A HISTORY OF ART
IN
CHALDÆA AND ASSYRIA.
A HISTORY
OF
Art in Chaldæa & Assyria
FROM THE FRENCH
OF
GEORGES PERROT,
PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE,
AND
CHARLES CHIPIEZ.
ILLUSTRATED WITH FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT
AND FIFTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES.
_IN TWO VOLUMES.---VOL. II._
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
WALTER ARMSTRONG, B.A., OXON.,
AUTHOR OF “ALFRED STEVENS,” ETC.
[Illustration]
London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, LIMITED.
New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON.
1884.
London:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE.
PAGE
§ 1. General Character of the Mesopotamian Palace and
History of the Excavations 1–8
§ 2. The Palace of Sargon 9–32
§ 3. Other Palaces of Mesopotamia 32–53
§ 4. Towns and their Defences 53–77
CHAPTER II.
SCULPTURE.
§ 1. The principal themes of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture 78–109
§ 2. Materials 109–125
§ 3. The Principal Conventions of Chaldæo-Assyrian
Sculpture 125–142
§ 4. On the Representations of Animals 142–173
§ 5. Chaldæan Sculpture 173–202
§ 6. Assyrian Sculpture 203–243
§ 7. Polychromy 243–250
§ 8. Gems 251–280
§ 9. The General Characteristics of Chaldæo-Assyrian
Sculpture 281–291
CHAPTER III.
PAINTING 292–297
CHAPTER IV.
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
§ 1. Ceramics 298–308
§ 2. Metallurgy 308–313
§ 3. Furniture 313–324
§ 4. Metal Dishes and Utensils 324–343
§ 5. Arms 343–349
§ 6. Instruments of the Toilet and Jewelry 349–363
§ 7. Textiles 363–372
§ 8. Commerce 372–374
CHAPTER V.
COMPARISON BETWEEN EGYPT AND CHALDÆA 375–400
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS 401–404
INDEX 407–420
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATES.
I. Royal statue, found by M. de Sarzec _To face page_ 126
II. Two Chaldæan heads, found by M. de Sarzec „ 128
III. Lion, from Nimroud „ 130
IV. Winged bull, from Khorsabad „ 136
V. Assurbanipal in his chariot „ 138
VI. Bronze lion, from the palace of Sargon „ 154
VII. Fragment from the Balawat gates „ 212
VIII. Enamelled brick, from Nimroud „ 294
IX. {Enamelled brick, from Nimroud }
{Fragment of painting on stucco, from Nimroud} „ 294
X. Decoration in enamelled brick, from the harem
at Khorsabad „ 294
FIG. PAGE
1. Map of Nineveh and its neighbourhood 6
2. The mound and village of Khorsabad before the
commencement of the excavations 9
3. Plan of Sargon’s palace in its present state 12
4. Longitudinal section through the palace of Sargon 13
5. South-eastern gateway of Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad 17
6. Plan of the harem in Sargon’s palace 21
7. Harem court in the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad 25
8. A hanging garden 30
9. Plan of a palace at Warka 33
10. Plan of chambers at Mugheir 34
11. Plan of chambers at Abou-Sharein 34
12. Plan of chambers at Abou-Sharein 34
13. General view of Nimroud 38
14. Plan of the north-western palace at Nimroud 39
15. Assurnazirpal offering a libation to the gods after
his victory over a wild bull 41
16. Plan of the south-western palace at Nimroud 43
17. Upper chambers excavated at Nimroud 44
18. Map of the site of Nineveh 45
19. Plan of the mound of Kouyundjik 46
20. Part plan of the palace of Sennacherib 47
21. Sennacherib at the head of his army 49
22. Town besieged by Sennacherib 54
23. Siege of a city 60
24. Plan of one of the ordinary gates at Khorsabad 66
25. Restoration in perspective of one of the ordinary
gates of Khorsabad 67
26. State gateway at Khorsabad 68
27. Longitudinal section through the archway of one of
the city gates, Khorsabad 69
28. Fortified wall; from the Balawat gates 73
29. Siege of a fort 74
30. An attack by escalade 75
31. Chariot for three combatants; from the palace of
Assurbanipal 76
32. The demon of the south-west wind 81
33. Head of a winged bull of Assurbanipal 83
34. Cone of chalcedony 85
35. Izdubar and Lion 86
36. Winged genius 87
37. Carrying the gods; from the palace of Sennacherib 90
38. Istar and the sacrificing priest 90
39. Istar between two personages 90
40. Lapis-lazuli cylinder 91
41. 42. Fragments of an ivory statuette 92
43. Merodach- or Marduk-idin-akhi 95
44. Captives on the march; from the palace of Sennacherib 97
45. Sargon before the sacred tree 99
46. Assyrian standard 102
47. Sennacherib before Lachish 105
48. Procession of captives 107
49. One face of the obelisk of Shalmaneser II. 111
50. Statuette of a priest 114
51. Dagon 114
52. Head of a lioness 115
53. Canephoros 117
54. Man driving goats and sheep; from the Balawat gates 118
55. Lion carved in wood 119
56. Ivory seal 119
57. Ivory tablet in the British Museum 120
58. Ivory fragment in the British Museum 121
59. Ivory tablet in the British Museum 122
60. Statue of Assurnazirpal 123
61. Statue of Shalmaneser II. 127
62. Pair of warriors 129
63. Prisoners; from the palace of Sennacherib 130
64. Vassal bringing monkeys 133
65. Head of a eunuch 136
66. Assyrian soldier 137
67. Fragment of a Chaldæan bas-relief 141
68. Head of a cow 143
69. Terra-cotta tablet 144
70. Cylinder of black marble 145
71. Terra-cotta dog 146
72. The hounds of Assurbanipal 147
73. Chariot horses 150
74. Wild ass; from the hunt of Assurbanipal 151
75. Embroidery on the king’s robe 153
76. Fight between a man and an ostrich 153
77. Lion and lioness in a park 155
78. Lion coming out of his cage 156
79. Wounded lion 157
80. Wounded lioness 161
81. Niche decorated with two lions 163
82. Sword and scabbard 164
83. Combat between a lion and a unicorn 165
84. Lion’s head, in enamelled earthenware 165
85. Recumbent goat ditto 166
86. Dog, in terra-cotta 167
87. Fantastic animal 168
88. Man-lion 169
89. Winged horse 171
90. Griffins seizing a goat 171
91. Human-headed bird 172
92. Inscription engraved on one of the seated Chaldæan
statues 175
93. Fragment of a stele; from Tello 177
94. Fragment of a stele; from Tello 179
95. Fragment of a stele; from Tello 181
96. Statue; from Tello 182
97. The hands of a statue; from Tello 183
98. The large statue from Tello 185
99. Female statuette 187
100. Statuette; from Tello 188
101. Fragment of a relief; from Tello 189
102. Fragment of a relief; from Tello 191
103. Head; from Tello 191
104. Stone pedestal; from Tello 192
105. Chaldæan statuette 193
106. Statuette of a priest 195
107. Statuette of a woman 195
108. Terra-cotta statuette 196
109. Head; from Tello 197
110. The Caillou Michaux 199
111. The Caillou Michaux, obverse 200
112. The Caillou Michaux, reverse 201
113. Assurnazirpal offering a libation 205
114. Tree on a river-bank 207
115. Detail from the royal robe of Assurnazirpal 209
116. Stele of Samas-vul II. 211
117. Two fragments from the Balawat gates 215
118. Bas-relief; from Khorsabad 221
119. Marsh vegetation 223
120. The great bas-relief at Bavian 227
121. Fountain 230
122. Assyrian bas-relief in the Nahr-el-Kelb 231
123. The bas-reliefs of Malthaï 233
124. Chaldæan cylinder 237
125. Assyrian cylinder 237
126. Wild goats 239
127. The feast of Assurbanipal 241
128. Terra-cotta statuette 242
129. River pebble which has formed part of a necklace 252
130. River pebble engraved 252
131. Concave-faced cylinder 254
132. Cylinder with modern mount 254
133. Tablet with impression from a cylinder 256
134. Cylinder with ancient bronze mount 257
135. Cylinder and attachment in one 257
136. Chaldæan cylinder 257
137. Impression from the same cylinder 257
138. Engraved shell 260
139. Chalcedony cylinder 261
140. Cylinder of black jasper 261
141. Assyrian cylinder 262
142. Chaldæan cylinder; marble or porphyry 264
143. Chaldæan cylinder; green serpentine 266
144. Chaldæan cylinder; basalt 267
145. Chaldæan cylinder; basalt 267
146. Chaldæan cylinder 268
147. Chaldæan cylinder; basalt 269
148. Chaldæan cylinder; black marble 270
149. Chaldæan cylinder of veined agate 271
150. Archaic Assyrian cylinder 272
151. Assyrian cylinder; serpentine 273
152. Assyrian cylinder; serpentine 273
153. Assyrian cylinder 273
154. Chaldæan cylinder dating from the second monarchy;
black jasper 275
155. Impression of a cylinder on a contract 275
156. Cylinder with Aramaic characters 276
157. Cone 277
158. Cone 277
159. Amethyst cone 279
160. Agate cone 279
161. Assurbanipal attacked by lions 283
162. Figure of a goddess 290
163–165. Chaldæan vases of the first period 299
166–168. Chaldæan vases of the second period 299
169. Chaldæan vase 300
170–173. Assyrian vases 301
174–176. Goblets 301
177. Ewer 301
178–180. Amphoræ 302
181. Alabastron 302
182. Fragment of a vase 302
183. Fragment of a vase 303
184, 185. Fragments of vases 303
186. Goblet 304
187. Fragment of a vase 304
188, 189. Fragments of vases 305
190. Glass vase or bottle 307
191. Glass tube 307
192. Iron mattock 310
193. Fragment of a throne 315
194. Fragment of a throne 316
195. Bronze foot of a piece of furniture 316
196. Capital and upper part of a small column 317
197, 198. Fragments of bronze furniture 317
199. Footstool; from a bas-relief 318
200. Stool 318
201. Ivory panel 321
202. Dagger-hilt; ivory 322
203. Bronze tripod 324
204, 205. Metal vases 325
206. Metal bucket 325
207. Applied piece 326
208. Bronze platter 327
209. Bronze platter 330
210–214. Columns or standards figured upon a bronze cup 331
215. Bronze platter 332
216. Part of a bronze cup or platter 333
217. Bronze cup 334
218. Bronze cup 342
219. Border of a cup 343
220, 221. Chariot poles 344
222, 223. Sword scabbards 345
224. Bronze cube damascened with gold 346
225. Votive shield 347
226. Knife-handle 348
227. Comb 350
228. Comb 351
229. Comb 352
230, 231. Bronze fork and spoon 353
232, 233. Bracelets 354
234. Ear-drop 354
235–237. Necklace and ear-drops 355
238. Necklace 356
239. Royal necklace 356
240. Bracelet 357
241. Bracelets 358
242. Ear-drop 358
243, 244. Ear-drops 358
245. Necklace 359
246, 247. Moulds for trinkets 361
248, 249. Gold buttons 359
250. Part of the harness of a chariot-horse 361
251, 252. Ear-pendents 362
253. Embroidery on the upper part of the king’s mantle 365
254. Embroidery upon a royal mantle 367
255. Embroidered pectoral 369
256. Detail of embroidery 370
257. Detail of embroidery 370
258. Detail of embroidery 371
259. Detail of embroidery 372
260. Egyptian mirror 387
261. Egyptian mirror 391
TAIL-PIECES, &c.
Fore-quarters of a lion, glazed earthenware (Louvre) 77
Standard, from a relief 291
Flower, from a relief 297
Head of a ram, ivory (Louvre) 374
The sacred tree, from a relief 400
Ornament from a royal tiara 404
A HISTORY OF ART
IN
CHALDÆA AND ASSYRIA
CHAPTER I.
CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE.
§ I. _General Character of the Mesopotamian Palace and History of the
Excavations._
As every student of Assyro-Chaldæan art has remarked, the best
preserved of its monuments are the palaces. They alone are represented
by ruins in such a condition that restorations may be successfully
attempted, not only so far as their general arrangements are concerned
but even in minor details. The preponderant part played by the ruins of
palaces in the history of Assyrian architecture is thus acknowledged by
all, but it has sometimes been explained by reasons that will not bear
examination. “Less religious or more servile than the Egyptians and the
Greeks, they made their temples insignificant in comparison with the
dwellings of their kings, to which indeed the temple is most commonly
a sort of appendage. In the palace their art culminates---there every
effort is made, every ornament lavished. If the architecture of the
Assyrian palaces be fully considered, very little need be said on the
subject of their other buildings.”[1]
History contradicts any such theory. The asserted inequality did not
exist. The piety of Chaldæans and Assyrians was no less lively and
profound than that of the Egyptians. A Seti or a Rameses, the cherished
son and visible image of Amen, the prince who became a god after his
life was done, was no less powerful and venerable at Memphis and Thebes
than were Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar at Nineveh and Babylon.
