_ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE._
Assyria, because she lies nearer to the mountains than Chaldæa, and
because the use of stone, without ever being exclusive, was more
frequent in northern than in southern Mesopotamia, has left us important
ruins which have already been partly explored, and which allow us to
reconstruct the forms of her architecture, without material gaps, from
the ninth to the seventh century before our era. In temples, palaces,
staged towers, and fortresses, the art of building is revealed to our
eyes by means of the excavations of which Nineveh and its environs have
been the object. But nothing is left of private architecture, and the
same must be said of sepulchral architecture, or rather this latter did
not exist in Assyria, which has only yielded to our explorers a few jars
filled with bones. The corpses were generally carried away into Lower
Chaldæa, which continued to be for long ages a sort of _Campo Santo_, or
vast cemetery at the service of the inhabitants of all Mesopotamia. Down
to the present day, the Persians, even of the most distant provinces,
make a point of having their dead buried at Nejef and Kerbela, near the
mosque of Ali, the great saint of the Shiite Mussulmans. This
traditional superstition is turned to profit by a company of carriers,
who annually transport more than ten thousand corpses. The necropolis
of Mugheir and the surrounding tells belongs therefore both to Chaldæa
and to Assyria; corpses are piled up there by hundreds of thousands, but
beyond the system of drainage, organised in order to catch the
rain-water, it offers nothing of great interest. There were no
sepulchral monuments; and as for the tombs themselves, they are
generally little brick structures with nothing remarkable about them;
the furniture consisting of terra-cotta vases and figurines, amulets and
cylinders, is of the most wretched description.
[Illustration: Fig. 36.--Tomb at Warka (after Taylor).]
The principal buildings of Assyria, which have been methodically and
almost completely explored, are those of Khorsabad, some leagues to the
north of Nineveh, and those of Kouyunjik and Nimroud. Several hillocks
in which a collection of important structures would with equal certainty
be found, such as the hill of Nebi Yunus, where Arab tradition fixes the
tomb of the prophet Jonah, and Arvil on the site of Arbela, have not yet
been tested by the explorer’s pick; others, such as the artificial
mounds of Kalah Shergat, Balawat, and Karamles, have only been
incompletely explored, and though epigraphic material, extremely
valuable for history, and bas-reliefs of the highest artistic interest,
have been extracted from them, from the architectural point of view at
least their imperfect excavation teaches us nothing new.
The Babylonian buildings of the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus
must have resembled the Ninevite palaces and temples in form and
architectural arrangement; but up to the present time we can only speak
of them by conjecture, or according to the inexact descriptions of Greek
travellers, and we cannot regret too much that the enormous Babylonian
tells, such as those called the Kasr or Palace, Tell Amran, Babil and
Birs Nimroud have yielded hardly anything yet of their archæological
treasures. We must, then, for the present, confine ourselves to the
description of the ruins of Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyunjik, in order
to reconstruct the principal forms of Mesopotamian architecture at the
most splendid period of the Ninevite empire.
§ I. PRINCIPLES OF CONSTRUCTION.
The limestone which is furnished in abundance by the lowest spurs of the
mountains of Kurdistan enabled the architects of Nineveh not to employ
brick exclusively, and sometimes to erect walls of trimmed ashlar. They
used limestone especially for the basements of the buildings, which were
more particularly exposed to the action of damp, so fatal to crude
brick; they also had recourse to it for the construction of the ramparts
of the royal palaces. But even here, on account of the dearness of the
materials, which it was necessary to seek at a distance and to spend
much time in hewing, stone is only employed for the outer facing of the
wall; the builders use it sparingly, and are as niggardly of it as they
are prodigal of brick. Accordingly, the walls which enclose the terrace
of Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad are only of stone on the surface; the
interior, or rather the nucleus of the structure, is of brick. The
blocks on their external and visible surface are of variable length, but
are placed upon one another in very regular courses of equal height and
with crossed joints. Headers penetrate like wedges into the mass of the
terrace to ease the layers of brick and bind them to the stone
structure. In the lower courses of the rampart of the palace at
Khorsabad there are regularly hewn blocks from 8 ft. 2 in. to 9 ft. 10
in. square; the blocks diminish in volume in proportion to the nearness
of the layers to the summit of the rampart, which was 59 ft. high,
including the battlements, which formed a parapet all round the terrace.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.--Masonry at Khorsabad (after Place).]
[Illustration: Fig. 38.--Section of wall at Khorsabad (after Place).]
The interior or exterior walls of the building which stood upon this
gigantic base had no need to fear the infiltration of water or the
attacks of enemies: their solidity might be lessened without
inconvenience, by economising the stone. As a matter of fact, they are
of brick, baked or crude, and stone is scarcely employed in them except
for the lining and paving of a few rooms. In that case great slabs of
limestone or gypsum are set upright as a plinth against the lower part
of the wall, to preserve it from corrosion; they are adjusted end to
end by the edge, and it was sufficient, in order to fix them, to pour
between their posterior surface and the wall mortar which often only
imperfectly adhered: the outer and only visible surface of these slabs
was decorated with bas-reliefs which served for the adornment of the
halls. As for the walls themselves, they were straight and perpendicular
in contrast to those of the Egyptian buildings, which, seen from
without, seem to lean inwards, and give to the whole building the
appearance of a truncated pyramid. The Assyrian walls rise vertically,
even when they enclose vaulted chambers, or when they form part of
staged pyramids; each stage forms a perpendicular terrace, not a sloping
one.
