Percy S. P. Handcock

THE architecture of a country is determined very largely by the materials with which nature has endowed that country; it is also influenced by the configuration of the country itself as well as by the climate whose effects it is the builder’s object to either regulate or counteract. The physical characteristics of the Mesopotamian Valley as also the climatic conditions which prevail there have already been under consideration, but it will not perhaps be unfitting to devote a few pages to a review of the materials which were used for building operations, before we proceed to discuss the ruins of the buildings themselves.

It has been already stated, that practically no stone at all is to be found in the low-lying and marshy country of Babylonia, hence it never assumed an important place in Babylonian architecture; any stone required, had to be quarried far away in the mountains and transported at great labour, in consequence of which it was only employed for exceptional purposes and in cases where the desire for permanent durability rendered it necessary. Accordingly the stone used was generally diorite, basalt, or some other hard stone of volcanic origin, contrasting strikingly with the softer stone utilized so freely by the Assyrians. Assyria on the other hand was more fortunate in this respect and afforded a very fair supply of limestone and alabaster which were used extensively by her sculptors and builders, though the clay so easily procurable all over the valley was the one indispensable element in the erection of temples, palaces, or houses in both countries. The supply of wood again was extremely scanty not only in Babylonia but also in Assyria, and any wood used for columns, lintels or thresholds was generally brought from Lebanon, Amanus, or some other distant place.

We thus see that the art of brick-building was almost forced upon the dwellers of Mesopotamia from the very necessity of the case.

The clay used for the purpose was by no means uniform either as regards its colour, or as regards its quality. Sometimes it is of a light yellow colour, sometimes it is almost black, while the clay from which other bricks are made is of a reddish hue. Those made of light yellow clay are the best from the point of view of durability. The bricks further vary both in size and shape according to the period to which they belong, so that it is often possible to provisionally assign a date to a building or the remains of a building by an examination of the style of brick employed. The type of brick characteristic of the early periods of Sumerian history is that known as the plano-convex48 type; thus the kiln-burnt bricks of which the storehouse of Ur-NinÂ, the first king of Lagash, was composed, are oblong and plano-convex, while each of them also bears the impression of a thumb-mark on the convex side.

But a yet earlier form of brick49 was found in the building underneath Ur-NinÂ’s storehouse: the bricks of which this building was composed were indeed plano-convex like those of Ur-NinÂ, but they were smaller, had no thumb- or finger-marks and were also unfortunately uninscribed.

At Mu?eyyer (Ur) Taylor came across a pavement made of plano-convex bricks, the antiquity of which was attested alike by the appearance of this type of brick and also by the depth below the surface at which the platform was found. This excavator discovered similar bricks at AbÛ Shahrein (Eridu), a further corroboration of the traditional antiquity of Ea’s once famous city. The excavations at other early sites have also yielded the same results; at FÂra (Shuruppak) the traditional scene of the Deluge, as well as at YÔkha, BismÂya, and in the pre-Sargonic strata at Nippur, the same style of bricks has been found.

But with the expansion of the Semites, culminating in the establishment of the empire of Shar-GÂni-sharri and his son NarÂm-Sin, the comparatively small, oblong and plano-convex brick fell into disuse, and gave way to a large square brick. Immediately beneath the crude-brick platform of Ur-Engur (circ. 2400 B.C.) at Nippur, part of the earlier work of NarÂm-Sin and Shar-GÂni-sharri was uncovered, the bricks used being no longer plano-convex and oblong, but flat and square, and measuring 20 x 20 x 3-1/2 inches; they are made of clay mixed with straw, and are at the same time well-dried and very hard; this type of brick was employed in all the buildings of these two kings.

The next period in the history of Babylonian brick-making is that belonging to the times of the second dynasty of Lagash and the first dynasty of Ur (i.e. circ. 2450 B.C.). The type of brick characteristic of this age resembles that of the preceding in regard to shape but not in regard to size. The bricks of Ur-Engur, king of Ur, and of Gudea, the most renowned ruler of the second dynasty of Lagash (circ. 2450 B.C.) are square like those of their Semitic predecessors, Shar-GÂni-sharri and NarÂm-Sin, but very much smaller, measuring a little over 12 x 12 inches, and this small square brick remained in use, with occasional slight variations, till the close of Mesopotamian history. The transition from the large brick used by the kings of Agade to the small brick in question was doubtless effected only gradually, for the bricks of Ur-bau, ruler of Lagash some time before Gudea, are larger than those of the latter king, but after the time of Gudea and Ur-Engur, the shape and size of the bricks became more or less stereotyped. The bricks of Ur-Engur himself vary somewhat from those of Gudea, thus the solid mass underlying the temple-tower at Nippur, which was constructed by Ur-Engur, is composed of bricks measuring only 9 × 6 × 3 inches, the arms of the causeway on the other hand are built of larger bricks measuring 14 × 14 × 6 inches. Kiln-burnt bricks were always used for the important parts of the building in Babylonia, the crude sun-dried bricks which as a rule formed the core of the terraced platforms, being revetted with a wall of burnt brick, or sometimes, in the case of Assyria with a supporting wall of stone. The reason of course for this lay in the inability of sun-dried bricks to resist damp, and their corresponding tendency to disintegrate. The bricks were as a rule carried on to the ground as soon as they were fairly dry and firm, and were laid while still soft.

Generally speaking the bricks bear the name of the king who caused the structure to be made, thus the majority of the bricks of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (604-561 B.C.) are inscribed:—“Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, restorer of the pyramid and tower, eldest son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, am I.” It is interesting to note that though the tiles on the western side of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace at Babylon bear the ordinary stamp of that king, those on the eastern side are stamped with a lion and an Aramaic inscription. Koldewey indeed says that there is no doubt that this part of the building was also erected by Nebuchadnezzar, as wall-tiles bearing the regular palace-inscription of the king have been found there. Prof. Euting however, from the forms of the Aramaic characters, would assign these Aramaic-inscribed bricks to the middle of the seventh century, i.e. about 650 B.C. None of the bricks found on the Kasr mound bear the stamp of any Assyrian kings, the latter apparently only having left their marks on the floor-bricks of E-sagila, the temple of Marduk. The characters were generally impressed with a stamp, though on both Assyrian and Babylonian bricks the inscription was sometimes engraved by hand. The stamps used were made of terra-cotta; a well-preserved specimen of a terra-cotta brick-stamp is that of NarÂm-Sin referred to above (cf. Fig. 4), while a terra-cotta brick-stamp of Shar-GÂni-sharri, the father of NarÂm-Sin, was discovered at Nippur, and one of the minor results of the expedition to BismÂya, directed by Harper, was the discovery of a number of clay brick-stamps. Many Assyrian and Babylonian bricks are glazed or enamelled and coloured in the most ornate fashion, and with the most striking pictures and designs, but an examination of these will naturally find its place in the chapter devoted to “Painting.”