The differences to which we have pointed are to be explained by other
and more simple reasons. In Egypt the temple has survived the palace
because it was a dwelling built for an immortal occupant, and therefore
the most durable materials, stone and granite, were used; while the
palace, being no more than the resting-place of a day, a shelter raised
among waving palms and flowing streams for the passenger through
this life to the next, had to be content with brick and timber. In
Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the same materials were used for the
dwellings both of gods and kings; and the same system of construction,
a system dictated by the climate, was applied to both classes of
buildings. It is not true that one group was neglected for the other,
that Mesopotamian civilization took less trouble for Marduk, for Istar
and Assur, than for its conquering princes; it is inaccurate to say
that her palace architecture was all that Assyria had to show. The tomb
was larger and more important in Egypt than in Mesopotamia, but in
the latter country the temple was the object of as much care, both in
construction and decoration, as the palace. Its arrangement was more
interesting and far more original, and its outward decoration no less
rich. In Babylon, at least, the inscriptions in which the kings recount
their exploits for the admiration of posterity, speak oftener and
with more pride of temples than of palaces. The remains of the latter
are more complete simply because their chief development was over the
surface of the ground, while that of the temples was toward the sky.
With materials such as those of which both the one and the other were
built it was inevitable that tall buildings should come to ruin before
low ones. Moreover, their most interesting parts were on the exterior
and more especially about their summits. Ramps and sanctuaries with
their surface decorations must have begun to disappear as soon as daily
care ceased to be lavished upon them. The solid interior alone would
be preserved, and, before many years were over, the degradation of
its substance would make it a shapeless heap of clay. The palace, of
course, burnt-in the first place and then abandoned to the slow action
of time, can have met the forces of destruction with no better effect
than buildings of marble and granite did elsewhere; but it inclosed
great empty spaces, wide quadrangles, long galleries, and spacious
chambers. In their fall ceilings and the heads of walls filled up these
voids and buried their inclosing walls to a considerable height in a
deep bed of protecting rubbish. This had only to be taken away to lay
bare the whole plan of the building and much of its ornamentation. We
can thus become much more intimately acquainted with the palace than
with the temple, but we have no right thence to conclude that the
former was the favourite work of the Chaldæan architects, or that it
contained the last word of their talent and taste.
In any case it was the Assyrian palace that, about forty years ago,
began to reveal to us an early civilization to which modern research
is now awarding its proper place in the history of the ancient world.
About the commencement of the present century criticism had succeeded
in fixing approximate dates for the few kings of Assyria and Chaldæa
mentioned in the Bible and by classic authors. It was suspected that
the tales of Ctesias included many a fable, and painful efforts
were made to disentangle what was true from what was false, but the
language, the literature, and the arts of those peoples were as yet
entirely unknown. The sites of Babylon and Nineveh had been ascertained
with some degree of certainty; it was known that ruins existed in
the plains of Mesopotamia which had been used by the natives as open
quarries for century after century, and that the towns and villages
that now stud the country were built from the materials thus obtained;
but nothing had been learnt as to the form and arrangement of the
buildings hidden under those heaps of _débris_. Travellers spoke
of seeing statues and bas-reliefs among the ruins, but they could not
bring them away, and they made no drawings which could be depended on
for accuracy. European museums could boast of nothing beyond small
objects, fragments of pottery, stones and terra-cotta slabs covered
with strange symbols and undecipherable inscriptions. Most of these
were cones and cylinders which proved that the Mesopotamians understood
how to cut and engrave the hardest stones. Such objects excited a kind
of hopeless curiosity. They were sometimes pointed out to the attention
of scholars, as by Millin in his paper on the _Caillou Michaux_,
a sort of Babylonian landmark that has belonged to the _Cabinet des
Antiques_[2] in Paris ever since 1801.
But no attempt was made to define the style of the school of art by
which such things were produced, and not the faintest suspicion was
felt of the influence exercised by Chaldæan productions over distant
races whose genius for the plastic arts was universally acknowledged. A
single writer, the historian Niebuhr, seems by a kind of intuition to
have divined the discoveries at which a new generation was to assist,
and to have anticipated their consequences. As early as the year 1829
he wrote, “When at Rome I heard from a Chaldæan priest who lives near
the ruins of Nineveh, that colossi are there found buried under huge
masses of building rubbish. When he was a child one of these statues
was discovered by a mere accident, but the Turks at once broke it up.
Nineveh is destined to be a Pompeii for Western Asia. It will be an
inexhaustible mine for those that come after us, perhaps even for our
own children. The Assyrian language will also have its Champollions.
You who can do so should prepare the way by the study of Zend for the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions.”[3]
Here Niebuhr showed himself a true prophet, but he was denied the joy
of seeing his prophecy fulfilled. He died in 1831, and it was not
till the 20th March, 1843, that the French consul at Mossoul sent
his first batch of labourers to Khorsabad. The date better deserves
to be remembered than that of many a battle or royal accession. His
first reports to the _Academic des Inscriptions_ were scientific
events.[4] Funds were placed at his disposal, and a clever draughtsman,
M. Flandin, was sent out to help in measuring plans and copying
bas-reliefs. In June, 1845, the first Assyrian sculptures of any size
that had ever left their native place for Europe were set afloat upon
the Tigris, and in December, 1846, they arrived in France. In 1847 de
Longperier was the first to read upon the Khorsabad remains that name
of Sargon which is mentioned by none of the classic authors and only
once by the Bible.[5] This discovery was of the greatest importance;
it at once gave a date to remains whose age had been previously a mere
matter of guess. The most divergent hypotheses had been started--some
believed the sculptures to have belonged to the remote times of
Ninus and Semiramis, others thought them no more ancient than the
Sassanids;[6] it was a great point gained to make sure that their true
date was the eighth century before our era.
These first discoveries excited so much attention that they were sure
to attract many to the task begun with such unhoped-for success by
Botta. England especially, by whom all that has the slightest bearing
on Jewish history is so passionately followed up, was sure to take her
part. In November, 1845, Mr. Layard began to excavate at Nimroud; he
carried on his work there and at Kouyundjik, until the year 1847. The
adjoining map (Fig. 1) will-give an idea of the relative position of
the sites we shall so often have to mention. The beauty and variety
of the monuments sent home by Mr. Layard, decided the authorities of
the British Museum to intrust him with a new mission, and from 1849
to 1851 he was again busy at Nimroud; he cleared some more rooms
in the great palace on the Kouyundjik mound, and he undertook some
explorations on the sites of several Chaldæan cities. The objects he
collected form the true foundation of the Assyrian collection in the
British Museum, which is, at present, by far the richest in existence.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Map of Nineveh and its
neighbourhood; from Oppert.]
In 1851, France decided to resume the excavations at Khorsabad, which
had been abandoned on the departure of Botta. M. Place, his successor
at Mossoul, continued and completed the excavations, which had been
little more than begun. His labours lasted till 1855, but unhappily
most of the sculptures recovered by him are now at the bottom of the
Tigris. The great work in which he was helped by the skill of Felix
Thomas is the most precious result of his enterprise.
The era of heroic explorations seems to have closed with Layard and
Place, but during the last thirty years there has always been some
English agent sounding the flanks of the Assyrian mounds. Under the
surveillance of Sir Henry, then Colonel, Rawlinson, the East India
Company’s resident at Bagdad, many discoveries were made by Mr. Hormuzd
Rassam, Sir Henry Layard’s collaborator, and by the late William
Kennett Loftus. Finally, we must mention George Smith, who died at
Aleppo in 1876, on the eve of his third journey into Assyria. He had
visited that country for the first time in 1873, at the expense of the
_Daily Telegraph_, which had placed a sum of one thousand guineas
at his disposal, and had afterwards presented all the objects he had
sent home to the British Museum.
We have enumerated all these dates with some dryness, and without any
attempt to write a taking narrative, because we wished to impress upon
our readers how recent these discoveries are, how they have followed
closely one upon another, and well within the lifetime of a single
man. The difficulty of our task will thus be evident. We are making
a first attempt to bring the results of all these explorations into
a connected form, and to present them systematically to the reader.
There is one thing that stands out very strongly in the whole inquiry.
The monuments, by which the art of a great vanished civilization
is represented in our museums, come mainly from the ruins of royal
dwellings. The chief idea suggested by the words Khorsabad, Nimroud
and Kouyundjik, is the excavation of the magnificent palaces raised
by the Assyrian monarchs within a period of something more than three
centuries. Following a custom still in vogue with the native rulers
of Egypt and India, of Persia and Turkey, each prince signalized his
accession by the commencement of a palace which should be entirely his
own.[7] To establish himself in the dwelling which had seen the death
of his predecessor would have seemed an invitation to misfortune, and
his pride would have been wounded at seeing the walls of his house
given up to celebrating the exploits of any one but himself. Finally,
each king hoped to surpass all those who had gone before in the extent
and luxury of the edifice to which his name would be thenceforward
attached. Sometimes he took dressed masonry from abandoned seraglios;
sometimes he raised at his doors winged bulls which had already done
duty elsewhere, changing, of course, their inscriptions; sometimes
he lined his chambers with alabaster slabs bearing reliefs in which
the conquests of his fathers were narrated; in that case he turned
the sculptured side to the wall, and caused his own prowess to be
celebrated upon the new surface thus cheaply won.[8] Whether old
materials were used or new, the palace was always personal to the king
who built it. Thus it is that the remains of some ten palaces have been
found in the mounds already attacked, although that of Khorsabad is the
only one that has been completely explored.
We cannot attempt to describe the ruins of so many palaces. No one
of them is an exact copy of any other; their dimensions, and many of
their arrangements have much variety, but nevertheless, we may say
that they all follow the same general plan. The only way to avoid
continual repetition is to take, as a type of all, the example that has
been most completely studied. Our choice of such a type is soon made.
The palace of Sargon, at Khorsabad, may be neither the largest of the
Assyrian palaces nor that in which the best sculptors were employed
upon the decorations, but it is certainly that in which the excavations
have been most systematically carried on. Except at a few points the
explorers have only held their hands when the flat summit of the mound
was reached. The whole has been cleared except the centres of some of
the quadrangles and a few unimportant outbuildings. Nowhere else can
the general arrangement be so clearly followed, or the guiding spirit
of an Assyrian plan so easily grasped.
[Illustration:
PLATE V
PALACE OF SARGON, KHORSABAD
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW BY CH. CHIPIEZ FROM
The restoration by F Thomas]
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--The mound and village of
Khorsabad before the commencement of the excavations; from Botta.]
§ 2.--_The Palace of Sargon._
The mound in which the remains of Sargon’s palace had lain concealed
for so many centuries bore on its summit, before the excavations began,
a small village called Khorsabad (Fig. 2). It rises about nine miles
north-north-east of Mossoul on the eastern bank of the Khausser, an
affluent of the Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of the mountains which
begin to draw in towards the left bank of that river not far above the
site of Nineveh. Botta was induced to begin his excavations at this
point on account of the numerous fragments of cuneiform inscriptions
which were found there by the peasants of the village. He sent a number
of workmen to Khorsabad under the superintendence of his confidential
servant, Charles Michel, who, twenty years afterwards, was my dragoman
in Asia Minor.[9] How often during our long marches through forests
and across barren steppes he entertained me with the story of how he
discovered Nineveh, as, like his master Botta, he always called it, my
readers may guess. “We arrived at Khorsabad towards evening, and after
exploring the village I was rather puzzled as to what I should find for
my men to do--we had already been so often deceived. At Kouyundjik we
had raised no end of dust and found hardly anything. While turning over
this question in my mind I had my supper before the door of one of the
houses, and after the meal was over, I was idly scratching the ground
by the side of the mat on which I was lying, with my knife. Suddenly I
felt the blade strike against something very hard; I withdrew it, and
thrusting my finger into the hole, I felt a stone. Working away with
the knife I soon enlarged the hole, and then saw that the stone was
worked and chiselled with great care. Next morning I brought my workmen
to the spot, and watched them closely to see that they advanced with
sufficient precaution. A few strokes of the pick-axe brought to light
the head of one of the bulls. Off I went at full gallop to Mossoul, and
came back next day with M. Botta.”
Whether this be a truthful narrative or not I cannot say. Michel was
born in the Levant, of French parents, and I always forgot to ask
whether, by any chance, his father was a Gascon. In any case, it
was to Botta’s honour that he understood the value and significance
of a discovery due, in the first place, to the idle scratchings of
a subaltern, and that he pushed on his explorations in the face of
Turkish ill-will and pecuniary difficulties, and that before he had
received any encouragement from Paris.
Botta soon recognized the true character of the building, even although
he clung to the erroneous notion that he had disinterred the historical
capital of Assyria, the Nineveh of classic writers and Hebrew
prophets.[10] The excavations of his successor and the decipherment
of the cuneiform texts have clearly proved his mistake. The monument
found and partly excavated by Botta, was never included in Nineveh,
vast though that city may have been. It was part of what may be called
a caprice of Sargon’s put into execution between the years 722 and 705
B.C. That prince was not content with founding a new dynasty;
he determined to pass the intervals between his campaigns in a palace
and city which should be entirely his own creation, and should bear
his name. That town and palace, with its situation a few miles from
the great political and commercial capital, was the Versailles of an
Assyrian _grand monarque_.
The connection between town and palace was very close. The fortified
walls of the former inclosed a large rectangular parallelogram (Vol. I.