It has been observed that the partitions which separate the halls
sometimes look like one block set up on end; the joints and the courses
of the brickwork cannot be detected, to such an extent have the
constructing materials been soldered together in a perfect amalgam of
beaten clay. This peculiarity, noticed by Victor Place at Khorsabad, can
only be explained by admitting that the bricks were employed in the
building while they were still saturated with water, and before the
process of drying was finished. Their natural dampness, added to that of
the clayey mortar which bound them to one another, has formed a sort of
muddy paste which must have taken years to harden, but which was
particularly effective against the disintegration of the wall, since it
became in this way entirely homogeneous. It was the extraordinary
thickness of these walls which prevented them from giving way under
their own weight, and even allowed them to uphold those heavy beds of
clay which form the vaults and terraces of the houses. They thus
protected the halls most effectively from the ardent heat of the sun. At
the present day the inhabitants of Bagdad and Mosoul take refuge, during
summer, in their _sirdab_, a half-underground room with extremely thick
brick walls, the single opening of which looks to the north. The people
of Nineveh and Babylon, subject to the same climatic conditions,
certainly acted in the same manner. As for the princes, they had, to
defend them against the sun, walls from 13 ft. to 26 ft. thick, and
vaultings as enormous as the walls. Nevertheless, the mode of building
with clay which we have just noticed was very defective; this is the
weak side of Ninevite and Babylonian buildings, and we understand why
the kings are unceasingly obliged, as they relate in their inscriptions,
to repair or rebuild walls which crumble under the dissolving action of
water from the sky.
The unusual thickness of the walls, the long, narrow form of all the
chambers, are also justified by the employment of the vault as the
essential element of the Assyrian buildings. V. Place unearthed at
Khorsabad a great doorway surmounted by a semicircular arch. The sides
of the doorway, as well as the arch itself, are of brick; there are
three rows of voussoirs one above the other, forming as it were three
concentric door-frames half-fitting into one another. All the voussoirs,
which have issued from a single mould, have a slightly trapezoidal
shape, like the stone voussoirs of our most carefully built edifices.
The height of the doorway, under the keystone, is 19 ft. 8 in., and the
breadth 11 ft. At other points, Place recognised that the enormous
accumulation of materials which filled up the halls could only come from
the falling in of the clay vaults. Some blocks still, at the time of the
excavations, formed an arch, sometimes several yards in diameter, solid
enough to serve as shelter for the shepherds of the neighbourhood; they
were, on the concave side, covered with carefully laid stucco, or with
paintings in fresco--a circumstance which proves positively that these
blocks are sections of crumbled vaults.
[Illustration: Fig. 39.--Vaulted and domed houses (after Layard).]
The square chambers were surmounted by a dome; there are in the palace
of Sargon two of these rooms as much as 44½ ft. square. In a bas-relief
discovered at Kouyunjik (fig. 39) a group of houses figures, among which
some are surmounted by hemispherical cupolas, others by elongated domes
in the form of sugar-loaves. The houses of Babylon were vaulted, as
Strabo tells us. The Mesopotamian palaces of the Achæmenid, Parthian, or
Sassanian epoch, the halls of which are surmounted by domes which
scarcely yield in boldness to those of St. Sophia, evidently only handed
on the Assyro-Chaldæan tradition which is also represented before our
eyes by the modern houses of Mosoul, Bagdad and southern Persia. The
technical methods of contemporary masons also do not fail to make known
to us what steps their ancestors of the time of Sargon or
Nebuchadnezzar took to supply the want of wood, and in consequence to do
without a previous arched framework: travellers tell us that they have
observed the commonest workmen of the country erecting their
hemispherical or elliptical cupolas by layers in rings, laid one above
the other, and narrowing in proportion to their nearness to the
keystone; it is the same principle as that of the corbelled vaulting.
[Illustration: Fig. 40.--Vaulted drain (after Layard).]
The place where it has been possible to observe the employment of the
vault in the architecture of the Assyrian palaces, is in the very bowels
of the basements of these edifices. A vast corridor, surmounted by a
semicircular vaulting, was discovered by the English explorers, in the
flanks of the mound of Nimroud; the lower courses are of enormous slabs
of stone, all the rest is brick. In the scientific system of drains
which carried off the sewage of the palace of Sargon, Place
distinguished every kind of vaulting: the pointed or ogival vault, the
semicircular vault, the flat-arched vault, the shallow vault, the
elliptical vault.