Sometimes the architects of Babylonia contrived to adapt the clay employed in their building operations to decorative devices. Such was the case at Warka (Erech) where Loftus discovered a wall some thirty feet long, composed entirely of clay cones fixed in a cement made of mud and straw, and laid horizontally with their bases outwards. Some of these cones had been coloured red or black and were arranged to form various geometrical designs. They were sometimes inscribed, sometimes not. But clay cones were apparently not the only kind of cone used for architectural decoration, for in the course of his excavations at AbÛ Shahrein, Taylor50 discovered cones of limestone and marble, some of which had a “rim round the edge filled with copper”; these cones vary from four to ten inches in length, their diameter measuring from one to three inches.

MORTAR

The layers and courses of clay bricks of which the buildings in Mesopotamia were for the most part composed, were cemented together by mud in the earliest times; this clay-mud is generally distinguishable from the bricks which it unites by the difference of its colour. Mud-mortar has been found on some of the earliest sites and in some of the most ancient buildings, while in Assyria it appears to have been the regular form of cement used at all times. In the city of Babylon, strange to say, clay mortar appears to have been used instead of lime or asphalt in the late buildings of Sassanidian times. This mud-mortar consisted of clay mixed with water and perhaps a little straw, as was the case in the cone-wall at Warka,51 while sometimes reeds embedded in clay were laid between the bricks, as was the case at both Warka and Hammam, but at an extremely remote period the Babylonian architect began to avail himself of the rich supply of bitumen gratuitously yielded by the soil of his native land, for the purpose in question.

The most famous bituminous springs in Mesopotamia were those at ?it on the Euphrates. Their fame had reached Egypt as early as the time of the eighteenth dynasty, for Thothmes III brought bitumen thence to Egypt. Herodotus a millennium later—about 450 B.C.—alludes to ?it as famous for her bitumen, and subsequent writers make similar mention of the springs there. A good example of the early use of bitumen in Babylonia was found at AbÛ Shahrein, the site of ancient Eridu, where a very early building was excavated by Taylor, the antiquity of which was proved by the pre-Sargonic plano-convex bricks used in its construction, and these bricks were all laid in bitumen; the same was found to be the case in a building composed of finger-marked bricks at Ur (Mu?eyyer), all of which were embedded in bitumen.

The platform upon which Ur-NinÂ’s storehouse at TellÔ was erected consisted of three layers of plano-convex and finger-marked bricks, all set in bitumen, while in the building underneath that of Ur-NinÂ, bitumen was also freely used.52

In like manner at Nippur, the finger-marked bricks of which the city-gate was constructed were laid in bitumen, though the bricks composing the early arch found on this site were set in mud, probably an indication that at the time when the arch was built bitumen was not used; around the base of Ur-Engur’s ziggurat on the other hand there was a coating of bitumen, while the crude brick altar found by Haynes in the lowest stratum at Nippur had a rim of bitumen; but in later times it was supplemented by the more tenacious lime-mortar, though only partially was this the case, for even as late as Nebuchadnezzar’s time (604-561 B.C.) its practical utility as a preventive against the destructive forces of rain were still recognized, the burnt brick retaining walls of his palace at Babylon being actually laid in bitumen. In like manner the bricks composing the old fortification wall, are rendered adhesive by means of a lavish prodigality of asphalt, so adhesive in fact, that it is often very difficult to separate them. Fortunately the side bearing the stamped inscription has its face downwards and therefore is not in immediate contact with the asphalt from which it is separated by the layer of reeds and clay already alluded to.

In the later buildings at Babylon, however, lime-mortar is also used, the transition period being marked by the employment of both in one and the same building, and in point of fact Koldewey found that in the case of one of the walls of a building of Nebuchadnezzar, one half of the wall was cemented together by means of asphalt, while in the other half lime-mortar alone was used. But in the new castle which Nebuchadnezzar built for himself on the Kasr, the very finest materials were employed, the bricks being of a pale yellow colour and extremely hard, contrasting with the bricks used in his earlier buildings, which are of a reddish-brown colour and less durable, while in this new structure, pure white lime-mortar alone is used. Lime-mortar, as well as mud-cement and bitumen, was employed at Nippur, as also at Birs-NimrÛd (Borsippa), and the mortar used has such adhesive properties that the bricks can only be separated by breaking them, while at Mu?eyyer (Ur) a mortar composed of a mixture of lime and ashes was employed.

In Assyria on the other hand, mortar seems to have been used more sparingly; when stone was employed as a building material, generally speaking no cement of any kind was used, the stones being carefully dressed so as to permit of no interstices, as for example was found to be the case with the stone retaining-wall round the ziggurat at NimrÛd; when ordinary crude bricks were employed, they were laid in a sufficient state of moisture to render them adhesive; while when burnt brick was the material in question, the mortar adopted was a mixture of clay and water. Bitumen however was by no means unknown in Assyria, but it was used chiefly under pavements or the limestone floors of sewers, to prevent leakage or infiltration.

STONE

The use of stone in Babylonia, as a building accessory, although seldom as a fundamental material, dates from the most ancient Sumerian times. A very early example of the use of stone for definitely architectural purposes in Babylonia is afforded by the pavement upon which a building at Lagash, found under the structure of Ur-NinÂ, was erected. The pavement53 consists of slabs of limestone, three or four feet long, one and a half to two feet broad, and about six inches thick. The door-sockets, again, of some of the earliest rulers of Lagash have been brought to light, among which may be mentioned those of the illustrious Eannatum and Entemena, all being made of marble or some other hard stone, while in Eridu, one of the most ancient sites of civilization in the Euphrates Valley, stone seems to have been quite extensively used. The terraced artificial platform upon which the temple and city of Eridu were built was buttressed by a wall of sandstone, and the staircase which led up to the first stage of the ziggurat was made of polished marble slabs, which are now lying about casually on the mound; pieces of agate and alabaster were discovered, and granite was also employed there. Stone gate-sockets have been similarly found at Nippur and in the ruins of other early cities of Babylonia, while both the Semite NarÂm-Sin, and the Sumerian Gudea a little later, brought heavy blocks of diorite from Magan, or Sinai, though apparently for sculptural rather than for architectural purposes.