Fig. 144), while the lofty platform on which the structures composing
the king’s dwelling were reared, was placed, as it were, astride of the
wall on its north-western face. Its pavement was on a level with the
summit of the wall.[11] Thus attached to the _enceinte_ the palace
esplanade shared the protection of its parapet and flanking towers,
while it stood boldly out, like an enormous bastion, from the stretch
of wall of which it formed a part. From three of its faces it commanded
a view of the plain, the river, and the neighbouring mountains, so
that the requirements of health and pleasure were remembered at the
same time as those of safety. As for placing the king’s dwelling, as
it might have been placed by a modern architect, at some distance from
the town, and upon the summit of some gentle height, such a notion was
quite outside Assyrian ideas. A country site would have been too easily
accessible to the numerous enemies of the Assyrian kings--those eastern
Attilas, who could only feel themselves safe when sheltered by the
impenetrable walls of dwellings perched upon an artificial hill, from
which the whole surrounding country could be watched.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Plan of Sargon’s palace in its
present state; from Place.]
We must refer those who wish to study the arrangements of Sargon’s
palace in detail to the plans and letterpress of Place. Botta
discovered fourteen apartments; Place cleared one hundred and
eighty-six. A few more were suggested by him on his restored plan at
points where symmetry seemed to demand their existence. His plan,
therefore, includes in all, two hundred and nine apartments of various
sizes.[12] The adjoining plan, which shows the actual state of the
ruins, is sufficient to show the general arrangement (Fig. 3).[13]
The longitudinal section (Fig. 4) is taken through the central axis
of the building, the position of the staged-tower showing that it is
the western half of the palace that has been chosen for reproduction.
A good idea of the general physiognomy of the whole may be obtained
from our Plate V. This is not a mere reduction from Thomas’s
restoration;[14] several details have been sensibly modified. Thus, on
the principal façade, barrel vaults have been substituted for domes
as being on the whole more probable; battlements have been placed on
the parapet of the double ramp, and the perspective, which is very
imperfect in Thomas’s plate, has been corrected. Our view is supposed
to be taken at some sixteen hundred feet above the ground and at a
considerable distance south-east of the platform.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Longitudinal section through the
palace of Sargon; compiled from Thomas.]
We shall here confine ourselves to showing how the Assyrians understood
the plan and general arrangement of a royal palace. The buildings of
which it was composed were grouped upon a platform shaped like a T.[15]
Each of the two parts of this platform was a rectangle. The larger of
the two--that within the town walls--had a superficial measurement
of about 68,500 square yards, the smaller one of about 40,000 square
yards; so that the palace as a whole covered between twenty-four and
twenty-five acres of ground, and the brick employed in building it may
be put at about 1,750,642 cubic yards. The imagination is oppressed
by such figures, especially when we remember that all this mass of
material was carried to its place in baskets on men’s shoulders. This
we know from those reliefs in which the construction of a palace is
figured.[16]
At the first glance the labyrinth of chambers, corridors and courts
presented by the above plan seems to offer a hopeless task to one
anxious to grasp the principle of its arrangements and to assign its
right use to each apartment. Place and Thomas tell us that such was
their feeling when they first began to open up the palace, but as the
work advanced they grew to understand its combinations. In certain
parts of the building objects were found that cast a flood of light
upon the original purposes of the rooms in which they occurred; the
character and richness of the decoration varied greatly between one
part of the palace and another. The arrangement of the side entrances,
the rarity or multiplicity of passages, also had their significance.
Thanks to the observations made on all these points during the progress
of the work we can now understand the economy of the building with some
completeness.
Its general arrangements were suggested to the architect by those
conditions of life in the east which have changed so little during so
many centuries. From this point of view it was soon perceived that
the palace was divided into three distinct groups of apartments,
groups corresponding exactly to the three great divisions into which
every palatial residence of modern India, Persia, or Turkey may be
divided. There is the Seraglio, or palace properly speaking, the rooms
inhabited by the men, and the sélamlik, in which visitors are received.
Then comes the Harem containing the private apartments of the prince
with those of his wives and children, who are guarded by eunuchs and
waited on by a crowd of female slaves and domestics. Finally there
is the Khan, a collection of service chambers that we should call
_offices_. The analogy is so absolute that in our ignorance of the
Assyrian names for the three divisions of the palace, we are tempted
to make use of those employed throughout the Levant, to designate
the different parts of such houses, as, thanks to the wealth of their
masters, are provided with all their organs.
It is possible that the palace had some direct outlet to the open
country, so that its inhabitants could escape, unknown to the
population of the city, in time of tumult, or could make a nocturnal
sortie upon an enemy encamped beneath the mound. If there were any such
arrangement it must have consisted of staircases contrived in the mound
itself and closed, perhaps, at their inferior extremities with heavy
bronze doors. No traces of such passages have been found. But even on
the side towards the city, the side on which lay the natural approach
to the palace, there is no sign of any ramp or staircase by which the
forty-six feet of difference between the levels of the platform and the
soil upon which the city was built, could be overcome. The palace had
two great monumental façades, each pierced with three large openings
flanked by winged bulls. One of these façades (that in front of the
hall lettered I on the plan) formed one side of a spacious rectangular
court (H) and faced towards the north-east. Some of the buildings
surrounding this court have entirely disappeared (see plan), but it is
certain that it communicated with the platform of the city walls and
that of the palace itself by one opening or more. On the north-eastern
side Thomas has placed a wide and easy inclined-plane by which horses
and other beasts of burden could mount to the platform, so that the
king’s chariot could deposit him at the very door of his apartments,
and the heavily laden mules and bullocks could deliver their loads in
the store rooms which occupied the whole eastern angle of the mound.[17]
The other façade occupies the middle of the south-eastern face and is
turned towards the town. It forms a majestic propylæum (Fig. 5) through
which the largest of the courts is reached (A on the plan). In the more
stately of the city gates foot prints may be traced, while in those
that are less ornamental there are marks of wheels, suggesting that
some entrances were reserved for pedestrians and others for carriages.
It is likely enough that a similar arrangement obtained in the palace,
and that in front of this south-eastern gateway there was a flight of
steps instead of a continuous ramp. We find such an arrangement at
Persepolis where both steps and balustrade, being cut in the rock,
are still in good preservation; at Khorsabad, however, there is now
no vestige of such a staircase. If the steps have not been carried
away they must lie entombed at the very bottom of the _débris_.
We cannot say then that our restoration is, in this particular,
beyond contention, but it is both probable in itself and entirely in
the spirit of Assyrian architecture. These steps must have been the
shortest way from the town to the palace. Horsemen, chariots, convoys
of provisions had to make a détour and reach both the palace platform
and that of the city walls by the south-eastern ramp.
Let us, too, make use of that approach, and, when we have gained the
summit of the incline, turn to our left and pass through the first
doorway. This must have been carefully fortified and guarded, for it
led directly to the heart of the royal dwelling. It has now entirely
disappeared with the northern corner of the mound on which it stood,
but we need not hesitate to restore it, with a whole suite of buildings
inclosing what must have been the chief court of the palace, so far,
at least, as dignity was concerned (H on the plan).[18] West and
south-west of this quadrangle there is a group of chambers excavated by
Botta, to which we have given the name of the seraglio.
The seraglio contained ten courts and no less than sixty rooms or
passages, intimately connected by the doors pierced through their
walls. M. Place divides this great collection of chambers into two
distinct parts, which, he thinks, had different duties to fulfil.
He calls the first part, that in which the courts marked I, J, K,
L occur, the _sculptural part_.[19] It contained the sélamlik
proper, consisting of the largest and most splendidly decorated halls.
The narrow gallery separating court I from court J is 150 feet long
and 19 feet wide. The other rooms opening out of court J are 106 feet
long by 26½ feet wide. This court J is the real centre of the sélamlik;
it is almost exactly square, with a superficial measurement of about
11,236 square feet. The eight doors that open upon it give access to
every part of the palace. Four of these doorways are supported by
bulls; they were all vaulted, and their arches decorated with bands
of enamelled brick. As for the walls themselves, their lower parts
were cased with bas-reliefs coloured in sober tints. It is quite
possible that this court was used for ceremonial purposes, as it could
be easily protected from the sun by stretching between the summits of
its walls, those rich stuffs the Babylonians knew so well how to weave.
By covering the ground with carpets a saloon would be formed in which
large numbers of people could be brought together, and one whose noble
decorations would be in complete harmony with the stateliest pageants.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--South eastern gateway of
Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad; compiled from Thomas.]
We cannot attempt to describe the seven great chambers that surrounded
the courtyard. They were all decorated with sculptured slabs and
enamelled brick; the doors that led from one to the other were flanked
by colossi. At one point (looking towards the court marked L) the
spectator could look down a vista of no less than eight of these arched
and decorated doorways.
All these large rooms opening from a single court made up a combination
in which everything was calculated for show. Their size alone made
such rooms uninhabitable, and, as life has everywhere much the same
requirements, M. Place found to the south of these state apartments a
collection of smaller and less richly ornamented chambers in which the
king could sleep, eat, and receive in private audience, and in which
the officers of his chancellery and his personal attendants could be
lodged within easy call. These are the rooms about the courts marked M,
M´, N, O, P in our plan. They contain a few sculptures. The walls as a
rule are coated with a coloured stucco, and sometimes decorated with
fresco paintings. There are in all forty-nine of these rooms, covering,
with their courts, about 6,000 square yards.
A short study of the plan is enough to make its presiding idea clear
to us. “Each court, taken by itself and with the chambers radiating
from it, forms a distinct group of apartments communicating with other
groups only on one side and often only by a single door.”[20] Each
of these groups must have afforded lodgings for the personnel of one
department of the king’s household. Ctesias says that fifteen thousand
officers and domestics found board and lodging in the palace of the
King of Persia, and although he may be here guilty, as in so many
other instances, of some exaggeration, we are willing to accept this
figure as being comparatively near the truth. Travellers who visited
Constantinople in the days of the Solimans and Amurats, tell us that
the walls of the old seraglio crave shelter to thousands of individuals
who were fed from the kitchens of the sultan.
Before quitting this part of the palace we must point out several
other buildings that belong to it both by position and character.
In the first place, our readers will see that the northern angle is
occupied by a group of chambers abutting on one corner of the seraglio
but not communicating directly with it. This group opens on the state
quadrangle and upon the external platform. “This building was decorated
in the most splendid fashion. It contained eight vast halls and a few
smaller chambers. It was like a second seraglio attached to the first
and rivalling it in magnificence. What could have been its destination?
We can hardly answer that question with certainty, but we may hazard
the suggestion that, in the lifetime of Sargon, his son Sennacherib was
already a great personage and must have had his own particular palace,
or suite of apartments, in the house of the king, his father.”[21]
In the western angle of the platform stands the isolated and
irretrievably ruinous building taken by Botta for a temple, and
restored by Thomas as a throne room.[22] In either case it played its
part in the official and public life of the king. We may say the same
of the building near the centre of the south-western face of the mound,
in which we have recognized a temple, although we have not scrupled to
make use of the title given to it by M. Place. The chief sanctuary of
the town that lay so far below its summit, it must have been the scene
after each campaign, of the royal homage to Assur; the observatory of
the astrologers, it must have had constant and intimate relations with
the palace, where the bulletins issued from it must have been awaited
with anxiety whenever the propitious moment for any great enterprise
was sought.
At the southern angle of the seraglio and to the south-east of the
_Observatory_, there is an almost completely separate building.
Its isolation, the few points of access and the way they are arranged,
the style of its decorations, their richness, and the disposition of
its chambers, all combine to suggest that this part of the palace
was the royal harem. An inscription upon the threshold of one of the
rooms confirms this conjecture; it prays for the blessing of fertility
upon the royal alliances.[23] In our Fig. 6 we give a large scale plan
on which its arrangements may be more easily followed. The total area
of the harem was about 10,912 square yards.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Plan of the harem in Sargon’s
palace; from Place.]
In the walls inclosing all this space there were but two openings;
one in the south-western façade, facing the city, the other leading
into the great court of the palace. The first opening was a narrow
passage leading to a small square chamber, which must have been a
eunuch’s guard-room. The passage from it into the main court of the
harem is at right angles with the first named passage, so that no
glimpse of the inside could be caught from the external platform, or
_vice-versâ_. The second entrance also leads to this same court
(Q on plan) which thus acts as a kind of vestibule to the rest of the
harem. This entrance leads from the southern angle of the large court
(A on first plan) into a rectangular guard-room like that already
mentioned. This guard-room has four doors. One leading through a small
square vestibule into the large court, two sides of which were taken
up with stables, workshops, and store-rooms; a second leading, as we
have seen, into the harem court; a third into the first of several
rectangular chambers that surround this court on the south-east; and
the fourth into a kind of corridor that runs between the harem wall (U)
and that of the great quadrangle, ending finally on the platform round
the _Observatory_. By this last named entrance the king could
reach his wives’ apartments by a route which, though longer, was far
more private than that through the great quadrangle. The passage may,
perhaps, have been covered by a wooden gallery, allowing it to be used
in all states of the weather.
The harem had three courts, around which were distributed a number of
small rooms and several large halls, destined, no doubt, for use on
festive occasions. There were no bas-reliefs on the walls, which were
decorated merely with a coat of white stucco crossed at the foot by a
black dado thirty-two inches high. Unlike the floors of beaten earth
in the seraglio, most of those in the harem were paved with bricks or
stone slabs.
