Ernest Babelon

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.

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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.

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Fig. 37.—Masonry at Khorsabad (after Place).

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.