Never, at any point in their history, did the Egyptians
[Illustration: Fig. 41.--Vaulted drain at Khorsabad (after Place).]
or the Romans push the application of the vault to an equal degree of
perfection. In most of the halls of Sargon’s palace a slab pierced with
a hole was remarked in the middle of the bricks which form the pavement:
this was the orifice of a vertical conduit opening into a vaulted drain
concealed in the terrace. One of these drains had an ogival vaulting,
the description of which we will borrow from MM. Perrot and Chipiez.[29]
“The bricks composing it are trapezoidal in shape, two of their sides
being slightly rounded--the one concave, the other convex. The radius of
this curve varies with each brick, being governed by its destined place
in the vault. These bricks go therefore in pairs, and as there are four
courses of bricks on each side of the vault, four separate and different
moulds would be required, besides a fifth, of which we shall presently
have to speak. The four narrow sides of these bricks differ sensibly
from one another. The two curved faces, being at different distances
from the centre, are of unequal lengths; while, as the lower oblique
edge is some inches below the upper in the curve, these two edges have
different directions. In their disinclination to use stone voussoirs the
Assyrian builders here found themselves compelled to mould bricks of
very complicated form, and the way in which they accomplished their task
speaks volumes for their skill.” The two upper voussoirs meeting and
touching one another by one of their corners, the triangular space left
empty between their edges was filled up either by wedge-shaped bricks or
by mortar. The drain which we have just given as an example is 4 ft. 7
in. high under the keystone and 3 ft. 8 in. broad; the explorers were
able to follow it to a length of 216 feet. To facilitate its
construction the architect conceived the ingenious idea of building it
upon an inclined plane--that is to say, that all the rows of voussoirs,
instead of being perpendicular, lean considerably backwards, and are
supported one upon the other; this system, which did not at all affect
the solidity of the vaulting, allowed the builders to do without
circular wooden frames.
[Illustration: Fig. 42.--Vaulted drain at Khorsabad. Slope of the bricks
(after Place).]
So much technical skill devoted to the construction of simple
subterranean conduits makes us particularly regret that the deplorable
quality of the material did not allow the vaults and domes of the
palaces to exist till our day. However, there were not only vaulted
halls in the Ninevite buildings; a certain number of them were covered
by flat roofs formed of beams of palm-wood, poplar-wood or cedar-wood,
which supported light terraces. The bas-relief at Kouyunjik which we
cited above shows us flat roofs side by side with parabolic and
spheroidal cupolas. Nevertheless, what we said about the use of stone in
the Ninevite structures we can repeat here on the subject of timber.
Nineveh, not being too remote from the wooded mountains of Armenia,
Kurdistan and Masius, where forests of pines, beeches, and oaks grow,
did not deprive herself of the use of these woods in her structures; she
had panelled halls in her palaces, and, at the apogee of her power, when
thousands and thousands of slaves placed their strength at the service
of her monarchs, she had the timber of the Amanus and the Lebanon
transported into her buildings. The king Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857)
relates in one of his inscriptions that he had an enormous quantity of
pines, cedars, and oaks cut down in the Amanus and the Lebanon in order
to have them carried to Nineveh, and to employ them in the construction
of his palace and the temples of his favourite gods. Other princes, such
as Sargon, Sennacherib, Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, make the same
boast of having utilised, in the buildings which they erected or
repaired, beams brought from the Amanus and the Lebanon. “I caused the
tallest cedars of Lebanon,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “to be brought to
Babylon; the sanctuary of E-Kua, in which the god Marduk dwells, was
freshly covered with beams of cedar-wood.”[30] This is the wood of
resinous nature, “the odour of which is good,” add the inscriptions. At
the British Museum fragments of a cedar beam, collected among the ruins
of Assur-nasir-pal’s palace at Nimroud, are preserved. Who will ever be
able to say what efforts and how many human lives were required to
transport these gigantic rafters across a rough country without any
roads for traffic, from the Lebanon as far as the banks of the Tigris
and Euphrates? Accordingly it may be affirmed that the use of wood was
always exceptional in the Chaldæo-Assyrian structures; it was never
introduced except as an exotic element, of which the monarchs boast on
account of its rarity. The climate and the nature of the Mesopotamian
soil were better suited by thick vaultings, which, then as at the
present day, never ceased to be the rule there.
Quite as little as the Chaldæans, and for the same motives, did the
Assyrians make a frequent and regular use of the column as an element of
their architecture. Victor Place notices, like the explorers of Lower
Chaldæa, several façades in the palace of Sargon adorned with pilasters
and half-columns of brick, projecting beyond the plane of the walls, and
having no object except to relieve the monotony of the structure.
Perhaps, too, these half-columns, which are found in groups of seven,
had, like the two famous pillars in the Temple of Solomon, a mystical
and symbolical meaning, the number seven playing an essential part among
the mythological conceptions of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. Elsewhere a few
bases of columns and a few monolithic capitals have been found, which
prove that the Assyrians used stone supports for monumental porches, as
we ascertained in the palace of Tello. A fragment of a bas-relief
preserved at the British Museum, and coming from the palace of
Assurbanipal, shows us (fig. 43) the façade of a great building adorned
with a projecting roof, supported by four pilasters and four columns.