The heart of the harem was the court marked U in our plan. Its
decorations were rich in the extreme. On at least one side the foot
of the wall was decorated with a sort of mosaic of enamelled brick
surmounted by groups of semi-columns (Fig. 101 and Plate XV.). The
doors were flanked by statues and by tall timber shafts cased in metal,
carrying on their summits tufts of palm leaves in gilded bronze, giving
a free rendering of the tall stem and graceful head of the date-tree.
We have restored one part of this court in perspective (Fig. 7)
introducing nothing conjectural but the upper parts of the wall.[24]
In this woodcut an arrangement may be noticed (it is still more clearly
shown in the plan) which is encountered nowhere else. The area of the
brick-paved court was intersected by two lines of stone slabs crossing
each other in the centre and standing slightly above the general level
of the pavement. These paths lead to three bedrooms in three corners of
the quadrangle and to a small unimportant-looking room in the fourth
corner. The three bedrooms were exactly similar to each other and
unlike anything to be found in the rest of the palace. They were large
oblong rooms; about a third of their area was occupied by a kind of
daïs twenty-four inches above the rest of the floor, and approached
by five brick steps. In the centre of the end wall there was a kind
of alcove, the floor of which was again four feet three inches above
that of the daïs. This alcove was decorated with grooves and surmounted
by an arch of enamelled brick (Fig. 90, Vol. I.). Its dimensions were
nine feet wide by three feet four inches deep, or just a convenient
space for a bed, which might be reached by movable steps. Thomas has
not hesitated to introduce one into his restoration. The bas-reliefs
furnished him with a model.[25]
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Harem court in the palace of
Sargon at Khorsabad; compiled from Thomas.]
Observe that the courts of the harem give access to three main groups
of chambers, and that those groups have no direct communication with
each other. Each of the three has its own separate entrance. Observe
also that the three bed chambers we have mentioned have no entrances
but those from the inner court; that they are all richly decorated,
and that nothing in their shape or arrangement admits of the idea
that they were for the use of attendants or others in an inferior
station---oriental custom having at all times caused such persons to
sleep on carpets, mats, or mattresses, spread on the paved floors at
night and put away in cupboards during the day--and you will allow that
the conclusion to which those who have studied the plan of Sargon’s
harem have arrived, is, at least, a very probable one. Sargon had
three queens, who inhabited the three suites of apartments; each had
assigned to her use one of the state bedrooms we have described, but
only occupied it when called upon to receive her royal spouse.[26] On
other nights she slept in her own apartments among her eunuchs and
female domestics. These apartments comprised a kind of large saloon
open to the sky, but sheltered at one end by a semi-dome (T, X, and
especially Z, where the interior is in a better state of preservation).
Stretched upon the cushions with which the daïs at this end of the
room was strewn, the sultana, if we may use such a term, like those
of modern Turkey, could enjoy the performances of musicians, singers,
and dancers, she could receive visits and kill her time in the dreamy
fashion so dear to Orientals. We have already given (Vol. I. Fig. 55,)
a restoration in perspective of the semi-dome which, according to
Thomas, covered the further ends of these reception halls.[27]
Suppose this part of the palace restored to its original condition; it
would be quite ready to receive the harem of any Persian or Turkish
prince. The same precautions against escape or intrusion, the same
careful isolation of rival claimants for the master’s favours, would
still be taken. With its indolent and passionate inmates a jealousy
that hesitates at no crime by which a rival can be removed, is common
enough, and among: the numerous slaves a willing instrument for the
execution of any vengeful project is easily found. The moral, like
the physical conditions, have changed but little, and the oriental
architect has still to adopt the precautions found necessary thirty
centuries ago.
We find another example of this pre-existence of modern arrangements
in the vast extent of the palace offices. These consist of a series
of chambers to the south-west of the court marked A, and of a whole
quarter, larger than the harem, which lies in the south-eastern corner
of the mound, and includes several wide quadrangles (B, C´, C, D, D´,
F, G, &c.).[28] We could not describe this part of the plan in detail
without giving it more space than we can spare. We must be content
with telling our readers that by careful study, of their dispositions
and of the objects found in them during the excavations, M. Place has
succeeded in determining, sometimes with absolute certainty, sometimes
with very great probability, the destination of nearly every group
of chambers in this part of the palace. The south-west side of the
great court was occupied by stores; the rooms were filled with jars,
with enamelled bricks, with things made of iron and copper, with
provisions and various utensils for the use of the palace, and with the
plunder taken from conquered countries; it was, in tact, what would
now be called the _khazneh_ or treasury. The warehouses did not
communicate with each other; they had but one door, that leading into
the great court. But opening out of each there was a small inner room,
which served perhaps as the residence of a store-keeper.
At the opposite side of the court lay what Place calls the _active
section of the offices_ (_la partie active des dépendances_),
the rooms where all those domestic labours were carried on without
which the luxurious life of the royal dwelling would have come to a
standstill. Kitchens and bakehouses were easily recognized by the
contents of the clay vases found in them; bronze rings let into the
wall betrayed the stables--in the East of our own day, horses and
camels are picketed to similar rings. Close to the stables a long
gallery, in which a large number of chariots and sets of harness could
be conveniently arranged, has been recognized as a coach-house. There
are but few rooms in which some glimpse of their probable destination
has not been caught. In two small chambers between courts A and B, the
flooring stones are pierced with round holes leading to square sewers,
which, in their turn, join a large brick-vaulted drain. The use of such
a contrivance is obvious.[29]
We may fairly suppose that the rooms in which no special indication of
their purpose was found, were mostly servants’ lodgings. They are, as a
rule, of very small size.
On the other hand, courts were ample and passages wide. Plenty of
space was required for the circulation of the domestics who supplied
the tables of the seraglio and harem, for exercising horses, and for
washing chariots. If, after the explorations of Place, any doubts could
remain as to the purpose of this quarter of the palace, they would be
removed by the Assyrian texts. Upon the terra-cotta prism on which
Sennacherib, after narrating his campaigns, describes the restoration
of his palace, he says, “the kings, my predecessors, constructed the
office court for baggage, for exercising horses, for the storing of
utensils.” Esarhaddon speaks, in another inscription, of “the part
built by the kings, his predecessors, for holding baggage, for lodging
horses, camels, dromedaries and chariots.”[30]
We have now made the tour of the palace, and we find ourselves again
before the propylæum whence we set out. This propylæum must have
been one of the finest creations of Assyrian architecture. It had no
fewer than ten winged bulls of different sizes, some parallel, others
perpendicular, to the direction of the wall. There were six in the
central doorway, which was, in all probability, reserved for the king
and his suite. A pair of smaller colossi flanked each of the two side
doors, through which passed, no doubt between files of guards, the
ceaseless crowd of visitors, soldiers, and domestics. The conception of
this façade, with its high substructure, and the ascending: lines of
a double flight of steps connecting it with the town below, is really
grand, and the size of the court into which it led, not much less than
two acres and a half, was worthy of such an approach.
The huge dimensions of this court are to be explained, not only by the
desire for imposing size, but also by the important part it played in
the economy of the palace. By its means the three main divisions, the
seraglio, the harem, and the khan, were put into communication with
each other. When there were no particular reasons for making a détour,
it was crossed by any one desiring to go from one part to another. It
was a kind of general rendezvous and common passage, and its great size
was no more than necessary for the convenient circulation of servants
with provisions for the royal tables, of military detachments, of
workmen going to their work, of the harem ladies taking the air in
palanquins escorted by eunuchs, and of royal processions, in which the
king himself took part.
As to whether or no any part of the platform was laid out in gardens,
or the courts planted with trees and flowers, we do not know. Of course
the excavations would tell us nothing on that point, but evidence is
not wanting that the masters for whom all this architectural splendour
was created were not without a love for shady groves, and that they
were fond of having trees in the neighbourhood of their dwellings.
The hanging gardens of Babylon have been famous for more than
twenty centuries. The bas-reliefs tell us that the Assyrians had an
inclination towards the same kind of luxury. On a sculptured fragment
from Kouyundjik we find a range of trees crowning a terrace supported
by a row of pointed arches (Vol. I., Fig. 42); another slab, from the
same palace of Sennacherib, shows us trees upheld by a colonnade (Fig.
8). If Sargon established in any part of his palace a garden like
that hinted at in the sculptured scene in which Assurbanipal is shown
at table with his wife (Vol. I., Fig. 27), it must have been in the
north-western angle of the platform, near the temple and staged tower.
In this corner of the mound there is plenty of open space, and being
farther from the principal entrances of the palace, it is more quiet
and retired than any other part of the royal dwelling. Here then, if
anywhere, we may imagine terraces covered with vegetable earth, in
which the vine, the fig, the pomegranate and the tall pyramid of the
cypress, could flourish and cast their grateful shadows. The existence
of such gardens is, however, so uncertain, that we have given them no
place in our attempts at restoration.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--A hanging garden; from Layard.]
For the service of such a building a liberal supply of water was
necessary. Whence did it come? and how was it stored? I have been
amazed to find that most of those who have studied the Assyrian palaces
have never asked themselves these questions.[31] One might have
expected to find the building provided, as is usual in hot countries,
with spacious cisterns that could be easily filled during the rainy
season; but neither at Khorsabad, Kouyundjik, nor Nimroud, have the
slightest traces of any such tanks been found. With the materials at
their disposal it would, perhaps, have been too difficult for the
Assyrian builders to make them water-tight. Neither have any wells
been discovered. Their depth must have been too great for common use.
We must remember that the height of the mound has to be added to the
distance below the ordinary surface of the country at which watery
strata would be tapped. It is, on the whole, probable that the supply
for the palace inmates was carried up in earthenware jars, and that
the service occupied a string of women, horses, and donkeys, passing
and repassing between the river, or rather the canal, that carried the
waters of the Khausser to the very foot of the mound, and the palace,
from morning until night.[32]
* * * * *
We have now concluded our study of the arrangements of an Assyrian
palace, and we may safely affirm that those arrangements were not
invented, all standing, by the architect of Sargon. They were suggested
partly by the nature of the materials used, partly by the necessities
to be met. The plan of an Assyrian palace must have grown in scale and
consistence with the power of the Assyrian kings. As their resources
became greater, and their engineers more skilled, increased convenience
and a richer decoration was demanded from their architects. We have
dwelt at length upon Khorsabad, because it affords the completest and
best preserved example of a type often repeated in the course of ten
or twelve centuries. In some respects, in its constructive processes
and the taste of its decorations, for instance, the Assyrian palace
resembled the other buildings of the country; its chief originality
consisted in the number of its rooms and the principles on which they
were distributed.
The method followed in the combination of these countless apartments
is, as M. Place has said, “almost naïve in its simplicity.”[33] The
plan is divided into as many separate parallelograms as there were
departments to be accommodated; these rectangles are so arranged that
they touch each other either at an angle or by the length of a side,
but they never penetrate one into the other, and they never command one
another. They are contiguous, or nearly so, but always independent.
Thus the palace contains three main divisions, the seraglio, the harem,
and the khan. Each of these is a rectangle, and each lies upon one side
of the great common square marked A on our plan. The same principle
holds good in the minor subdivisions. These consist of smaller
rectangles, also opening upon uncovered courts, and without any lateral
communication with each other. Examine the plan and you will see the
system carried out as rigidly in the seraglio as in the harem. Thus the
various sections of the palace are at once isolated and close together,
so that their occupants could live their lives and perform their duties
in the most perfect independence.
The methodical spirit by which these combinations were governed was all
the more necessary in a building where no superposition of one story
upon another was possible. The whole palace was one vast ground floor.
To arrange on one level more than thirty courtyards and more than two
hundred halls and chambers, to provide convenient means of access from
one to the other, to keep accessory parts in due subordination, to give
each room its most fitting place in the whole--such was the problem
put before the Assyrian constructor. Profiting by a long experience he
solved it with the utmost judgment, and proved himself to be wanting
neither in forethought, skill, nor inventive power.
§ 3. _Other Palaces of Mesopotamia._
The type of palace we have studied at Khorsabad, is, like the staged
towers, a development from Chaldæan structures whose leading lines were
established many centuries before the princes of Calah and Nineveh
began to raise their sumptuous houses. The sites of the ancient cities
of Lower Chaldæa inclose buildings that seem to date from a very remote
epoch, buildings in which we may recognize the first sketch, as it
were, for the magnificent dwellings of Sargon and Sennacherib.
The most important of these buildings, and the most interesting, is
the ruin at Warka, which Loftus calls _Wuswas_ (Fig. 172, Vol.
I., letter B on the plan).[34] Unfortunately his explorations were
very partial and his description is very summary, while his plan of
the ruin only gives a small part of it (Fig. 9). There is, however,
enough to show the general character of the structure. The latter stood
upon a rectangular mound about 660 feet long and 500 wide. In spite
of the enormous accumulation of rubbish, Loftus succeeded in making
out an open door in the outer wall, and several chambers of different
sizes communicating with a large court. There was the same thickness
of wall and the same absence of symmetry as at Khorsabad; the openings
were not in the middle of the rooms. In the long wall, decorated with
panels and grooves, which still stands among the ruins to a height of
about twenty-four feet and a length of about 172 feet, the posterior
façade, through which there was no means of ingress and egress, may be
recognized. We have already copied Loftus’s reproduction of this façade
for the sake of its decoration (Fig. 100, Vol. I.).
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Plan of a palace at Warka; from
Loftus.]
