In the flat country of Mesopotamia the architects built lofty zekkurats
in order to provide high substructures for the crowning cella or
shrine, and these lofty, temple-capped pyramids had a materialistic
as well as a spiritual value in that they helped to form in the minds
of the people an ideal as to the position in the community of both
temporal and spiritual power.
To the north, at Khorsabad, a city of Assyria, the rulers constructed,
as part of the great wall, an enormous plateau. This artificial mound,
towering as it did some sixty feet above the level of the city, was
used as a place of residence for the king and his court, while back
of it, and so high that it bathed the plateau with its shadows, was
constructed the many-stepped, cella-crowned temple of the priests. Thus
religion looked down upon royalty and royalty, in turn, on its walled
city with its level streets and multitudinous inhabitants, and thus in
this segregated and self-sufficient community a natural and unwitting
psychological arrangement of class housing was worked out by these
early architects.
This same community phenomenon which we have noted in the Orient
existed at the same time at Mycenae, Thyrns, Argos, Attica and
Rome,--the heights being always occupied by the rulers, the foot-hills
by the nobles and the adjacent plains by the people.
By these few examples taken from the religious and civil architecture
of early civilization I have endeavored to show that class distinction
tends to express itself through the use of different housing levels,
the height of each group being directly proportional to the power
of its social division, thus giving a concrete expression to the
theoretical grades by which the human mind differentiates the social
status of the people who comprise any given group.