The base of these columns rests on the back of gigantic lions, which
seem to advance to meet one another, two and two. On the back of the
lion the architect has placed a coussinet, surmounted by a torus and by
the stem of the column. In the ruins of the palace of Kouyunjik, four
bases of columns were found still in place, and seeming to belong to a
covered gallery; there were also two small winged bulls with human
heads, crowned with the tiara, and supporting on their back a spheroidal
base decorated with geometrical designs in relief. At Nimroud Sir A. H.
Layard noticed also two crouching sphinxes bearing bases of columns
(fig. 44); according to the same architectural principle the foot of the
arches rested upon the gigantic bulls which flanked the chief entrances
of the palaces.
[Illustration: Fig. 43.--Façade with pilasters (from bas-relief in
British Museum representing Babylon).]
[Illustration: Fig. 44.--Base of column (after Layard).]
The stem of the columns was probably of wood, painted or covered with a
metallic envelope. Round the inner courtyards there were, as in the
courts of oriental palaces in our own day, porticoes formed of cedar
beams resting on bases analogous to those which we have just noticed.
Strabo[31] reminds us that in Babylon beams of palm-wood were used in
the construction of houses: “They are careful,” he says, “to wrap round
each palm-wood pillar with rush-cords, which are then covered with
several coats of paint.” Things were not done quite in this way in the
houses of the rich and in princely residences. A fragment of a cedar
beam of the size of a man was discovered at Khorsabad. It was still
overlaid with a plating of bronze decorated with designs in _repoussé_,
which imitate the bark of a palm-trunk.
[Illustration: Fig. 45.--Assyrian capital (after Place, _Ninive et
l’Assyrie_, pl. 35).]
[Illustration: Fig. 46.--Capital of Sassanian period from Warka (British
Museum).]
An enormous block of limestone, 39 ft. 3 in. high, brought to light at
Khorsabad, comprises an entire capital and a part of the stem at the
same time (fig. 45); it is almost the only Assyrian capital known. It
affects the spheroidal form, and its convex part is decorated with a
double line of curved festoons in relief; there was a similar ornament,
no doubt, at the base. Several capitals from Warka are also preserved at
the British Museum, but they were found among ruins of the Sassanian
epoch. Nevertheless the resemblance which some of them bear to the
architectural features of the bas-reliefs is so close that they are
probably representatives of a style inherited from a former period. They
are of that form, so well known in the sculptures, which has the
character of the Ionic order, and was probably its original.
[Illustration: Fig. 47.--Shrine with columns (Botta, _Les Monuments de
Ninive_, pl. 114).]
In imitation of their southern neighbours the Assyrians used the column
especially in chapels of little importance, in which the supports had no
vault or terrace to uphold. Bas-reliefs from Khorsabad and Kouyunjik
represent sanctuaries the roof of which is supported by small columns
with a base and a capital, which partake at once of the Ionic and of the
Doric order of the Greeks (fig. 47). These little structures recall the
Chaldæan shrine of the god Samas (fig. 29). An object which appears to
be the base of a small column exists in the Nimroud Gallery of the
British Museum. It is of sandstone, and, to judge from its size, it must
have formed part of a small chapel or shrine, such as we see in the
sculptures. The ornamental design upon it is partly similar to that of
the large capital figured above, but presents some variations from it.
There is a small hole into which the pillar was doubtless fastened by a
peg or metal dowel.
The Assyrian palace, like Arab houses, developed itself entirely in
area, and not in height; there was rarely a second story on the
platform. Nevertheless such a second story exists sometimes; it is then
open at the sides, and the roof is supported by small columns. These
columns, of wood rather than of stone or brick, form a gallery over the
façade, and they are adorned at their upper extremity with a double
volute as a capital. Bas-reliefs show us houses thus surmounted by a
colonnade, which supports a light, flat roof of wooden beams. At the
present day, houses in Kurdistan are still built on the same lines, and
show an identical arrangement in two stories; the lower without windows,
the upper open at the sides.
[Illustration: Fig. 48.--Base of small column (British Museum).]
In a word, the Assyrians, like the Chaldæans, not having at their
disposal building-stone in great abundance, were obliged to construct
their edifices almost exclusively of brick, the capabilities of which
they tried to the utmost. The result of this was that they never had
those halls of columns which are the triumph of Egyptian architecture.
However thick one may suppose pillars of brick, or columns formed of
bricks moulded in the shape of segments of a circle, to be, these
supports will never offer the same guarantee of solidity as the stone
column. Wherever a heavy burden, such as a vault or a terrace, had to be
supported, great walls were raised of an extraordinary thickness, which
it would have been imprudent to pierce with windows capable of
diminishing its resistance. Air and light only penetrated into the
apartments by the doors; often, too, an opening was contrived at the
summit of the vault or dome, formed of a cylindrical pipe of burnt clay
carried through the entire thickness of the structure.
§ II. PALACES.