In the Neo-Babylonian era stone was employed to a greater extent: the procession pavement of the god Marduk at Babylon, discovered recently by the Germans, was formed of slabs of limestone, bearing an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, while Herodotus tells us that the bridge which then united the two banks of the Euphrates was made of “very large stones,”54 and according to the classical writers, Strabo and Diodorus, the famous hanging gardens of Babylon, which Koldewey would locate to the east of the palace, were supported by stone architraves. But the stone used only for exceptional purposes in Babylonia, was re-used time and again, the ruins being regarded as a quarry, and consequently the stone has for the most part disappeared entirely.

In Assyria, on the other hand, stone was easily procurable and therefore readily used, though not to the extent one would expect, the reason being that the Assyrian was not an inventor but an imitator of his predecessor, the Babylonian, who afforded him little or no example in the working of stone. Accordingly even in Assyria, stone was for the most part used only for pavements, plinths and the lining of walls: at times however it was also used for the retaining walls which enclosed an artificial mound. The blocks of stone used for this latter purpose were sometimes of colossal size, measuring even as much as 6 × 6 × 9 feet and weighing some tons. The principal kinds of stone employed by the Assyrian architects were limestone, of varying degrees of hardness, and alabaster, which latter is often found in Assyria itself a little below the surface of the soil. Alabaster is a sulphate of chalk, it is grey in colour, soft, and admits of a high polish, but it is brittle and deteriorates in course of time. At NimrÛd (Calah) some of the drainage channels were covered with large slabs of limestone, and the ziggurat of NimrÛd, of which only one storey remains, was faced with a massive stone revetment wall, while occasionally stone columns appear to have been used, and one part of a column composed of carved limestone, some forty inches high and including both the capital and the upper part of the shaft in one piece has been actually discovered. Layard further found four bases of columns made of limestone, on the northern side of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh (cf. Fig. 14). Sometimes the lintels of doors were made of stone; one such stone lintel was found by George Smith at the entrance to the hall in Sennacherib’s palace, while the sill or threshold generally, or at all events very frequently, consisted of alabaster or limestone. Similarly the floors of the more important rooms were formed of limestone-slabs.

The harder stones were notwithstanding sometimes employed in Assyria just as limestone was occasionally used in Babylonia, but as a general rule, in either case for sculptural rather than building purposes. The well-known black obelisk of Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.) already alluded to, was supposed to afford a good example of the use of volcanic stones in the northern country, but the material of which it is made is probably alabaster. A basalt statue of this same king was however brought to light by the German excavations at Ashur some few years ago, while the capital of a column found on the same site, belonging possibly to the time of Tiglath-Pileser I, gives us an illustration of the use of hard stones for purely architectural purposes by the Assyrians. It is uncertain from what quarter they obtained these harder stones, but basalt and other igneous rocks may be quarried in the valleys of the streams that poured their waters into the Tigris and Euphrates, and in the valley of the Khabour Layard informs us that he discovered many extinct volcanoes.

WOOD

Assyria afforded a better supply of wood than Babylonia, the latter country being as poor in wood as it is in stone. The only trees from which beams sufficiently long to be of any use could be obtained, were the poplar and the palm tree. Wood being more perishable than either clay or stone, we naturally do not expect to find the same amount of material evidence of its usage; sufficient however has survived the ravages of time to establish the certainty of its usage in Mesopotamia as a building material from the earliest to the latest times. Thus for example at Nippur, Peters found charred beams of palm-wood which evidently had at one time formed the roof of the corridor in which it was discovered; pieces of tamarisk were in like manner found upon the brick threshold of a doorway, which probably represented all that remained of the doors and door-posts. Similarly at Lagash not far from Ur-NinÂ’s storehouse were found the charred remains of pillars made of cedar-wood, which doubtless at one time supported a portico made of the same material, while Ur-Nin himself records that he fetched wood from the mountains, as did his descendants of later days. In like manner the roof of a temple erected by Enannatum I a successor of Ur-Nin was constructed of cedar-wood. So too at Mu?eyyer (Ur), large quantities of charred wood were discovered,55 while at AbÛ Shahrein (Eridu), the casement wall of the ziggurat is studded with square holes—three inches square, which are filled with wood.56 After the establishment of Babylonian sovereignty over the land of Amurru, (i.e. Syria and Palestine) by Shar-GÂni-sharri and NarÂm-Sin, the kings of Babylonia regularly obtained cedar-wood from the Lebanon, as did the early kings of Egypt. In a room at Nippur used apparently for storing unbaked tablets in the time of Gimil-Sin (c. 2350 B.C.) wooden shelves had seemingly been used for the purpose, while the roof of the famous castle at Babylon, rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar, was made of cedar-wood, as also were the doors, and the portal-like entrance of one of the buildings at Babylon excavated by Koldewey was roofed throughout with a ceiling of timber.

Of the use of wood in Assyria, the wall reliefs would alone afford ample evidence, for parts of some of the structures there encountered could only possibly have been made of wood. Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.) in commemorating his reconstruction of the temple of Anu and Adad at Ashur, says that he roofed it over with beams of cedar, and those of the larger rooms of the palaces which were not vaulted must have been roofed with wood, because there is no evidence of the existence of slabs of stone of sufficient size to have effected the purpose, and large flat brick roofs would be out of the question. In like manner Tiglath-Pileser III states that he made a palace of cedar-wood57 while Esarhaddon says that the doors of one of the palaces which he erected for himself were made of cypress-wood and were covered with silver and copper,58 while in another passage he states that in his building operations at Babylon he used oaks, terebinths and palms. At Khorsabad, Place further found fragments of cedar-beams which had been clearly used for architectural purposes, and probably formed part of the lintels of the doorways in which they were found; so too Layard in the course of his excavations found the charred remains of wood together with a beam of cedar-wood, all of which are now in the British Museum. The scantiness of the remains of wood thus used is adequately accounted for by the destructibility of that material.

METAL

Metal can hardly be said to have been used for purely architectural purposes at all, and when employed seems rather to have been added for the adornment of the more conspicuous parts of the building, than used as an integral part of the structure. There are, however, one or two exceptions to this generalization. The sills were sometimes made of metal in the more luxurious buildings, and a bronze sill measuring 60 × 20 × 3-1/2 inches, with an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar has actually come to light, and is now in the British Museum, while another object of a singularly unique character, consisting of a bronze gate-socket set in lead, has similarly found its way to that famous institution. Herodotus furthermore tells us in his account of Babylon that the walls had a hundred gates “all of bronze; their jambs and lintels were of the same material.” Some of the bas-reliefs also exhibit structures, parts of which must seemingly have been made of metal: the royal pavilion carved on the tablet from AbÛ Habba (Sippar) for example (cf. Pl. XIV) is provided with a curved back wall which at the same time is bent right over so as to form a roof; this wall and roof may indeed have been constructed of wood, but metal would clearly have adapted itself the more easily to such a form. Of other minor building materials, such as tools, and nails which played a subsidiary part in Mesopotamian architecture, we know comparatively little, though a number of nails have been recovered from different sites.