The building at Sirtella (_Tello_) in which M. de Sarzec
discovered such curious statues, was less extensive; it was only
about 175 feet long by 102 wide. The faces of the parallelogram were
slightly convex, giving to the building something of the general form
of a terra-cotta tub (Fig. 150, Vol I.). Here the excavations were
pushed far enough to give us a better idea of the general arrangement
than we can get at Warka. A great central court, about which numerous
square and oblong apartments are arranged, has been cleared; there is
a separate quarter, which may be the harem; at one angle of the court
the massive stages of a _zigguratt_ may be recognized. The walls
are entirely of burnt brick. They are decorated only on the principal
façade, where the ornaments belong to the same class as those of
Wuswas--semi-columns mixed with grooves in which the elevation of a
stepped battlement is reproduced horizontally.
In none of the ruins of habitations found in this district by the
English explorers, were the chambers other than rectangular. Taylor
cleared a few halls in two buildings at Mugheir (Fig. 10) and
Abou-Sharein (Figs. 11 and 12) respectively. Both of these stood on
artificial mounds, and it is difficult to believe that they were
private dwellings. The walls of several rooms at Mugheir seemed to have
been decorated with glazed bricks; at Abou-Sharein there was nothing
but roughly painted stucco. In one chamber the figure of a man with a
bird on his fist might yet be distinguished.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Plan of chambers at Mugheir;
from Taylor.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Plan of chambers at
Abou-Sharein; from Taylor.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Plan of chambers at
Abou-Sharein; from Taylor.]
It is in Babylon that we ought to have found the masterpieces of this
architecture, in that capital of Nebuchadnezzar where the Chaldæan
genius, just before it finally lost its autonomy, made the supreme
effort that resulted in the buildings attributed by the travelled
Greeks to their famous Semiramis. We have no reason to disbelieve
Ctesias when he says that there were two palaces in Babylon, one on
the left and another on the right bank of the Euphrates. “Semiramis,”
says Diodorus, following his usual guide, “built a double residence for
herself, close to the river and on both sides of the bridge, whence she
might at one and the same time enjoy the view over the whole city, and,
so to speak, keep the keys of the most important parts of the capital
in her own power. As the Euphrates runs southward through Babylon, one
of these palaces faced the rising, the other the setting, sun. Round
the palace that faced westwards, she built a wall sixty stades in
circumference, &c.”[35]
The larger and more richly decorated of the two palaces was that on the
left bank.[36] Its opposite neighbour has vanished and left no trace.
The Euphrates has been gradually encroaching on its right bank ever
since the days of antiquity, and has long ago disunited and carried
away the last stones and bricks of the western palace. The eastern
palace is on the other hand still represented by one of the great
mounds that dominate the plain; this mound is called the Kasr, or
castle (Fig. 183, vol. i.). Its circumference is now not far short of a
mile.[37] Its form is that of an oblong parallelogram, with its longest
side next the river and parallel to it. The flanks of the mound have,
however, been so deeply seamed by searchers for treasure and building
materials that no vestige of its arrangements is now to be traced. The
bricks employed in the building all bore the name of Nebuchadnezzar.
South of the Kasr there is another mound, rising about one
hundred feet above the plain and very irregular in shape. This is
_Tel-Amran-ibn-Ali_, or _Tell-Amran_, (Fig. 183, vol. i.). It
is agreed that this contains all that remains of the hanging gardens,
a conjecture that is confirmed by the numerous tombs dating from the
Seleucid, the Parthian, and the Sassanid periods, which have been
found in its flanks whenever any excavation has been attempted.[38]
Tell-Amram seems to have been a far more popular depository for corpses
than either Babil, the Kasr, or the Birs-Nimroud, a preference which is
easily explained. Whether we believe, with Diodorus, that the gardens
were supported by great stone architraves, or with Strabo, that they
stood upon several stories of vaults, we may understand that in either
case their substructure offered long galleries which, when the gardens
were no longer kept up and the whole building was abandoned to itself,
were readily turned into burial places.[39] The palace and temple
mounds did not offer the same facilities. They were solid, and graves
would have had to be cut in them before a corpse could be buried in
their substance. The Kasr was a ready-made catacomb into which any
number of coffins could be thrust with the smallest expenditure of
trouble.
Excavations in the Kasr and at Tell-Amran might bring many precious
objects to light, but we can hardly think that any room or other
part of a building in such good preservation as many of those in the
Assyrian palaces would be recovered. To the latter, then, we shall
have again to turn to complete our study of the civil architecture of
Mesopotamia.
If we have placed the edifices from which the English explorers have
drawn so many precious monuments in the second line, it is not only
because their exploration is incomplete, but also because they do not
lend themselves to our purpose quite so readily as that cleared by MM.
Botta and Place. At Khorsabad there have never been any buildings but
those of Sargon; city and palace were built at a single operation,
and those who undertake their study do not run any risk of confusion
between the work of different generations. The plan we have discussed
so minutely is really that elaborated by the Assyrian architect to whom
Sargon committed the direction of the work. We can hardly say the same
of the ruins explored by Mr. Layard and his successors. The mounds of
Nimroud and Kouyundjik saw one royal dwelling succeed another, and
the architects who were employed upon them hardly had their hands
free. They had, to a certain extent, to reckon with buildings already
in existence. These may sometimes have prevented them from extending
their works as far as they wished in one direction or another, or even
compelled them now and then to vary the levels of their floors; so that
it is not always easy for a modern explorer to know exactly how he
stands among the ruins of their creations, or to clearly distinguish
the work of one date from that of another.[40]
It was at Nimroud that this perplexity was chiefly felt, until the
decipherment of the inscriptions came to enable different periods and
princes to be easily distinguished. This name of Nimroud, handed down
by the ancient traditions collected in Genesis, has been given to a
mound which rises about six leagues to the south of Mossoul, on the
left bank of the Tigris, and both by its form and elevation attracts
the attention of every traveller that descends the stream. The river
is now at some distance from the ruins, but as our map shows (Fig.
1), it is easy to trace its ancient bed, which was close to the foot
of the mound. The latter is an elongated parallelogram, about 1,300
yards in one direction, and 750 in the other (see Vol. I., Fig. 145).
Above its weather-beaten sides, and the flat expanse at their summit,
stood, before the excavations began, the apex of the conical mound in
which Layard found the lower stories of a staged tower (Fig. 13). Calah
seems to have been the first capital of the Assyrian Empire and even
to have preserved some considerable importance after the Sargonids
had transported the seat of government to Nineveh, and built their
most sumptuous buildings in the latter city. Nearly every king of any
importance, down to the very last years of the monarchy, left the mark
of his hand upon Nimroud.[41]
Of all the royal buildings at Calah that which has been most
methodically and thoroughly cleared is the oldest of all, the
north-western palace, or palace of Assurnazirpal (885–860). It has
not been entirely laid open, but the most richly decorated parts,
corresponding to the seraglio at Khorsabad, have been cleared. The
adjoining plan (Fig. 14) shows arrangements quite similar to those of
Sargon’s palace. A large court is surrounded on three sides by as many
rectangular groups of apartments, each group forming a separate suite,
with its own entrances to the court.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--General view of Nimroud; from
Layard.]
The chief entrance faces the north. Two great doorways flanked by
winged and human-headed lions, give access to a long gallery (4 on
plan). At the western end of this gallery there is a small platform
or daïs raised several steps above the rest of the floor. Upon this,
no doubt, the king’s throne was placed on those reception days when
subjects and vassals crowded to his feet. Some idea of what such a
reception must have been may be gained from an Indian _Durbar_,
or from the Sultan of Turkey’s annual review of all his great
functionaries of state at the feast of _Courban-Baïram_. I
witnessed the latter ceremony in the Old Seraglio in 1857, and when
those great officers, like the mollahs and sheiks of the dervishes,
who had preserved the turban and floating robes of the East, bent to
the feet of Abd-al-Medjid, I was irresistibly reminded of the pompous
ceremonials sculptured on the walls of Nineveh and Persepolis.
[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Plan of the north-western
palace at Nimroud; from Layard.]
The walls of this saloon were entirely lined in their lower parts
with reliefs representing the king surrounded by his chief officers,
offering prayers to the god of his people and doing homage for the
destruction of his enemies and for successful hunts (Fig. 15). The
figures in these reliefs are larger than life. A doorway flanked by two
bulls leads into another saloon (2 on plan) rather shorter and narrower
than the first. In this the ornamentation is less varied. The limestone
slabs are carved with eagle-headed genii in pairs, separated by the
sacred tree (Vol. I., Fig. 8). The inner wall of this saloon is pierced
with a fine doorway leading into the central court (1), while in one
corner there is a narrower opening into a third long hall (6), which
runs along the eastern side of the court. It was in this latter room
that the finest sculptures, those that may perhaps be considered the
masterpieces of the Assyrian artists, were found. Behind this saloon
there was another, rather longer, but not quite so wide (7); then five
chambers, completing the palace on this side. To the south of the great
court there were two large halls (3 and 5) similar in arrangement to
those already mentioned but less richly decorated, and several smaller
rooms opening some into the halls, others into the passages on the
west of the court. As to whether the latter was inclosed or not on the
west by buildings like those on the other three sides we cannot now
be certain, as on that side the mound has been much broken away by the
floods of the Tigris, which once bathed its foot. There is nothing to
forbid the hypothesis of a grand staircase on this side leading up from
the river bank.[42]
In the _central_ and _south-western_ palaces, built by Shalmaneser II.
and his grandson Vulnirari III. the excavations have not been carried
far enough to allow the plans to be restored. The explorers have been
content to carry off inscriptions and fragments of sculpture in stone,
ivory, and metal.[43]
The _south-western palace_, or palace of Esarhaddon, has been the
scene of explorations sufficiently prolonged to give us some idea of
its general arrangements (Fig. 16). A curious circumstance was noticed
by the English explorers. While the works of Assurbanipal bore the
strongest marks of care and skill, those of Esarhaddon showed signs of
having been carried out with a haste that amounted to precipitation,
and his palace was never finished. Nearly all the alabaster slabs were
taken from older buildings.[44] Most of these were fixed with their
original carved surfaces against the wall, but a few were turned the
proper way. Doubtless, had time served, these would have been smoothed
down and reworked. Nothing was finished, however, but the bulls and
sphinxes at the doors (Vol. I. Fig. 85) and a few reliefs in their
immediate neighbourhood.[45] Esarhaddon died, no doubt, before the
completion of the work, which was never continued.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--Assurnazirpal offering a
libation to the gods after his victory over a wild bull. British
Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
And yet his architect was by no means lacking in ambition. Upon the
southern face of the building he intended to build the largest hall,
which, so far as we know, was ever attempted in an Assyrian palace.
This saloon would have been about 170 feet long by 63 feet wide. As
soon as the walls were raised he saw that he could not roof it in.
Neither barrel vault nor timber ceiling could have so great a span.
He determined to get over the difficulty by erecting a central wall
down the major axis of the room, upon which either timber beams or
the springers of a double vault could rest. This wall was pierced by
several openings, and was stopped some distance short of the two end
walls. It divided the saloon into four different rooms (marked 1, 2,
3, 4 on our plan) each of which was by no means small. Even with this
modification the magnificence of the original plan did not entirely
disappear. The two colossal lions opposite the door were very wide
apart, and all the openings between the various subdivisions were large
enough to allow the eye to range freely over the whole saloon, and to
grasp the first thought of the architect in its entirety.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Plan of the south-western
palace at Nimroud; from Layard.]
As to the buildings on the other sides of the court and the total
extent of the palace, we know very little; towards the west the walls
of several saloons have been recognized, but they have been left
half cleared. On the east, landslips have carried away part of the
buildings.[46]
Between the palace of Assurnazirpal and that of Esarhaddon Layard found
what seemed to him the remains of the second story of some building,
or at least of a new building erected over one of earlier date (Fig.
17). Impelled, no doubt, by the rarity of the circumstance, he gives
a plan of these remains, and goes so far as to express his belief that
the arrangements shown in the plan were repeated on the three other
faces of a tower of which he encountered the summit, still partly
preserved.[47]
Although Calah was never abandoned, it fell, after the accession of the
Sargonids, from the first place among Assyrian cities; on the other
hand Sargon’s attempt to fix the seat of government in his own town of
Dour-Saryoukin does not seem to have met with permanent success. From
the eighth century to the end of the seventh the Assyrian kings appear
to have made Nineveh their favourite place of residence.
The site of this famous city has been much discussed,[48] but at last
the question appears to be settled. Nineveh was built on the left
bank of the Tigris, opposite to the site occupied by modern Mossoul.
Two great mounds rising some five-and-thirty feet above the level of
the plain, represent the substructures upon which the royal homes
of the last Assyrian dynasty were raised; they are now famous as
_Kouyundjik_ and _Nebbi-Younas_. Like the mound of Khorsabad
these two artificial hills were in juxtaposition with the city walls,
which may still be traced in almost their whole extent by the ridge of
earth formed of their materials (Fig. 18).
[Illustration: FIG. 17.--Upper chambers excavated at
Nimroud; from Layard.]