The town of Dur-Sarrukin (the Fortress of Sargon) stood three leagues
north of Nineveh, on the Khaswer, one of the branches of the Tigris,
where the Kurdish village of Khorsabad has been built. Discovered in
1843 by E. Botta, French Consul at Mosoul, it was almost completely
excavated by this illustrious explorer and his successor, Victor Place,
and it is from Khorsabad that most of the Assyrian monuments in the
Louvre come. It was the custom that each of the Ninevite monarchs should
have a special palace built at some distance from the great Assyrian
capital, and this became the royal residence round which stood the
dwellings of the court-officers, the guards, the servants, and all
persons who depended upon the prince or lived at his expense.
Dur-Sarrukin was built by Sargon, the father of Sennacherib, about the
year 710 before our era. The palace and the town which was annexed to
it formed a group of structures contained within a fortified enclosure
(fig. 49) the plan of which was a square of 5905 feet.
[Illustration: Fig. 49.--Plan of Dur-Sarrukin (after Place, pl. 2).]
The wall of circumvallation, the angles of which pointed to the four
quarters of the heavens, as in the Chaldæan buildings, was crowned with
battlements and pierced by eight gates protected by towers.
The king’s palace (fig. 50) stood almost in the middle of the
north-eastern façade, and a part of its structure which projected beyond
the ramparts had the appearance of an enormous bastion. The structure of
this palace was supported by a platform which formed an acropolis nearly
twenty-five acres in area. The mass of clay which had to be brought to
raise the terrace and the walls of the palace has been estimated at
48,233,000 cubic feet. The platform overlooked the town, and was reached
by staircases, destroyed at the present day, but which must have been
analogous to the monumental staircase which formed the ascent to the
palace of Sennacherib, and
[Illustration: Fig. 50.--Plan of the palace of Sargon (after Place, pl.
7).]
the traces of which Sir A. H. Layard recognised. As at Tello, a gentle
ascent on an inclined plane was formed for the passage of vehicles. The
royal apartments built upon the terrace comprised no less than two
hundred and nine more or less spacious rooms, the walls of which, laid
bare by Botta and Place, are still sometimes twenty-six feet high and
always reach at least ten feet in the parts most demolished. It was not
easy to determine the destination of these different halls. However, by
comparison with the
[Illustration: Fig. 51.--South-eastern façade of the palace of Sargon
(restoration by Place, pl. 20).]
present Turkish and Persian palaces, in which an analogous arrangement
has been perpetuated, with the same usages, the following parts have
been distinguished at Dur-Sarrukin as in the palace of Tello: the
_seraglio_, that is to say, the reception-rooms and the dwelling-rooms
of the prince and the men attached to his person; the _hareem_, or
apartments of the women and their children; the _khan_, or the residence
of the slaves, the kitchens, the stables, and the offices. The
_seraglio_, the most luxurious and most highly decorated part, included
ten courts and more than sixty rooms, adorned with those bas-reliefs in
stone which are now the glory of the Louvre. They were paved with square
bricks fixed in bitumen. Where the ground was not to be covered with
carpet, as before the door, there was a stone pavement in which the
designs, skilfully carved in relief, imitated those of the carpets
themselves. To the buildings of the seraglio, situated on the
north-east, is attached the staged tower of which we shall speak farther
on. The principal court of the seraglio had an area of 3,202 square
feet, and eight doors formed a means of communication between it and the
rooms of this part of the palace; most of these openings are flanked
with colossal lions or bulls supporting the feet of semicircular arches.
The _hareem_, which occupied, on the south, a surface of more than
94,726 square feet, formed a group of structures communicating with the
rest of the palace by two doors only. It was, with its lofty blind
walls, a sort of prison in the very bosom of the fortress. Within, there
were several courts and isolated suites of rooms, in which the
apartments of the women were separately arranged. The walls of the
principal court must have been decorated with true Asiatic luxury, for
the foot of these walls, when they were laid bare about fifty years ago,
was still covered with a lining of enamelled bricks representing animals
and mythological scenes. It was here that the shaft of a column was
found, of wood covered with a bronze sheath, so that it is not rash to
affirm that this court was furnished with a portico all round, and
perhaps even with an upper story with open sides. The _khan_, situated
towards the eastern angle of the structure, occupied an even larger
space than the _hareem_; the treasury or _bit kutalli_, the cellars,
granaries, and storehouse of domestic utensils, have been distinctly
recognized, as well as magazines of objects of all sorts, carried off as
plunder by Sargon in his expeditions, and weapons of the chase and of
war: in the very stables, the presence of iron rings fixed in the wall
has been ascertained, to which horses and camels were attached: lastly,
the small but numerous rooms of the servants and slaves have been
excavated. Ctesias brings the number of persons attached to the service
of the palace of the
[Illustration: Fig. 52.--Bird’s-eye view of the palace of Sargon at
Khorsabad (restoration by Place, pl. 18 _bis_).]
kings of Persia up to fifteen thousand: it may easily be supposed that
an equal number of hands was employed at the court of the haughty king
of Nineveh.