TEMPLES

It would be quite impossible to give an account of all the temples and palaces in Mesopotamia, excavated during the last sixty years, we must therefore confine ourselves to a brief description of a few of the better explored buildings, which may with reserve be regarded as typical. The temples have not weathered the deteriorating effects of time and climate so well as the palaces, the reason for which is to be found in the fact that, generally speaking, the object of the temple-builder was so far as possible to erect a structure whose top should metaphorically “reach unto heaven,” whereas the culminating glory of palaces lay not in the height to which they were reared but in the extent of ground which they covered.

PLATE X

The ruined mounds of Nippur

As to the general plan of Sumerian temples we are still in a state of ignorance, for on the earliest sites of Babylonian occupation, few important buildings have been unearthed. The best preserved and most thoroughly explored temple in Southern Babylonia is that of En-lil at Nippur. A Babylonian plan of this once famous shrine, drawn on a clay tablet and probably belonging to the first half of the second millennium B.C. was discovered by Haynes in the course of his excavations, and has been of no small assistance in determining the general character of this Babylonian temple in its later reconstructed state, while it may be in reality a copy of an earlier plan,59 as it accords so well with the general conclusions to be drawn as to the configuration of the temple in the time of Shar-GÂni-sharri and NÂram-Sin, both of whom, and especially the latter, did much in the way of repairing this ancient fane.

The most prominent feature in connection with the temple of Nippur as revealed by the excavations, is the ziggurat, or stage-tower erected by Ur-Engur, king of Ur (circ. 2400 B.C.). The ruined mounds of Nuffar, or Niffer (cf. Pl. X), are situated on the eastern side of the Shatt-en-NÎl canal which at one time formed a line of communication between the Persian Gulf and the city of Babylon. The mounds in question, the principal of which marks the site of Ur-Engur’s ziggurat, were excavated by Peters, Harper, Haynes and Hilprecht, under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, between the years 1889 and 1900. The tower surmounts an artificial platform measuring roughly 192 × 127 feet, and in accordance with the usual Babylonian principle of orientation, has its four corners facing the cardinal points of the compass. The ziggurat apparently only had three stages in contradistinction to the seven-staged tower characteristic of the Babylonian and Assyrian temples of later days, though Gudea’s temple of E-pa erected in honour of his god Nin-girsu was seven-zoned, which probably means that it was a seven-staged tower. The ziggurat at Mu?eyyer60 (Ur) excavated by Taylor similarly appears to have been three-storied, or possibly only two-storied. The lower storey, protected with a wall of burnt brick four feet in thickness, was further strengthened with buttresses, though it should be mentioned that the so-called “buttresses” of the stage towers of Babylonia and Assyria are in the majority of cases water-conduits for draining the upper platforms. The second storey, the base of which is connected with the lower storey by means of a staircase three yards broad, is composed of bricks entirely different to those of the lower storey, those of the lower storey being 11-1/4 × 11-1/4 × 2-1/4 inches, and bearing a small stamp 3-1/4 inches square, while those of the second are 13 × 13 × 3 inches, the stamp measuring 8 × 4 inches. The bricks of the first storey were laid in bitumen, while those of the second—the bricks on the northern side being excepted—are set in a mortar consisting of lime and ashes. The ascent to the summit of the second storey was effected by means of an inclined pathway: from which facts it would appear that the two stories were not built at the same time. The ziggurat at AbÛ Shahrein,61 also excavated by Taylor, is about seventy feet high, and like that at Mu?eyyer is cased with a wall of burnt brick. Here, too, the top of the first storey is reached by means of a staircase, fifteen feet broad, access to the summit of the second storey being gained by an inclined road as at Mu?eyyer.

The approach to En-lil’s ziggurat at Nippur is on the south-east side, and is marked by two walls of burnt brick, some ten or more feet high and over fifty-two feet long, a space of about twenty-three feet separating the two walls from each other, while the causeway itself which led up to the ziggurat was formed of crude bricks. The whole of the temple enclosure was surrounded by a massive wall, and some thirty courses of the bricks which composed it, still remain. Below the crude-brick platform upon which the tower was erected, another pavement of much finer construction, made of large well-burnt bricks nearly all of which were inscribed with the stamps of Shar-GÂni-sharri or NarÂm-Sin, was discovered. Directly to the south-east of the ziggurat, a large chamber about thirty-six feet long, over eleven feet wide and some eight feet high was found, the floor of which rested on the platform of NarÂm-Sin. The inscribed bricks proved that this chamber, like the ziggurat itself was built by Ur-Engur. Immediately below it, a second chamber of the same kind was discovered, in which was found a brick stamp of Shar-GÂni-sharri: around the walls of this chamber ran a narrow shelf on which some tablets are said to have been found. Haynes excavated right down to the virgin-soil, and states that he discovered at least two temples below the pavement of NarÂm-Sin; in the lowest stratum an altar of crude brick measuring 13 × 8 feet is said to have been found, on which there was a large deposit of white ashes. Around the “altar” there was a low wall surrounding the sacred enclosure, on the outside of which two clay vases some twenty-five inches high, and decorated with a rope-pattern were brought to light. On the south-east of the “altar” is a crude-brick platform nearly twenty-three feet square and over nine and a half feet thick. Around the base of this, Haynes informs us that he found a number of water-vents, while beneath this solid mass, he found a drain running underneath the platform, in the roof of which a true keystone arch was discovered. This arch was found about twenty-three feet below the pavement of Ur-Engur and more than fourteen and a half feet below the platform of NarÂm-Sin. Unfortunately the lowest strata in the mound have been so much disturbed, and the buildings so ruthlessly pillaged, that it is impossible to dogmatize about the dates of all that the excavations have revealed.

With regard to the ziggurat itself, the lowest of its three stages would appear to have been some twenty and a half feet high: the slope of the sides upwards is about one in four, and the second terrace is set back some thirteen and a half feet from the surface of the one below. The lower terrace is protected with burnt brick on the south-east side, while on all the other sides the foundation is of burnt brick, four courses high and eight courses wide, surmounted by crude bricks covered with a plaster consisting of clay and chopped straw, which helped to preserve the crude brickwork. In the centre of each of these three sides there was a water-conduit by which the upper parts of the ziggurat were drained (cf. Pl. XI); the conduit was made of burnt bricks, and was ten and a half feet in depth and three and a half feet span. Around the base of the ziggurat, was a coating of bitumen which sloped outwards, with gutters to drain off the water, and thus preserve the crude bricks from dissolution.

