
such as apotropaic eyes, weird scaraboids, and the like. Decorative
glass beads made like the alabastrons just described, and which are
general in Babylon in early times, date back as far as the fourth
millennium in Fara.
[Illustration:
FIG. 173.—Ancient glass.
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 174.—Earthenware bell.
]
A number of utensils and toys were found, especially in Merkes. Several
pottery utensils of remarkable form, which must have been employed for
some business purpose unknown to us, are still inexplicable. A bell of
burnt clay that occurs rather frequently is worthy of notice (Fig. 174).
It looks like a pointed beaker, but it is always perforated at the base,
and near the hole it has two projections, which are often fashioned like
animals’ heads and must have served for suspension. A string passed
through the hole, with a clapper of unburnt clay attached to it. It was
only when we found one of these clappers still bearing the print of the
string inside a bell that we could distinguish the bells as such, and
not as pierced beakers; it is, of course, only rarely that the clappers
are found in place.
[Illustration:
FIG. 175.—Woman on a beaker or omphalos.
]