The palace of Sargon, the best-preserved of Assyrian edifices, and that
of which the excavation was directed with the greatest consistency and
method, deserved to be taken as the most perfect type of the Ninevite
palaces. The researches of the English explorers, Sir A. H. Layard, Sir
H. Rawlinson, G. Smith, and H. Rassam, have procured, it is true, for
the British Museum the incomparable galleries of Assyrian monuments
known as those of Nimroud and Kouyunjik from the name of the principal
tells explored; they have made known the site of the royal residences of
Assur-nasir-pal, Shalmaneser, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Assur-bani-pal,
and exhumed the fine sculptures which decorated their halls; but from
the architectural point of view these excavations teach us nothing
remarkable and original, or rather they only confirm what we know of the
art of building among the Assyrians from the study of Khorsabad; the
elements and principles of building show themselves to be identical
throughout, and, save for secondary modifications and variable
proportions, it may be said that the arrangement and adornment of
Assyrian palaces were everywhere the same, and issued from an uniform
type created in Chaldæa, which was never remarkably modified.
§ III. TEMPLES AND STAGED TOWERS.
It was also in Chaldæa, as we have seen, that those towers in stages
(_zikkurat_) were invented, painted in bright and varied colours, which
constitute one of the original features of Mesopotamian architecture. If
the staged towers of Mugheir, Tello and Abu Shahrein, are too much
destroyed for us to be able to restore their different steps except in
thought, we are sure, nevertheless, that these old Chaldæan edifices
were similar to the towers the lower stories of which were excavated at
Kouyunjik, Nimroud, Khorsabad, and finally at Babylon, where stood, from
the remotest antiquity, the two famous temples called E-saggil and
E-zida and where Nebuchadnezzar built, according to the testimony of his
inscriptions, the famous Tower of the Seven Lights. Who can say whether
this architectural form was not inspired by the sight of the pyramids in
steps of the Nile valley? In any case the Greek historians agree in
affirming that the staged towers were of a height comparable to that of
the loftiest Egyptian pyramids, and the mass of the mounds of débris
which represent the ruins of these towers is a sure warrant of this
assertion. Birs-Nimroud at Babylon is still, at the present day, 235
feet high, and it has certainly lost at least half of its primitive
height. The ruin of Babil is still 130 feet high. What European monument
is there, even if built of hewn stone, which, after crumbling in upon
itself, would reach 130 feet after thirty centuries of ruin and decay?
It is improbable, then, that Strabo deserves to be taxed with
exaggeration when he assigns the height of a stadium of 591 ft. 9 in.,
to the temple of Bel at Babylon. Herodotus describes the same building
in the following manner: “This temple is square, and each side is two
stadia in length (1,183 ft. 6 in.). In the centre is a massive tower, of
one stadium in length and breadth; on this tower stands another tower,
and another again upon this, and so on up to eight. A spiral staircase
has been built outside leading round all the towers. Towards the middle
of the ascent there is a room, and there are seats upon which visitors
rest; upon the last tower stands a large shrine, in which is a large bed
with rich coverings, and near it a golden table.” Modern excavations
enable us to affirm that this description is exact in all points, and
that all the staged towers of Assyria and Chaldæa were constructed upon
the same principle.
The _zikkurat_ of the palace at Khorsabad, placed to the east of the
seraglio buildings, has still at the present day three complete steps
and the beginning of a fourth; the first describes on the ground a
square of 141 ft. each way; each stage is 20 feet high, which gives us
reason to believe that the structure was as high as it was broad at the
base--a peculiarity already noted by Herodotus and Strabo in the temple
of Bel. The stages laid bare by the French excavations were still partly
coloured by means of enamelled stucco, the lowest stage white, the
second black, the third reddish purple, the fourth blue. Among the ruins
of the tower were found numerous fragments of enamelled bricks, coloured
vermilion, silver grey and gold, which proves that the tower had seven
stages of different colours. It has been remarked that Herodotus (i.
98), gives to the fortress of Ecbatana, in Media, the arrangement of a
gigantic tower in stages, the colours of which are similar to those of
the _zikkurat_ of Khorsabad. There were, according to him, seven
concentric enclosures, the most spacious being as large as Athens, while
the battlements of each enclosure rose higher than those outside them.
“The battlements of the first wall are of white stone; those of the
second of black stone; those of the fourth blue; those of the fifth
vermilion.... The two last walls are plated, the one with silver, the
other with gold.”
[Illustration: Fig. 53.--The staged tower of Khorsabad (restoration by
V. Place).]
The explorers of Mugheir thought that they recognised, in spite of the
bad state of the ruins, that the _zikkurat_ of Ur was constructed in
such a way that the stages did not rise exactly in the middle of the
square platform of the lower stage which served as their base; they were
nearer to one of the sides, so that they present on one side much
narrower terraces than on the other three. This observation is confirmed
by a bas-relief in the British Museum, unfortunately very rough, in
which, however, we distinguish clearly the greater width of the terraces
on one side and their corresponding narrowness on the other. On the
other hand the slope of each terrace proves that it ascended like a
screw, and that there was no staircase cut in each of the stages to put
them in communication with each other. This is, moreover, what is
observed at Khorsabad: the ascent to the summit of the ruins of the
fourth stage is by a quadrangular sloping path which mounts gently as it
winds round in a spiral form.