From this brief description of the architectural remains discovered at Nippur, it will be seen at once, that, though the information afforded is of supreme importance and of the utmost value, we are still at a loss as to the general appearance of an early Babylonian temple, the temple-tower of the later Ur-Engur of course being excepted. A restoration of the temple as it probably appeared in the days of Ur-Engur has been made by Hilprecht and Fisher, and is reproduced by their kind permission in Fig. 6.

Of the temple erected by Gudea to the honour and glory of his god Nin-girsu, we know comparatively little beyond what he tells us, but from his account, it was evidently very elaborate, for it contained chambers for the priests, treasure-houses, granaries, and enclosures for the various sacrificial victims. In later times there appear to have been two general types of temple in vogue in Babylonia, the one having a staged tower as its characteristic feature, the other being distinguished by its absence. Of the latter type, we have a good example in the temple of Nin-makh at Babylon, excavated by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. The goddess Nin-makh had been venerated as early as the first dynasty of Lagash, for in Entemena’s time temples were already erected in her honour. Her temple at Babylon was made chiefly of sun-dried bricks, the four corners being oriented towards the four points of the compass as usual: it comprised a courtyard, as well as a number of rooms some of which were painted, and traces of white decoration were still visible. Apparently a vestibule led into a courtyard or hall, around which were situated various rooms and halls, and into which they also opened. The inner courtyard offers a point of contrast with the Assyrian temple at NimrÛd, which has no such interior hall. Near the ruins of this temple was the famous Ishtar-gate, the sides of which were formed of massive walls which were found still preserved to the height of thirty-nine feet. These walls were decorated with reliefs on enamelled bricks representing animals of both normal and abnormal character. There were apparently at least eleven rows of these reliefs portraying bulls or dragons one above the other.

But of all Babylonian temples, that of E-temen-an-ki built by Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon upon the site of an ancient shrine, is by far the most famous. This temple is called by Herodotus (I, 181) the temple of Belus, and it was undoubtedly a very magnificent building both in point of size as well as in point of splendour. Herodotus in his description states that it was formed of a solid block of masonry, upon which was superimposed another block of smaller size, and so on till there were finally eight blocks in all, the first or lowest however, was simply the foundation of the whole ziggurat, and is not to be regarded as a “stage” at all; it was accordingly a perfect seven-staged tower, the topmost block of which supported a shrine. The summit was reached by means of an ascent going round the structure. According to the late George Smith, whose estimates were based on a Babylonian description contained in a tablet at one time in his possession, the height was 300 feet, the sides of its square base being of the same dimensions; the second storey measured 260 feet square and its height was 60 feet. The third, fourth and fifth storeys were each 20 feet high, and measured 200, 170 and 140 feet square respectively. The variation in height of the different stages forms a point of contrast with the regularity exhibited by the ziggurat at Khorsabad, of which the remains of four stages are still to be seen. Concerning the sixth stage the Babylonian tablet was apparently silent, while the top storey supporting the sanctuary of the god was stated to have measured 80 × 70 feet, and to have been 50 feet high. The seven stages without doubt at one time shone with the seven planetary colours, as was the case with the seven-staged tower at Khorsabad, on the lower remaining stages of which the colours were still found, the order of the colours being, white for the lowest stage, black for the next, while the succeeding storeys were painted blue, yellow, silver, and gold. The ziggurat was surrounded by an enclosure, some 400 yards square, the ingress and egress to which was by means of bronze gates. A double-winged building on the west, presumably the shrine of the god, contained a couch of gold and a throne with steps also of gold, while the temple further contained an image of the god himself, made of solid gold. The Babylonian account informs us that the temple comprised two oblong courts, one within the other, the building as a whole consisting in a series of sanctuaries, although of course the most conspicuous and therefore perhaps the most important element in its composition, was the ziggurat.

But Nebuchadnezzar’s building operations were not confined to the erection of a temple in honour of Belus: he rebuilt or restored the great walls of the city of Babylon, Imgur-BÊl and Nimitti-BÊl, he constructed temples for Shamash the Sun-god at Sippar and Larsa, both of which cities had been ancient centres of the cult of this god, while in Babylon he erected a temple to the goddess Nin-makh. At Borsippa (Birs-NimrÛd), he bestowed much attention and care upon the ancient shrine of Nebo, and his work on this site has been identified by some scholars with the magnificent temple described above, to which Herodotus refers at such length, though as Hommel and Pinches both point out, the distance of Borsippa from Babylon is rather against the identification. On the other hand at Borsippa there are the remains of what once may well have been the magnificent temple in question, while at the city of Babylon itself no such remains are to be seen; and in regard to the objection raised to the identification of these remains with the famous temple of Belus on the ground that Borsippa was too far distant, it must be recollected that we do not really know how far the city extended, whether in fact it may not have even included Borsippa within its boundaries, for, according to Herodotus, the circuit of the city measured some fifty-six miles. Nebuchadnezzar’s own account of his architectural achievements is inscribed on a number of barrel-shaped clay cylinders and on the well-known East India House Inscription.

The Assyrian temples seem for the most part to have conformed to the same general type as that prevalent in Babylonia. One of the earliest explored, and at present perhaps the most famous, is that excavated by Layard at NimrÛd (Calah).62 It consisted in an outer courtyard, from which the worshipper entered into a vestibule measuring 46 feet by 19 feet,63 beyond which there was a side chamber and a hall 47 feet long and 31 feet broad, ending in a recess paved with a huge alabaster slab, 21 feet long, 16 feet 7 inches broad and 1 foot 1 inch thick, in which was probably set the image of the god; many stone slabs of a religious character were found within, while upon the stone pavement a history of the reign of Ashur-na?ir-pal was inscribed. The main entrance was decorated and protected with winged human-headed lions 16-1/2 feet high and 15 feet long, whose rÔle of guardianship at the portals of the king’s palace is thus exchanged for a yet higher and more exalted position of trust, while the entrance into the side room was covered with reliefs portraying the god in the act of expelling a malicious demon. The side entrance was thirty feet to the right of the main entrance, and the chamber into which it led was connected by two corridors with the vestibule and the main hall. It was to the right of this smaller entrance that the famous arch-topped monolith of Ashur-na?ir-pal was discovered (cf. Pl. III). A short distance from the building just described, and on the very edge of the artificial platform, another temple was discovered. The entrance was guarded by two colossal lions (cf. Pl. XXVI), 8 feet high and 13 feet long, and the gateway which was about 8 feet wide was paved with one inscribed slab. In front of the lions were two altars similar to the altar in the Khorsabad relief reproduced in Fig. 14, C. The gateway led into a room 57 feet long and 25 feet broad, ending in a recess paved with an enormous alabaster slab inscribed on both sides and measuring 19-1/2 feet by 12 feet. It was in this temple that the statue of Ashur-na?ir-pal was discovered (cf. Pl. XXIV).