The mound of Nebbi-Younas has so far remained almost unexplored. It is
fortified against the curiosity of Europeans by the little building
on its summit and the cemetery covering most of its surface. The
inhabitants of the country, Mussulman as well as Christian, believe
that Jonah lies under the chapel dome, and they themselves hope to rest
as near his body as possible. Some slight excavations, little more than
a few strokes of the pick-axe, have been made in the scanty spots where
no graves occur, but enough evidence has been found to justify us in
assuming that Nebbi-Younas also hides its palaces. They too will have
their turn. Thanks to the prestige of the prophet they are reserved for
excavations to be conducted perhaps in a more systematic fashion than
those hitherto undertaken on the site of Nineveh.
[Illustration: FIG. 18.--Map of the site of Nineveh;
from Oppert.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.--Plan of the mound of
Kouyundjik; from Rassam’s _Transactions_.]
At Kouyundjik, on the other hand, no serious obstacle was encountered.
The village transported itself to the plain; it was not necessary to
persuade the inhabitants to quit it, as it had been at Khorsabad. When
Botta, who had begun certain inquisitions at this spot, abandoned his
attempts, the English explorers were left free to sound the flanks
of the artificial hill at their leisure, and to choose their point
of attack. If they had gone to work in the same fashion as Botta and
Place, they might have laid bare palaces excelling that of Sargon in
the scale and variety of their arrangements. Of this we may judge from
Mr. Rassam’s plan (Fig. 19). But after the departure of Mr. Layard the
excavations, frequently interrupted and then recommenced after long
intervals, aimed only at discovering such objects as might figure in a
museum. A trench was opened here and another there, on the inspiration
of the moment. The explorers often neglected to measure the buildings
in which they were at work, so that we have only partial plans of the
two principal buildings of Nineveh, those palaces of Sennacherib and
Assurbanipal from which so many beautiful monuments have been taken to
enrich the British Museum.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Part plan of the palace of
Sennacherib; from Layard.]
The mound of Kouyundjik in its present state is an irregular pentagon.
Its circumference is rather more than a mile and a half. The palace of
Sennacherib occupies the south-western corner, and forms a rectangle
about 600 feet long by 330 wide. The two chief entrances were turned
one towards the river, or south-west, the other towards the town,
or north-east. The latter entrance was flanked by ten winged bulls.
The four central ones stood out beyond the line of the façade, and
were separated from each other by colossal genii.[49] About sixteen
halls and chambers have been counted round the three courtyards. As
at Khorsabad, some of these are long galleries, others rooms almost
square. The fragmentary plan shown in our Fig. 20 brings out the
resemblance very strongly. It represents a part of the building
explored in Layard’s first campaign. In the rooms marked 2, 3, and 4,
small niches cut in the thickness of the walls may be noticed. They are
not unlike the spaces left for cupboards in the modern Turkish houses
of Asia Minor. The hall marked 1 in the plan is about 124 feet long
and 30 wide. In another part of the palace a saloon larger than any of
those at Khorsabad has been cleared. It measures 176 feet long by 40
wide. The average size of the rooms here is about one-third more than
in the palace of Sargon, suggesting that the art of building vaults
and timber ceilings made sensible progress during the reign of that
king. As in the case of the Khorsabad palace, the explorers believed
they could distinguish between the seraglio and the harem; but the
plan given by Layard has too many blanks and leaves too many points
uncertain for the various quarters to be distinguished with such ease
and certainty as at Khorsabad.[50] The walls were everywhere covered
with rich series of reliefs, from which we have already taken some of
our illustrations (Vol. I., Figs. 151 and 152), and shall have to take
more. The military promenade figured upon page 49 will give a good idea
of their general character (Fig. 21).
Assurbanipal, the grandson of Sennacherib, built his palace towards
the north of the mound. The excavations of Mr. Rassam have been the
means of recovering many precious bas-reliefs from it, but we may see
from the plan (Fig. 19) that a very small part of the building has been
cleared. Much more must remain of a palace so richly decorated and with
rooms so large as some of those explored in the quarter we have called
the sélamlik. One of these saloons is 145 feet long and 29 wide. The
plan of its walls suggests a very large building, with spacious courts
and a great number of rooms.[51]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.--Sennacherib at the head of
his army. Height 38 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme
Gautier.]
In many other mounds of Assyria, such as those of _Arvil_,[52] of
_Balawat_,[53] of _Kaleh-Shergat_,[54] of _Karamles_,[55] and in
the valley of the _Khabour_,[56] the explorers have encountered the
remains of buildings and of ornamental figures that must have formed
parts of royal palaces, or at least of the dwellings of great nobles.
We shall not stop to notice all these discoveries. None of the mounds
in question have been explored with sufficient care and completeness
to add anything of importance to what we have learnt by our study of
Khorsabad. The chief thing to be gathered from these widely scattered
excavations is that during the great years of Assyria there was no
town of any importance in which the king did not possess a habitation,
arranged and decorated in the same spirit as the great palaces at Calah
and Nineveh, and differing from these chiefly in the size of their
courts and chambers.
No doubt the pavilions sprinkled about the park, or paradise, as
the Greek writers called it, in which the king sought amusement by
exercising his skill as an archer upon the beasts that roamed among
its trees, were ornamented in the same fashion, although in all
probability, wood and metal played a more important part in their
construction. As for the dwellings of the great officers of the crown
and of vassal princes, they must have reproduced on a smaller scale the
plan and ornamentation of the royal palace.
Of the house properly speaking, the dwelling of the artizan or peasant,
whether in Assyria or Chaldæa, we know very little. We are unable to
turn for its restoration to paintings such as those in the Egyptian
tombs, which portray the life of the poor with the same detail as that
of the rich or even of the monarch himself. The Assyrian bas-reliefs,
in which the sieges of towns are often represented, always show them
from the outside (Fig. 22), nothing is to be seen but the ramparts and
the towers that flank them. The only bas-relief in which we can venture
to recognize one of the ordinary houses of the country belongs to the
series of pictures in which Sennacherib has caused the transport of
the materials and colossal bulls for his own palace to be figured.
We there see two very different types of edifice, one covered with
hemispherical or elliptical domes, the other with flat roofs supporting
a kind of belvedere[57] (Vol. I., Fig. 43).
This latter type may be found several times repeated in a relief
representing a city of Susiana (Vol. I., Fig. 157). Here nearly every
house has a tower at one end of its flat roof. Was this a defence,
like the towers in the old Italian towns and in the Greek villages of
Crete and Magnesia? We do not think so. The social conditions were very
different from those of the turbulent republics of Italy, where the
populace was divided into hostile factions, or of those mountainous
districts whose Greek inhabitants live in constant fear of attack
from the Turks who dwell in the plains. The all-powerful despots of
Assyria would allow no intestine quarrels, and for the repulse of a
foreign enemy, the cities relied upon their high and solid lines of
circumvallation. We think that the towers upon the roofs were true
belvederes, contrivances to get more air and a wider view; also,
perhaps, to allow the inhabitants to escape the mosquitoes by rising
well above the highest level reached by the flight of those tiny pests.
It was, then, between these two types, as Strabo tells us, that the
civil buildings of Mesopotamia were divided. They all had thick
terraced roofs but some were domical and others flat.[58] At Mugheir
Mr. Taylor cleared the remains of a small house planned on the lines of
an irregular cross; it was built of burnt brick and paved with the same
material. In the interior the faces of the bricks were covered with a
thin and not very adhesive glaze. Two of the doors were round-headed;
the arches being composed of bricks specially moulded in the shape of
voussoirs; but the numerous fragments of carbonized palm-wood beams
which were found upon the floors of each room, showed that the building
had been covered with a flat timber roof and a thick bed of earth.
Strabo justly observes that the earth was necessary to protect the
inmates of the house against the heats of summer. As a rule houses must
have been very low. It was only in large towns such as Babylon, that
they had three or four stories.[59]
* * * * *
We need say no more. We have studied the palace in detail, and the
palace was only an enlarged, a more richly illustrated edition of
the house. It supplied the same wants, but on a wider scale than was
necessary in the dwelling of a private individual. To complete our
study of civil architecture it is only necessary to give some idea of
the fashion in which palaces and houses were grouped into cities, and
of the means chosen for securing those cities against hostile assault.
§ 4. _Towns and their Defences._
Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has been the
most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world; her name has
stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than any other city
of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city _par excellence_,
the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that were admired
and feared by the Hellenic population even after their political
weakness had been proved more than once. In the centuries that have
passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and fame of
Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of those Hebrew
prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and poetic books of the
Old Testament with their hatred of the Mesopotamian city, an ardent
hate that has found an echo across the ages in the religion which is
the heir of Judaism.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.--Town besieged by Sennacherib.
Height 86 inches. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
There is, then, no city of the ancient world in which both our
Christian instincts and our classic education would lead us to
take a deeper interest, or to make more patient endeavours towards
the recovery of some knowledge of its passed magnificence by the
interrogation of its site and ruins, than this town of Babylon. At
the same time it happens, by a strange series of chances, that of
all the great cities of the past Babylon is the least known and the
most closely wrapped in mystery. The descriptive passages of ancient
writers are full of gaps and exaggerations, while as for the monuments
themselves, although the size of their remains and the vast extent
of ground they cover allow us to guess at the power and energy of
the people to whom they owed their existence, there are no ruins in
the world from which so little of the real thoughts and ideas of
their constructors is to be learnt. Not only has the ornamentation
of palace and temple disappeared, the ruling lines and arrangements
of their plans are no longer to be traced. It is this no doubt that
has discouraged the explorers. While the sites of Calah, Nineveh,
and Dour-Saryoukin have been freed of millions of cubic yards of
earth, and their concealed buildings explored and laid bare in every
direction, no serious excavations have ever been made at Babylon. At
long intervals of time a few shafts have been sunk in the flanks of the
Kasr, of Babil and the Birs-Nimroud, but they have never been pushed
to any great depth; a few trenches have been run from them, but on no
connected system, and only to be soon abandoned. The plain is broken
by many virgin mounds into which no pick-axe has been driven, and yet
they each represent a structure dating from some period of Babylonian
greatness. It would be a noble undertaking to thoroughly explore the
three or four great ruins that rise on the site itself, and to examine
carefully all the region about them. Such an exploration would require
no slight expenditure of time and money, but it could not fail to add
considerably to our present knowledge of ancient Chaldæa; it would
do honour to any government that should support it, and still more
to the archæologist who should conduct the inquiry to completion,
laying down on his plan the smallest vestige remaining of any ancient
detail, and allowing himself to be discouraged by none of the numerous
disappointments and deceptions that he would be sure to encounter.
Meanwhile it would be profitless to carry our readers into any
discussion upon the topography of Babylon. In the absence of
ascertained facts nothing could be more arbitrary and conjectural than
the various theories that have been put forward as to the direction
of the city walls and their extent. According to George Smith the
only line of wall that can now be followed would give a town about
eight English miles round. Now Diodorus says that what he calls the
_Royal City_ was sixty stades, or within a few yards of seven
miles, in circumference.[60] The difference between the two figures is
very slight. “In shape the city appears to have been a square with one
corner cut off, and the corners of the walls of the city may be said
roughly to front the cardinal points. At the north of the city stood
the temple of Belus, now represented by the mound of Babil; about the
middle of the temple stood the royal palace and hanging-gardens.”[61]
The _Royal City_ was the city properly speaking, the old city
whose buildings were set closely about the great temple and the palace,
the latter forming, like the _Old Seraglio_ at Constantinople, a
fortified town in itself with a wall some twenty stades (4043 yards)
in circumference. A second wall, measuring forty stades in total
length, turned the palace and the part of the city in its immediate
neighbourhood into a sort of acropolis. Perhaps the nobles and priests
may have inhabited this part of the town, the common people being
relegated to the third circle. In the towns of Asia Minor at the
present day the Turks alone live in the fortified inclosures, which are
called _kaleh_, or citadels, the rest of the town being occupied
by the _rayahs_ of every kind, whether Greek or Armenian.
There is, then, nothing in the description of Diodorus at which we need
feel surprise. Our difficulty begins when we have to form a judgment
upon the assertion of Herodotus, who speaks of an inclosure 120 stades
(13 miles 1385 yards) square.[62] According to this the circumference
of Babylon must have been nearly 55¼ English miles, which would make it
considerably larger than what is called Greater London, and more than
three times the size of Paris. Here, strangely enough, Ctesias gives a
more moderate figure than Herodotus, as we find Diodorus estimating the
circumference of the great _enceinte_ at 360 stades (41 miles 600
yards).[63]
We can hardly read of such measurements without some astonishment.
It seems difficult, however, to doubt the formal statement of such a
careful eye-witness as Herodotus. Although the Greek historian was
quite ready to repeat the fantastic tales he heard in the distant
countries to which his travels led him--a habit we are far from
wishing to blame--modern criticism has never succeeded in convicting
him of falsehood or exasperation in matters of which he could judge
with his own eyes. Our surprise at his figures is diminished when we
remember with what prodigious rapidity buildings of sun-dried bricks
could be erected. The material was at hand in any possible quantity;
the erection of such a length of wall was only a question of hands.
Now if we suppose, with M. Oppert, that the work was undertaken by
Nebuchadnezzar after the fall of Nineveh, that prince may very well
have employed whole nations upon it, driving them into the workshops
as the captive Jews were driven. In such a fashion the great wall that
united into one city towns which had been previously separated--such
as the original Babylon, Cutha, and Borsippa--might have been raised
without any great difficulty. It is certain that the population of such
a vast extent of country cannot have been equally dense at all points.