Diodorus Siculus informs us that the top of the staged towers was
occupied by statues, for which the zikkurat would only form a sort of
pedestal: “At the summit of the ascent,” he says, “Semiramis placed
three golden statues wrought with the hammer.” These statues were
perhaps in the interior of the sanctuary which generally crowned the
building; everything makes it probable also that little chapels were
constructed at each stage in the thickness of the structure, and that
each of them was consecrated to the stellar deity of whom the colour of
the stage was emblematic. The chapel on the summit was covered by a
gilded cupola, which glittered under the glorious sunlight of the pure
eastern sky, and dazzled all beholders. Nebuchadnezzar relates in his
inscriptions that he overlaid the dome of the sanctuary of Bel Marduk
“with plates of wrought gold so that it shone like the day.” Does not
Herodotus tell us that the last stage of the citadel of Ecbatana was
gilded? Finally, Taylor picked up among the ruins on the summit of the
_zikkurat_ at Abu Shahrein, a large quantity of thin plates of gold,
still furnished with the gilded nails, which had served to fix them to
the walls.
Besides these sanctuaries erected on the top of staged towers, in which
the priests passed the night in watching the courses of the stars, there
were other temples not provided with similar basements. Thus, on a
bas-relief from the palace of Sargon, we see a representation of the
pillage of the temple of the god Haldia at Musasir, in Armenia (fig.
54). This sanctuary, built upon a terrace like that of a palace, has a
façade decorated with a triangular pediment, like a Greek temple.
Instead of a portico with columns to support the pediment, there are
thick pilasters to the number of six, adorned at intervals with
projecting horizontal lines, and with disks, which are seen upon the
façade also, and may be taken for votive bucklers. Between the two
middle pilasters is the door of the temple, the opening of which is
enclosed by an architrave in stone; on each side of the door and of the
same height as it, are two colossal genii in human form, carved in stone
and holding lances, the points of which rise even higher than the
pillars; behind them are lions; lastly, some distance in front of the
door, two gigantic basins, probably of bronze, resting on tripods,
recall the great vessel found before the façade of the palace of Tello,
the brazen sea in the temple of Solomon, the vase from the temple of
Amathus: they were basins for lustral water.
[Illustration: Fig. 54.--Temple of the god Haldia (after a bas-relief at
Khorsabad, Botta, pl. 141).]
The description given by Herodotus and the author of Bel and the Dragon
of the famous temple of Bel-Marduk, in Babylon, acquaints us somewhat
closely with the interior arrangement of the chapel which crowned the
_zikkurat_. There was nothing, Herodotus relates, in the way of
furniture but a bed and a golden table; the walls were panelled with
plates of gold, silver, and ivory. The evidence of the Greek historian
is confirmed by the text of the cuneiform inscriptions: “I conceived the
idea,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “of restoring E-saggil, the temple of
Marduk. I had the tallest cedars brought from Lebanon; the sanctuary of
E-kua, in which the god dwells, was covered with cedar beams and
overlaid with gold and silver.” Elsewhere relating the construction of
the tower of Borsippa, where stood the temple of E-zida consecrated to
the god Nebo, the same prince expresses himself as follows: “In the
middle of Borsippa I rebuilt E-zida, the eternal house. I raised it to
the highest degree of magnificence with gold, silver, other metals,
stone, enamelled bricks, beams of pine and cedar wood. I covered with
gold the wood of Nebo’s resting-place. The posts of the door of oracles
were plated with silver. I encrusted with ivory the posts, the threshold
and the lintel of the door of the resting-place. I covered with silver
the cedar posts of the door of the women’s chamber.” On the golden table
in the temple of Marduk, Nebuchadnezzar lays, as he recounts himself,
offerings of every kind: honey, cream, milk, refined oil; to draw upon
himself heavenly blessings he pours out great draughts of the wine of
different countries into the goblet of Marduk, and Zarpanit the
Babylonian Astarte.[32]
§ IV. TOWNS AND THEIR FORTIFICATIONS.
In his description of Babylon, as Nebuchadnezzar and the kings of his
dynasty made it, Herodotus expresses himself as follows: “This city,
situated in a vast plain, forms a perfect square of which each side is
120 stadia long, so that the circumference is 480 stadia.” Pausanias
says that Babylon was the greatest city that the sun had ever seen in
his course; Aristotle seems to compare it to the Peloponnese in
size.[33] Classical authors also assign to the walls of the Chaldæan
capital a height of 200 royal cubits (342 ft.) and a thickness of 85 ft.
They are said to be pierced by a hundred gates, flanked by two hundred
and fifty towers and protected by a large moat, into which the waters of
the Euphrates were turned. The exactness of these descriptions, which at
first might seem hyperbolical, has been confirmed, as far as the
thickness of the walls is concerned, by the excavations at Khorsabad,
the ramparts of which are 78 ft. and even 90 ft. thick where they are
furnished with bastions. The extent of the city itself was verified on
the spot between 1852 and 1854 by the French expedition to Mesopotamia.
The great enclosure of Babylon, that is to say, the enlarged Babylon of
Nebuchadnezzar, according to M. Oppert, is 199 square miles in
area--that is to say, seven times the extent of the fortified enclosure
of
[Illustration: Fig. 55.--Walls of Babylon (British Museum).]