The resemblance which the staged towers of Mesopotamia bear to the pyramids of Egypt naturally led to an interrogation as to whether they resembled them also in regard to the use to which they were put. Accordingly Layard endeavoured to answer the question, which had already been categorically answered by Ctesias and Ovid, by making cuttings in a ziggurat at NimrÛd with a view to ascertaining whether they contained voids in which the bodies of kings or heroes might have at one time been deposited, whether in fact the ziggurats were primarily tombs like the pyramids of Mi?raim. The possibility of such being the case was proved by the discovery of a vault, on a level with the platform itself, measuring 100 feet in length, 6 feet in breadth and 12 feet in height, though if this had actually been the last resting-place of a departed king, it had been completely rifled. Of the ziggurat in question, but one storey remained, protected by a massive facing of stone, and about twenty feet high; the stones seem to have been laid together without any mortar, as was so often the case in Assyrian masonry.

Another excellent example of an Assyrian temple is the Anu-Adad temple at Ashur, recently excavated by the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft. The code of Khammurabi shows that this city was in existence at all events as early as his time, and the German excavations have proved that it did not lose its importance when the seat of government was removed thence to Calah (NimrÛd) about 1300 B.C., but on the contrary continued to be a royal city and maintained its importance till the seventh century B.C., and possibly later.

The temple of Anu-Adad was founded by Ashur-resh-ishi (circ. 1140 B.C.). It consisted of a rectangular terrace to which access was gained by a doorway flanked by towers: beneath the terrace there were a number of rooms. The two temple-towers were separated from each other by a long passage, on each side of which were four small rooms surrounding a large chamber in the middle, which may well have been the sanctuary. One of these large chambers was dedicated to Anu, and the other to Adad. The two temple-towers were according to Andrae four-staged ziggurats, and no doubt upon the topmost storey there was a shrine, as in the temple of Belus at Babylon. Many of the bricks composing the towers were inscribed as was nearly always the case. Tiglath-Pileser I (1100 B.C.) the son and successor of Ashur-resh-ishi had occasion to repair or rebuild this temple, and he records that he raised its towers to heaven and made firm its battlements with baked brick.64 His account reads as follows:—

“In the beginning of my government Anu and Adad, the great gods, my lords, who love my priestly dignity, demanded of me the restoration of this their sacred dwelling. I made bricks, and I cleared the ground, until I reached the artificial flat terrace upon which the old temple had been built. I laid its foundation upon the solid rock and incased the whole place with brick like a fireplace, overlaid on it a layer of fifty bricks in depth, and built upon this the foundations of the Temple of Anu and Adad of large square stones. I built it from foundation to roof larger and grander than before, and erected also two great temple towers, fitting ornaments of their great divinities. The splendid temple, a brilliant and magnificent dwelling, the habitation of their joys, the house for their delight, shining as bright as the stars on heaven’s firmament and richly decorated with ornaments through the skill of my artists, I planned, devised and thought out, built and completed. I made its interior brilliant like the dome of the heavens; decorated its walls, like the splendour of the rising stars, and made it grand with resplendent brilliancy. I reared its temple towers to heaven and completed its roof with burned brick; located therein the upper terrace containing the chambers of their great divinities; and led into its interior Anu and Adad, the great gods, and made them dwell in this their lofty home, thus gladdening the heart of their great divinities. I also cleared the site of the treasure-house of Adad, my lord, which the same Shamshi-Adad, priest of Ashur, son of Ishme-Dagan, likewise priest of Ashur, had built and which had fallen into decay and ruins, and rebuilt it from foundation to roof with burned brick, making it more beautiful and much firmer than before. I slaughtered clean animals therein as a sacrifice to Adad, my lord.”

This same king, with the prescience characteristic of Assyrian monarchs, prays that, in the event of the building falling into disrepair, a future king may restore them, and he further begs that such king may anoint his own inscribed tablets and his foundation-cylinders with oil. His prayer was justified by after events, for in Shalmaneser II’s (860-825 B.C.) time, the temple had already suffered from the effects of time and climate, and that king consequently rebuilt it throughout. Shalmaneser’s reconstruction was not so aspiring in its dimensions as that of Ashur-resh-ishi, the original founder of the temple. He erected two temple-towers (cf. Fig. 7) parallel to those of his predecessor, differing however from those of Ashur-resh-ishi, according to Andrae, in being panelled instead of plain, as was the case with the ziggurat (the so-called “Observatory”) at Khorsabad and the ziggurat of Belus at Babylon. But Shalmaneser was not the last king to whom was accorded the privilege of repairing this ancient fane: Sargon 722-705( B.C.) the successor of Shalmaneser IV, and the immediate predecessor of Sennacherib, also found occasion to devote himself to this work of piety, and in the courtyard of Shalmaneser II, the pavement-tiles nearly all bear the name of Sargon, a permanent testimony to his sense of religious obligation in this matter. The unique feature about this temple is its double ownership.

Another temple recently excavated at Ashur by Koldewey and Andrae, is the temple erected by Sin-shar-ishkun in honour of the god Nebo. Sin-shar-ishkun was the last king of Assyria and reigned about 615 B.C. This temple, which comprised a considerable number of rooms of various shapes and sizes, was separated into two main divisions, both of which consisted in a group of apartments leading into a main court, the two courts being connected with each other. Access to the temple from outside was gained through a door and vestibule leading into the northern court, though possibly the southern court with which the latter is connected at one time had a similar entrance.