A large part must have been occupied by royal parks, by gardens,
vineyards, and even cultivated fields. Babylon must, in fact, have been
rather a vast intrenched camp than a city in the true sense of the word.
At the time when Herodotus and Ctesias visited Babylon, this
wall--which was dismantled by the Persians in order to render revolt
more difficult--must have been almost everywhere in a state of ruin,
but enough of it remained to attract curious travellers, just as
the picturesque fortifications of the Greek emperors are one of the
sights of modern Constantinople. The more intelligent among them,
such as Herodotus, took note of the measurements given to them as
representing the original state of the great work whose ruins lay
before their eyes and confirmed the statements of their guides.[64]
The quarter then still inhabited was the _Royal City_, the true
Babylon, whose great public works have left such formidable traces
even to the present day. Naturally no vestige of the tunnel under the
Euphrates has been found; we may even be tempted to doubt that it ever
existed.[65] But we cannot doubt that the two sections of the town were
put in communication one with another by a stone bridge; the evidence
on that point is too clear to admit of question.[66] The descriptions
of the structure give us a high idea of the engineering skill of the
Chaldæans. To build such a bridge and insure its stability was no small
undertaking. The river at this point is about 600 feet wide, and from
twelve to sixteen deep at its deepest part.[67] We need hardly say that
for many centuries there has been no bridge over the Euphrates either
in the neighbourhood of Babylon or at any other point in Mesopotamia.
As for the quays, Fresnel found some parts in very good preservation in
1853.[68] At the point where this discovery was made the quay was built
of very hard and very red bricks, completely covered with bitumen so as
to resist the action of the water for as long as possible. The bricks
bore the name of Nabounid, who must have continued the work begun by
Nebuchadnezzar.
The description given by Herodotus of the way in which Babylon was
built and the circulation of its inhabitants provided for must also
be taken as applying to the Royal City. “The houses are mostly three
and four stories high; the streets all run in straight lines, not only
those parallel to the river, but also the cross-streets which lead to
the waterside. At the river end of these cross-streets are low gates in
the fence that skirts the stream, which are, like the great gates in
the outer wall, of brass and open on the water.”[69]
We may perhaps form some idea of Babylon from the appearance of certain
parts of Cairo. Herodotus seems to have been struck by the regularity
of the plan, the length of the streets, and the height of the houses.
In these particulars it was very different from the low and irregularly
built Greek cities of the fifth century B.C. The height of the
houses is to be explained partly by the necessity for accommodating
a very dense population, partly by the desire for as much shade as
possible.[70]
The decadence of Babylon had begun when Herodotus visited it towards
the middle of the fifth century before our era;[71] but the town was
still standing, and some of the colossal works of its later kings
were still intact. The last dynasty had come to an end less than a
century before. We are ready, therefore, to believe the simple and
straightforward description he has left us, even in those particulars
which are so well calculated to cause surprise. The evidence of
Ctesias, who saw Babylon some half century later, seems here and there
to be tainted with exaggeration, but on the whole it agrees with that
of Herodotus. Supposing that he does expand his figures a little,
Ctesias is yet describing buildings whose ruins, at least, he saw with
his own eyes, and sometimes his statements are borne out by those of
Alexander’s historians.[72]
The case of Nineveh is very different. Of that city Herodotus hardly
knew more than the name; he contents himself with mere passing
allusions to it.[73] Ctesias is trammelled by fewer scruples. When
he wrote his history Nineveh had ceased to exist for more than two
centuries; the statements of Xenophon[74] prove that at the time of
the famous retreat its site was practically deserted and its name
almost forgotten in the very district in which its ruins stood. But
the undaunted Ctesias gives us a description of the Assyrian capital
as circumstantial as if he had lived there in the days of Sennacherib
or Assurbanipal. According to his account it formed an elongated
rectangle, the long sides being 150 stades (17 miles 380 yards), and
the shorter 90 stades (10 miles 595 yards), in length, so that the
total circumference was 480 stades (55 miles 240 yards).[75] The whole
of this space was inclosed by a wall 100 Greek feet (103 feet English)
high, and with towers of twice that height.
It is hardly necessary to show that all this is pure invention. To find
room for such a Nineveh we should have to take all the space between
the ruins opposite Mossoul and those of Nimroud. But all the Assyrian
texts that refer to Nineveh and Calah speak of them as two distinct
cities, each with an independent life and period of supremacy of its
own, while between the two sites there are no traces of a great urban
population. The 1,500 towers on the walls were the offspring of the
same brain that imagined the tower of Ninus nine stades (5458 feet)
high. We can scent an arbitrary assertion in the proportion of two
to one given to the heights of the towers over that of the wall. In
the fortified walls of the bas-reliefs the curtain is never greatly
excelled in height by its flanking towers (see Vol. I. Figs. 51, 60,
76, and 158, and above, Fig. 23).
[Illustration: FIG. 23.--Siege of a city; from Layard.]
Ctesias has simply provided in his Nineveh a good pendant to Babylon.
Being quite free to exercise his imagination, he has laid down even
a greater circumference than that of the city on the Euphrates. The
superiority thus ascribed to the northern city is enough by itself
to arouse our suspicions. We cannot point to any particular text,
but contemporary history as a whole suggests that Babylon was more
populous than Nineveh, just as Bagdad is now more populous than
Mossoul. Nineveh, and Calah before it, were the capitals of a soldier
nation, they were cities born, like Dour-Saryoukin, of the will of man.
Political events called them into life, and other political events
caused them to vanish off the face of the earth. Babylon, on the other
hand, was born of natural conditions; she was one of the eternal cities
of the world. The Turks do their best to make Hither Asia a desert,
but so long as they do not entirely succeed, so long as some light of
culture and commerce still flickers in the country, it will burn in
that part of Mesopotamia which is now called _El-Jezireh_ (_the
island_), where the two streams are close together, and canals
cut from one to the other can bring all the intermediate tract into
cultivation.
Sennacherib speaks thus of his capital: “Nineveh, the supreme city, the
city beloved of Istar, in which the temples of the gods and goddesses
are to be found.”[76] With its kings and their military guards and
courts, with the priests that served the sanctuaries of the gods, with
the countless workmen who built the great buildings, Nineveh must have
been a fine and flourishing city in the days of the Sargonids; but
even then its population cannot have equalled that of Babylon under
Nebuchadnezzar. The latter was something more than a seat of royalty
and a military post; it was the great entrepôt for all the commerce of
Western Asia.[77]
All the travellers who have visited the neighbourhood of Mossoul are
agreed that, on the left bank of the Tigris, there is no trace of any
wall but that which forms a rather irregular parallelogram and embraces
the two mounds of Nebbi-Yonnas and Kouyundjik (Fig. 18).[78] According
to M. Oppert this wall was about ten thousand metres (nearly 6¼ miles)
in circumference, which would make it cover about one-eleventh of the
ground covered by modern Paris. There is nothing here that is not in
accord with our ideas as to the character and importance of Nineveh. If
we add to the town inclosed within such a wall suburbs stretching along
the right bank of the river on the site of modern Mossoul, we shall
have a city capable of holding perhaps two or three hundred thousand
people.
In the northern part of the inclosure, not far from the north-western
angle, Sir Henry Layard made some excavations that brought one of
the principal gates of ancient Nineveh to light.[79] The passage was
probably vaulted, but its upper part had disappeared. The gateway,
which was built by Sennacherib, had a pair of winged bulls looking
towards the city and another pair looking towards the country outside.
The limestone pavement in the entrance still bears the mark of wheels.
Two great chambers are hollowed out of the thickness of the walls and
open into the entrance passage. The walls must be here about 116 feet
thick, judging from the proportion, in Layard’s plan,[80] between them
and one of the two chambers, which has a diameter, as we are told by
its finder, of 23 feet. We need say no more of this doorway. The town
attached to the palace of Khorsabad will give us a better opportunity
for the study of a city gate.
The “town of Sargon,” _Dour-Saryoukin_ or _Hisr-Sargon_,
according as we follow one or the other method of transcribing the
Assyrian name, was far smaller than Babylon, was smaller even than
Nineveh. It formed a parallelogram two sides of which were about 1,950
yards, the other two about 1,870 yards long, which would give a surface
of considerably more than a square mile. This city is interesting not
for the part it played in history, for of that we know nothing, and
it is quite possible that after the death of Sargon it may have been
practically abandoned, but because, of all the cities of Assyria, it
is that whose line of circumvallation has been best preserved and most
carefully studied (Vol. I. Fig. 144).
Like all inhabited places of any importance Dour-Saryoukin was
carefully fortified. Over the whole of Mesopotamia the words town
and fortress seem to have been almost convertible terms. The nature
of the soil does not lend itself to any such distinctions as those
of upper and lower city, as it does in Italy and Greece; there was
no _acropolis_, to which the inhabitants could fly when the
outer defences were broken down. In case of great need the royal
palace with its massive gates and cincture of commanding towers might
be looked upon as a citadel; while in Babylon and some other towns
several concentric lines of fortification made an attack more arduous
and prolonged the defence. But, nevertheless, the chief care of the
Mesopotamian engineers was given to the strengthening of the external
wall, the _enceinte_, properly speaking.
At Khorsabad this stood on a plinth three feet eight inches high, above
which began the sun-dried brick. The whole is even now nowhere less
than forty-five feet high, while in parts it reaches a height of sixty
feet. If we remember how greatly walls built of the materials here used
must have suffered from the weather, we shall no longer be astonished
at the height ascribed by Herodotus to the walls of Babylon: “These
were, he says, 200 royal cubits (348 feet) high.”[81] This height was
measured, no doubt, from the summit of the tallest towers into the
deepest part of the ditch, which he adds, “was wide and deep.” It
is possible that the interpreters who did the honours of Babylon to
the Greek historian exaggerated the figures a little, just as those
of Memphis added something to the height of the pyramids. That the
exaggeration was not very great is suggested by what he says as to the
thickness of the wall; he puts it at fifty royal cubits, or eighty-six
feet six inches. Now those of Khorsabad are only between six and seven
feet thinner than this, and it is certain that the walls of Babylon,
admired by all antiquity as the masterpieces of the Chaldæan engineers,
must have surpassed those of the city improvised by Sargon both in
height and thickness.
Far from abusing our credulity, Herodotus is within the mark when he
says that on the summit of the wall “enough room was left between the
towers to turn a four-horse chariot.”[82] As for Ctesias, he speaks of
a width “greater than what is necessary to allow two chariots to pass
each other.”[83] Such thicknesses were so far beyond the ideas of Greek
builders that their historians seem to have been afraid that if they
told the truth they would not be believed, so they attenuated rather
than exaggerated the real dimensions. If we give a chariot a clear
space of ten feet, which is liberal indeed, it will be seen that not
two, but six or seven, could proceed abreast on such walls.
The nature of the materials did not allow walls to be thin, and in
making them very thick there were several great advantages. The
Assyrians understood the use of the battering-ram. We see it employed
in several of the bas-reliefs for opening a breach in the ramparts of
a beleaguered town (Vol. I. Fig. 60 and above, Fig. 23). They also dug
mines, as soon as they had pierced the revetment of stone or burnt
brick.[84] To prevent or to neutralize the employment of such methods
of attack they found no contrivance more effectual than giving enormous
solidity to their walls. Against such masses the battering-ram would
be almost powerless, and mines would take so much time that they would
not be very much better. Finally, the platform at the summit of a wall
built on such principles would afford room for a number of defenders
that would amount to a large army.
Throughout the circumference of the _enceinte_ the curtain
was strengthened by rectangular flanking towers having a front of
forty-five, and a salience of rather more than thirteen feet.[85]
These were separated from each other by intervals of ninety feet,
or double the front of a tower. Only the lower parts of the towers
are now in existence, and we have to turn to the representations of
fortresses in the reliefs before we can restore their super-structures
with any certainty. In these sculptures what we may call the head of
the tower equals on an average from a fourth to a fifth of the height
of the curtain. By adopting an elevation half way between these two
proportions, M. Place has given to his towers a total height of 105
feet to the top of their crenellations, a height which is near enough
to the 100 Grecian feet attributed by Diodorus to the Nineveh walls.
The description borrowed by that writer from Ctesias, is, as we have
shown, in most respects quite imaginary, but it may have contained this
one exact statement, especially as a height of about 100 feet seems to
have been usually chosen for cities of this importance.
The parapets of the towers were corbelled out from their walls and
pierced with loopholes, as we know from the reliefs. Each doorway was
flanked by a pair of towers, the wall between them being only wide
enough for the entrance. Our Plate V. will give a very exact idea of
the general appearance of the whole _enceinte_. Including those of
the palace mound, it has been calculated that the city of Sargon had
one hundred and sixty-seven towers. Was there a ditch about the wall
like that at Babylon? We are tempted to say yes to this, especially
when we remember the statement of Herodotus that the earth taken from
the ditch served to afford materials for the wall. Moreover such a
ditch could have been easily kept full of water by means of the two
mountain streams that flow past the mound. But the explorers tell us
they could find no trace of such a ditch.[86] If it ever existed it has
now been so completely filled up that no vestige remains.