Paris. A raised road, 196 ft. broad, ran along the interior of this
rampart, and separated it from the interior wall, itself four times as
long as the circumference of Paris; the two concentric walls bear in the
cuneiform texts the names of Imgur Bel and Nimitti Bel. A view of the
walls of Babylon seems to be given in one of the bas-reliefs from
Kouyunjik, which represent the campaign of Assurbanipal against his
brother Samas-sum-ukin, king of Babylon (B.C. 651-648). Nebuchadnezzar
says that his own father Nabopolassar began to build the walls, and that
he himself finished them; but this does not mean that the earlier city,
called by Herodotus the Royal City, was not surrounded, as in the
bas-relief, by a double wall like the later. Diodorus says that
Semiramis surrounded the western part of the city with three walls, and
two of these are identified by M. Oppert.[34] Fifty principal streets,
twenty-five of which were parallel to the Euphrates, and twenty-five at
right angles to it, leading to the hundred gates, divided the city into
regular squares; a single bridge, formed of wooden planks resting on
stone piles, was thrown across the Euphrates, which cut the city in two
diagonally. The limits of the wall of Nineveh are not yet exactly known;
but the testimony of the Bible gives us reason to believe that this city
scarcely yielded in point of size to Babylon. The best mode of
reconciling the statements of modern explorers with those of the Book of
Jonah and the historian Ctesias, is, perhaps, to adopt the suggestion of
Schrader,[35] and to suppose that “the Great City” of Genesis x. 12 was
a group composed of the four towns there enumerated, of which Nineveh
proper was the chief, and gave its name to the whole group.
[Illustration: Fig. 56.--Chaldæan plan of a fortress.]
In the absence of textual evidence, the very sculptures of the Assyrians
place before our eyes numerous fortresses in plan or in a bird’s-eye
view. One of the statues from Tello represents the patesi Gudea as an
architect, holding on his knees a tablet on which is carved in outline
the plan of a stronghold (fig. 56). There are six gates flanked by
towers, and the walls are surmounted by battlements. In all the
bas-reliefs in which sieges are represented, the fortress is seen to be
composed of several concentric walls supported by towers of greater
elevation than the rampart from which they project, and surmounted by
denticulated battlements (figs. 58 and 74), which stand out on corbels
beyond the perpendicular surface of the wall.
[Illustration: Fig. 57.--Assyrian plan of a fortress (from a bas-relief
in the British Museum).]
Might we not imagine ourselves in presence of a naïve miniature of the
middle ages, representing the siege of a feudal castle, when we examine
in the galleries of our museums these Assyrian bas-reliefs, on which are
carved the sieges of fortresses, which to defend themselves against
battering-rams, arrows, and projectiles of all sorts, are provided with
redans and round towers, battlemented pierced with loopholes, and
furnished with a system of defence which looks like _ourdeys_ and
machicolations? As in the middle ages, a gate is never opened in the
wall of a fortified enclosure without being provided with a drawbridge,
sheltered by two strong towers, and defended by a projecting structure
composed of another rampart and two new bastions. The gate is the weak
point; it is the flaw in the cuirass, the natural breach by which the
enemy might enter: every system of defence is there ingeniously
accumulated, and the walls are thicker at that point. These tall towers,
these thick walls were guarded by bodies
[Illustration: Fig. 58.--Siege of a fortress (from a bas-relief in the
British Museum).]
of soldiers always on the look-out, who found here a pleasant shade to
protect them from a scorching sun, to which even the inhabitants of the
city found their way when they met to discuss their affairs or to
converse upon the news of the day. On each side of these long passages
recesses were made, and even actual halls for the guards. Several of the
dramas related in the Biblical books are developed in such places, under
such vaults. The present state of one of the entrances of Khorsabad
enables us to ascertain that the custom of assembling at the city gate
goes back to the time of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. This gate was still
surmounted by its semicircular arch decorated with an archivolt in
enamelled bricks. The structure formed a projection of 82 feet from the
wall; built on a rectangular plan, it was itself pierced by an opening
defended by two projecting bastions. After passing through this first
structure, a court was reached which gave access to the opening
[Illustration: Fig. 59.--Plan of a gate at Khorsabad (after Place, pl.
18).]
[Illustration: Fig. 60.--Gate of Khorsabad (restoration by Place, pl.
8)]
in the rampart proper flanked by two square towers. Through this gate a
second court was reached, separated again from a third court by a new
opening; lastly, the wall at the bottom of this third court had again an
aperture which gave access to the town. Thus it was necessary to pass
successively through four doors to penetrate into Dur-Sarrukin, and a
structure, symmetrical with that on the outside, projected from the wall
into the interior of the fortress. These massive structures formed by
themselves a real stronghold, 22,965 feet square, with vaulted passages
and galleries, the chief of which is not less than 278 ft. long. It is
clear that such buildings, which would invariably serve as
meeting-places, form fresh and cool retreats in countries where the heat
is such that it was impossible to gather in the Forum or in the Agora,
as at Rome or Athens.