The southern court measures over ninety feet in length and about thirty-seven feet in breadth, and is surrounded by rooms on its southern, eastern and northern sides, while on the northern side it is connected with the northern court. But it is on the western side of this southern court that the main temple rooms are located. Thanks to the excellent state of preservation in which the brickwork foundation of the walls was found, the excavators were able to determine the ground-plan of two parallel series of rooms, to each of which access from the court was gained by an entrance-gate provided with a tower; both the northern and southern series of rooms contained first of all a broad room which communicated with a long room, at the extreme end of which was a recess for the statue of the god. The recess at the end of the long room in the northern series is so well preserved that the general plan of its reconstruction is quite certain. The limestone paved pedestal in the recess was ascended by a small double flight of low steps, the steps being similarly paved with limestone and numbering four. All these rooms including the southern and western corridors and the southern court were paved with brickwork, some of the bricks bearing the building inscription of Sin-shar-ish-kun, and the bricks in both the southern and the northern broad rooms were inscribed “temple of Nebo,” thereby proving that this whole part of the building belonged to the temple of that god, and that his temple was thus double in character.

Sin-shar-ishkun had evidently not been above utilizing the building materials of his predecessors, for one of the door-sockets bears the name of Ashur-na?ir-pal, while among other inscribed objects discovered were fragments of hollow terra-cotta cylinders and prisms as well as clay cones bearing an inscription of Sin-shar-ishkun. The ground-plan of the southern division of this temple of Nebo corresponds in all essential particulars to that of the normal Assyrian temple, of which the outstanding characteristics—apart from the ziggurat—were the broad-room, the hall with a recess for the god’s statue, a group of surrounding rooms and a corridor.

The most famous temple at Ashur was that of the god Ashur himself, but unfortunately it is badly preserved, and is consequently of less archÆological importance than the Anu-Adad temple or the temple of Nebo. One point of interest about the ancient temple of Ashur, is that the rooms appear to have been broad rather than long. In the oldest part of the building, an alabaster block65 bearing an inscription of twenty-four lines written in archaic characters was discovered. The characters somewhat resemble those found in Irishum’s inscriptions and are similar to the characters used in early Babylonian inscriptions, while like them, they read longitudinally and not laterally, but the lines run from left to right instead of from right to left, and in this they resemble a few inscriptions found at TellÔ.66 This alabaster block is possibly the oldest Assyrian inscription as yet brought to light. In the fore-court of this same temple, some fragments of a diorite sculpture with small figures similar to those of the Khammurabi period were found.

The best-preserved ziggurat in Mesopotamia is that which was discovered at Khorsabad; four stages of this tower still remain, and the colours with which they were painted are yet visible. It is in close proximity to though not in immediate connection with the group of buildings formerly regarded as the harem of the palace, but recently shown by Koldewey67 to be in reality a group of temples (cf. Fig. 24 B). The argument upon which the harem-theory was based was the fact that this block of buildings is separate from the palace, but this argument could be used with even greater force in support of the temple theory, while its proximity to the ziggurat, and the general correspondence in form and shape of the several buildings which it comprises, to the normal Assyrian temple as revealed by the excavations, makes Koldewey’s contention a practical certainty. Furthermore, though the ziggurat, as is the case at Borsippa, is not connected with the theoretical “temple-complex,” there seems to be no doubt they belong to each other as there is no room elsewhere in the neighbourhood for a temple proper, and the adjacent parts of the palace were certainly used for secular and not religious purposes. The block would appear to contain three temples the entrance to each of which was through a central court; the temples consisted in a broad-room or vestibule, a long-room or hall at the end of which was another room—presumably the sanctuary where the statue of the god was enshrined. The entrance to the sanctuary from the hall was through a broad opening and up some stairs.

In addition to these salient parts of the building there were various subordinate rooms, which in one temple flanked the right side, in another the left, and in the third both sides of the main hall, these rooms being connected in one case with the broad-room, the hall and the sanctuary, in the second with the hall and sanctuary, and in the third with the hall only. Sometimes they further have surrounding corridors; it will be thus seen that though they show considerable variation among themselves, they exhibit the same general type, a type totally different from that to which the Assyrian palaces and houses conform, the general shape of which was broad rather than long.

But in spite of the general similarity of Assyrian temples, the earlier buildings differ from those of later date in at least one important respect; in the former the sanctuary is simply a deep niche in the back wall of the main long-room or hall, while in the later temples of Sargon, the niche has been developed into a special sanctuary chamber.

It has been already demonstrated that the ziggurats in Mesopotamia did not by any means all conform to the same plan; not only did the number of their stages vary however, but occasionally their shape also. As a rule they were square, or at all events rectangular, but the ziggurat excavated at El Hibba by the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft proved to be an exception to this general rule. The tower in question is circular in form, and comprises two stages; it is not built on an artificial mound, but on the natural soil, and is still standing to the height of twenty-four feet. The diameter of the first storey68 is over four hundred feet, while that of the upper storey is only a little over three hundred feet. The last-named is protected with a casement-wall of burnt bricks laid in bitumen, and the upper surfaces of both stories were coated with the same material in order to protect them from the disintegrating effects of the rain. The structure was drained by means of canals made of burnt bricks, which served the further purpose of strengthening the lower storey, and acted in fact as a buttress. A number of clay cones or nails were found on the surface of the upper storey, similar to those found at the foot of the Nippur ziggurat, but none of them apparently bore any inscription.

PALACES

Other buildings in Babylonia of a more secular character have been preserved in a more satisfactory state than those specifically dedicated to the gods, but the royal palaces themselves have for the most part undergone such a course of reconstruction that it is very difficult to determine the precise form which the original building assumed. Ur-Nin has bequeathed to us the remains of an elaborate building which he erected at his royal city Lagash, but it appears to be a storehouse rather than an integral part of a palace; Ur-bau and Gudea some centuries later have also left unmistakable signs of their building activity at this famous city of the past. In the course of the excavation of a large palace in one of the ruined mounds of TellÔ, many bricks inscribed with the name of Gudea were found, and this discovery not unnaturally led to the hasty conclusion that this elaborate building so wonderfully preserved, was actually the royal residence of this long deceased ruler, but a closer investigation revealed the presence of other bricks bearing the name of one, Hadadnadinakhe, in both Greek and AramÆan characters, thereby proving conclusively that the building in question belonged to the Parthian period and could not be assigned to a date earlier than the latter half of the second century B.C. The bricks belonging to Gudea’s early building had been re-used as material for this later structure, a practice to which recourse was frequently had in Mesopotamia. Parts however of Gudea’s early building were actually incorporated in the Parthian palace, the best preserved of which are a gateway (cf. Pl. V) and a portion of a tower, while underneath one corner of the palace, part of a wall erected by Ur-bau, one of Gudea’s immediate predecessors, was discovered.