Upon each of its south-eastern, south-western and north-eastern faces
the city wall was pierced with two gates. One of these, decorated
with sculptures and glazed bricks, is called by Place the _porte
ornée_, or state entrance, the other, upon which no such ornament
appears, he calls the _porte simple_. On the north-western face
there is only a _porte simple_, the palace mound taking the place
of the state gateway. The plinth and the lower courses of burnt brick
are continued up to the arches of these gates; the latter are also
raised upon a kind of mound which lifts them about eight and a half
feet above the level of the plain.
In size and general arrangement these gateways were repetitions of
each other. Our Figs. 50 in the first volume, 24 and 25 in this, show
severally the present condition, the plan and the restored elevation of
a _porte simple_.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.--Plan of one of the ordinary
gates at Khorsabad; from Place.]
The entrance was covered by an advanced work, standing out some
eighty-three feet into the plain. Each angle of this sort of barbican
was protected by a low tower, about forty feet wide. Through the centre
of the curtain uniting these towers there is a first vaulted passage,
leading to a large courtyard (A in Fig. 24), beyond which are the space
(B) between the great flanking towers of the gate proper and the long
vaulted passage (C--G) which gives access to the town. This passage is
not a uniform tunnel. The mass through which it runs is 290 feet thick,
and in two places it is crossed at right angles by transepts wider
than itself (D and F). The tunnel ends in a kind of open vestibule
interposed between the inner face of the wall and the commencement of
the street. All these courts, passages and transepts are paved with
large limestone slabs except the small chamber that opens from one end
of the outer transept (I). This small apartment was not a thoroughfare,
but it has been thought that signs of a staircase leading either to
upper rooms or to the battlements could be traced in it. We have seen
that the Egyptian pylons had such staircases and upper chambers.[87]
It would be curious to find the arrangement repeated here, but we
cannot certainly say that it was so. On the other hand the situation
of the doors by which the entrance into the city was barred is very
clearly marked. At the point where the passage C opens into the
transept D the sockets in which the metal feet of the door pivots were
set, are still in place.[88]
[Illustration: FIG. 25.--Restoration in perspective of
one of the ordinary gates of Khorsabad; from Place.]
The state doorways are distinguished from their more humble companions,
in the first place by a flight of eleven brick-built steps which have
to be mounted before the court A can be reached from the outside; in
the ordinary gateways a gentle inclination of the whole pavement of
the court makes such steps unnecessary. A second difference is of more
importance. At the entrance to the passage marked C on our plan the
state doorways have a pair of winged bulls whose foreparts stand out
a little from the wall while their backs support the arch. The latter
is decorated with the semicircle of enamelled bricks of which we have
already spoken at length in our chapter upon decoration (Vol. I., Figs.
123 and 124, and below, Fig. 26). Behind the bulls there are two winged
genii facing each other across the passage and about thirteen feet high
(Fig. 27).
[Illustration: FIG. 26.--State gateway at Khorsabad.
Elevation; from Place.]
That these monumental doorways with their rich decorations were
reserved for pedestrians, is proved by the flight of steps. It was
not thought desirable to subject their sculptures to the dangers of
vehicular traffic. In the _portes simples_ the marks of wheels can
be distinctly traced on the pavements.[89]
Each of these gateways, whether for carriages or foot passengers, was a
complicated edifice, and the arrangement of their 10,000 square yards
of passage and chamber could scarcely have been explained without the
use of plans. Military necessities are insufficient to explain such
elaborate contrivances. The existence of barbican and flanking towers
is justified by them, but hardly the size of the court and the two
great transepts. We cease to be surprised at these, however, when we
remember the part played by the city gates in the lives of the urban
populations of the Levant.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.--Longitudinal section through
the archway of one of the city gates, Khorsabad; from Place.]
In the East the town gate is and always has been what the _agora_
was to the cities of Greece and the _forum_ to those of Italy.
Doubtless it was ill-adapted to be used as a theatre of political
or judicial debate, like the public places of the Græco-Roman world.
But in the East the municipal life of the West has never obtained a
footing. The monarchy and patriarchal _régime_ have been her two
forms of government; she had no need of wide spaces for crowds of
voters or for popular tribunals. Nothing more was required than a place
for gossip and the retailing of news, a place where the old men could
find themselves surrounded by a circle of fellow townsmen crouched
upon their heels, and, after hearing plaintiffs, defendants and their
witnesses, could give those awards that were the first form of justice.
Nothing could afford a better _rendezvous_ for such purposes than
the gate of a fortified city or village. Hollowed in the thickness of a
wall of prodigious solidity it gave a shelter against the north wind in
winter, while in summer its cool galleries must have been the greatest
of luxuries. Husbandmen going to their fields, soldiers setting out on
expeditions, merchants with their caravans, all passed through these
resounding archways and had a moment in which to hear and tell the
news. Those whom age or easy circumstances relieved from toil or war
passed much of their time in the gates talking with all comers or sunk
in the sleepy reverie in which orientals pass so much of their lives.
All this is painted for us with the most simple fidelity in the Bible.
“And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot seeing them, rose
up to meet them.”[90] When Abraham buys a burying place in Hebron he
addresses himself to Ephron, the owner of the ground, “and Ephron the
Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even
of all that went in at the gate of his city.”[91] So too Boaz, when
he wishes to marry Ruth and to get all those who had rights over the
young Moabitess to resign them in his favour, “went up to the gate, and
sat him down there ... and he took ten men of the elders of the city,
and said, sit ye down here. And they sat down.”[92] And these old men
were called upon to witness the acts of resignation performed by Ruth’s
nearest relatives.[93]
So too, in later ages, when the progress of political life led kings to
inhabit great separate buildings of their own, the palace gates became
for the courtiers what the city gates were for the population at
large. At Khorsabad they were constructed on exactly the same plan as
those of the town; they are even more richly decorated and the chambers
they inclose are no less spacious. In them servants, guards, military
officers, foreign ambassadors and wire-pullers of every kind could
meet, lounge about, and await their audiences. Read the book of Esther
carefully and you will find continual allusions to this custom. “In
those days, while Mordecai sat in the king’s gate, two of the king’s
chamberlains, Bigthan and Teresh, of those which kept the door, were
wroth, and sought to lay hands on the king Ahasuerus.”[94] The gates
of the palace must have been open to all comers for a man of despised
race and a butt for the insults of Haman, like Mordecai, to have been
enabled to overhear the secret whispers of the king’s chamberlains. In
the sequel we find Mordecai hardly ever moving from this spot.
Assis le plus souvent aux portes du palais,
as Racine says, he thence addresses to Esther the advice by which
she is governed. He did not stand up, as he must have done in a
mere passage, for Haman complains that he did not rise and do him
reverence.[95]
This use of gates has not been abandoned in the East. At Mossoul, for
instance, the entrances to the city are buildings with several rooms
in them, and in the gate opening upon the Tigris M. Place often saw
the governor of the province seated among his officers in an upper
chamber and dispensing justice.[96] In the same town the doorways
of a few great private houses are frequented in the same fashion by
the inhabitants of the quarter. This was the case with the French
Consulate, which was established in a large house that had been the
ancestral home of a family of independent beys, now extinct. At the
entrance there was a chamber covered with a depressed cupola and
surrounded by stone benches. Right and left were four lodges for
porters, and on one side a staircase leading to four upper rooms built
over the vault. One of these served as a divan. All this was separated
by a large courtyard from the dwelling place proper, and even after
the building had become a part of France, the neighbours kept up their
habit of coming to sit and gossip under its dome.[97]
The word _porte_ has thus acquired a significance in every
European language that could hardly be understood but for the light
thrown upon it by such customs as those illustrated by the remains of
Assyrian architecture, and alluded to so often in the sacred writings.
Every one who has visited Stamboul, has seen in the first court of the
Old Seraglio, that arched doorway (_Bab-i-Houmaioun_) in whose
niches the heads of great criminals and rebellious vassals used once
to be placed; it formerly led to the saloons in which the Ottoman
sultans presided at the great council, listened to the reports of
their officers, and received foreign ambassadors. The doorway through
which the august presence was reached ended by representing in the
imagination of those who passed through it; first, the whole of the
building to which it belonged, and secondly, the sovereign enthroned
behind it. The decrees in which the successors of Mohammed II. made
known their will ended with these words: “_Given at our Sublime
Gate, at our Gate of Happiness_.” In later years the Old Seraglio
was abandoned. The different public departments were removed into a
huge edifice more like a barracks than an eastern palace, but the
established formula was retained. In the Constantinople of to-day “to
go to the Porte” means to go to the government offices, and even the
government itself, the sultan, that is, and his ministers, are known
in all the chancelleries of Europe as _the Porte_, _the Sublime
Porte_, _the Ottoman Porte_.
It was, no doubt, by a metonomy of the same kind that the capital of
ancient Chaldæa, the town into which the principal sanctuaries of the
national gods were gathered, was called _Bab-ilou_, the _Gate of
God_, which was turned by the Greeks into Βαβυλών, or Babylon.
After our careful description of the remains left by the city of
Sargon we need enter into few details as to the other fortified
_enceintes_ that have been explored in Mesopotamia. The same
rectangular plan, the same thick walls and carefully arranged gateways
are to be found in them all. With the Assyrians as with their
neighbours, every town was fortified. The square form seems to have
been universally employed for the flanking towers. It is quite by
exception that we find in one of the pictures of a siege on the Balawat
gates, tall and slender towers that appear to be round on plan and to
be much higher than the curtain they defend (Fig. 28). Besides these
town walls there were, no doubt, at the mouths of the valleys opening
into the basin of the Tigris, strong forts and isolated towers, perched
upon some abrupt rock or ridge: the siege of such a fortress seems
to be going on in the relief figured on the next page (Fig. 29). The
platform at the top of the tower seems to be raised and strengthened
by a structure of wood, which stands out beyond the crenellations and
is protected by a row of shields, like the bulwarks of a Roman galley.
This contrivance resembles those _ourdeys_ of which the military
engineers of the middle ages made such constant use. The garrison still
show a bold front from behind their defences, but the women and old
men, foreseeing the fall of their stronghold, are decamping while there
is yet time.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.--Fortified wall; from the
Balawat gates. British Museum.]
The military successes of the Assyrians are partly to be explained by
their engineering skill. In all that concerned the attack and defence
of places they seem to have left the Egyptians far behind. In addition
to mines and battering rams they employed movable towers which they
pushed forward against such walls as they wished to attack point blank,
and thought either too high or too well lined with defenders to be open
to escalade (Vol. I., Fig. 26). In the relief partly reproduced on page
75, the defenders have not ceased their resistance, but in the lower
section, in what we may call the _predella_ of the picture, we
see a long band of prisoners of both sexes being led off by soldiers.
These we may suppose to be captives taken in the suburbs of the
beleaguered city, or in battles already won.[98]
[Illustration: FIG. 29.--Siege of a fort; from Layard.]
The Assyrians not only understood how to defend their own cities, and
to destroy those of their foes, they were fully alive to the necessity
for good carriage roads, if their armies and military machines were
to be transported rapidly from place to place. How far these roads
extended we do not know, but Place ascertained the existence of paved
causeways debouching from the gates of Dour-Saryoukin,[99] and unless
they stretched at least to the frontiers, it is difficult to see
how the Assyrians could have made such great use as they did of war
chariots. Not one of their series of military pictures can be named in
which they do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy
cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their
wheels are far from being those solid disks of timber that are alone
capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have
not the lightness of a modern carriage with its tires of beaten steel,
but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove
that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia
of to-day can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with
great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number (Figs. 21 and
31).
[Illustration: FIG. 30.--An attack by escalade; from
Layard.]
In the interior of the town--we are still speaking of the town of
Sargon--these same causeways formed the principal streets. They were
about forty feet wide. Their construction was, of course, far inferior
to that of a Roman road. There were no footpaths, either within or
without the cities; the stones were small, irregular in shape, and not
of a very durable kind. They were placed in a single layer, and the
pavement when finished looked like a mere bed of broken stones. All
Mesopotamia, however, cannot now show a road that can be compared to
these ancient ways. Wherever the traveller goes, his beasts of burden
and the wheels of his carts sink either into a bed of dust or into
deep and clinging mud, according to the season. It is no better in the
towns. Whoever has had the ill luck to be out, in the rainy season, in
the sloughs and sewers that the Turks call streets, will be ready to
acknowledge that the civilization of Assyria in the time of Sargon was
better furnished than that of Turkey in the days of Abdul-Hamid.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Chariot for three combatants;
from the palace of Assurbanipal. Louvre. Height 16 inches. Drawn
by Bourgoin.]
At Khorsabad, where the main streets must, like those of Babylon, have
intersected each other at right angles, how were the buildings, public
and private, arranged? We might have had an answer to this interesting
question had M. Place been in command of enough time and means to
clear the whole interior of the _enceinte_. Even as it was he
found enough to justify him in asserting that the great inclosure of
some eight hundred acres was not, as we might be tempted to imagine
at first sight, a royal park attached to the palace, but a city. He
sunk trenches at three points where low mounds suggested the presence
of ruins, and all his doubts soon disappeared. Several yards below
the present level of the ground he found the original surface, with
the pavements of streets, courtyards and rooms; doorways with their
thresholds and jambs; walls covered with stucco, cut stone and even
alabaster slabs; potsherds, fragments of brick and utensils of various
kinds--decisive evidence, in fact, that one of those agglomerations of
civilized human beings that we call towns, had formerly occupied the
site.
[Illustration]