Another palace of great fame was that of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, known as the El-?asr (cf. p. 69). This palace has been excavated by Koldewey and Andrae. The outer wall was made of bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, and was some 23-1/2 feet thick, the inner wall also made of brick being over 44 feet thick, while the space between the two walls, nearly 70 feet, was filled in with sand and other material, the total thickness thus being nearly 136-1/2 feet. The burnt bricks of which the retaining walls were composed were laid in asphalt and are so compactly joined that it is impossible to separate them into their layers. The ?asr mound, which represents a new suburb of the city of Babylon itself, has revealed nothing earlier than the seventh century. Ashur-bani-pal (668-626 B.C.) built a temple here which has been duly excavated, but Nebuchadnezzar’s palace is the principal building which has been discovered on this famous site. Before the time of Nebuchadnezzar there had seemingly been a palace here, which had undergone a course of reconstruction at the hands of Nabopolassar (625-604 B.C.) the founder of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, but it subsequently suffered grievously from an inundation of the Euphrates, and was accordingly repaired and enlarged by Nebuchadnezzar who rebuilt it with burnt brick; so enduring was his work that the lower portions of it have remained in position till our own day.

The interior of the palace consisted in a great number of rooms arranged around courtyards. The large hall, situated on the south of the main court, had a niche in its southern wall and was further provided with three doors in its northern wall, where traces were also to be found of what may have been at one time a colonnade. The roof of the palace was made of cedar-wood, as were also the doors, which latter were covered with bronze, just as was the case with the famous gates at BalÂwÂt (cf. Fig. 43). The thresholds were made of the same metal, as also were the steps in the temple E-zida at Borsippa, one of which has come down to us and bears this king’s name, while gold, silver and precious stones of various kinds were used with an unsparing prodigality in the decoration of the royal residence.

Nebuchadnezzar further erected another building on the northern side of the wall, which was apparently a fortress, and was connected with the palace. According to the India House Inscription, and the statement of Berosus the Babylonian historian (about 300 B.C.) whose history unfortunately is lost, but from which extracts have been handed down to us by Josephus, this building was completed in the incredibly short period of fifteen days.

Assyrian palaces are however in a better state of preservation than those of Babylonia, and afford more material for the study of Mesopotamian architecture. First and foremost of these must be mentioned that built by Sargon (722-705 B.C.) at Khorsabad (cf. Fig. 8). The palace in question was built upon an artificial mound, like most of the important edifices in Babylonia and Assyria, these mounds serving a more practical purpose in Southern Mesopotamia, as by their means the buildings themselves were thus elevated beyond the reach of the waters of the inundating Euphrates. The mounds, sometimes formed of a mass of crude brick, sometimes of sand, gravel and other material, were kept together and protected by a casement wall of either burnt brick or stone. The revetment-walls at Khorsabad, which were formed of blocks of stone weighing sometimes as much as twenty-three tons and measuring 6 × 6 × 9 feet, gradually become thinner towards the top. The inner face of this stone wall in immediate contact with the crude brick mass, was left rough, which added to the general coherency of the whole. The total height of the wall at Khorsabad was some 60 feet, the foundations measuring 9 feet, and the retaining wall 46 feet, a parapet of 5 feet making up the total of 60 feet. When the roof was flat, it seems to have generally been surmounted by a parapet the top of which was crenelated. Nearly all the buildings portrayed on Assyrian bas-reliefs exhibit this crenelation, which was apparently a peculiar characteristic of Mesopotamian architecture, and indeed so popular did this style of arrangement become in later times, that even the tops of altars and stelÆ were sometimes crenelated (cf. Fig. 14, C). Crenelated buildings are however not found in Babylonia till the time of Gudea and the dynasty of Ur (circ. 2450 B.C.). The foundation-mound upon which the brick town-wall of DÛr-sharrukÎn (Khorsabad) was built was similarly faced with stone, the mound itself consisting of stones and rubble, but inside the palace, stone was only used for lining the walls, for the flooring of the more important rooms, and for the shafts, capitals and bases of columns, and other architectural accessories, the main body of the edifice being built entirely of brick. The outer walls of buildings were as a rule fortified with “buttresses,” made of stronger and more durable material than the walls themselves, while apparently the only foundations were the artificial mounds upon which the buildings were constructed. Unfortunately but little is known as to the internal arrangements of the buildings, and we are in considerable doubt even regarding the manner in which the various rooms were roofed.

The rooms in Sargon’s palace are nearly all rectangular in shape, sometimes square, but generally very long in proportion to their breadth. The walls of the rooms were phenomenally thick and vary from twelve to twenty-eight feet. The roofs of these long chambers must have either been vaulted, or else constructed of timber-beams, though the former would have been the more serviceable in a climate characterized by extreme heat on the one hand and extreme cold on the other, for the thick vaulting would alike avert the scorching rays of the summer’s sun and the penetrating cold of a rigorous winter, while the discovery of an enormous quantity of broken bricks, dÉbris and rubble, and the corresponding absence of any trace of wood in the excavated rooms supports the theory that the roofs were made of clay rather than of wood; and lastly, the only wood easily procurable would seemingly have been quite inadequate to support the strain of a superimposed flat roof of mud. Victor Place furthermore actually discovered the remains of vaults which had collapsed, while the extensive use of the arch both in the city walls of Khorsabad as well as in the drainage of the palace furnishes an additional argument and increases the probability of the theory yet the more. The disappearance of any trace of wood in the rooms themselves might have been explained by the frailty and non-enduring character of that material, but near the doorways, which obviously could not have been formed of clay, or stone, fragments of wood as well as door panels are said to have been found, and without doubt, had the ceilings of the rooms been made of wood also, similar evidence of the fact would be forthcoming. Place further alludes to the discovery of rollers made of limestone in some of the chambers: these rollers may have been used to flatten and solidify the pisÉ-roofs after a downpour of rain, and thereby been the means of preventing the dissolution and general collapse of this integral part of the structure. But these clay roofs however unsatisfactory they may have been in days gone by from the architectural standpoint, have proved of incalculable value to the archÆologist of to-day, for to the softness of the material of which they were composed is due the perfect preservation of the sculptures and statues which they were destined to entomb for so long a period.

As already mentioned, the partition-walls of the rooms exhibit the same extraordinary solidity noticeable, alike in the outer walls of the palace and in those of the city, the thinnest being some ten feet thick. The massiveness of these partition walls bears out the theory that the roofs were not formed of wooden beams but of clay vaulting, and is thus an additional piece of evidence to that afforded by the absence of any trace of wood in the chambers themselves on the one hand and the discovery of fragments of wood in the doorways on the other; for the only available explanation and general raison d’Être of such thick interior walls is that vaulted roofs made of soft clay could only be supported by walls of more than ordinary solidity. Doubtless the vaulted roofing was also a determining factor in the shape and general contour which the rooms assumed, and it is to the dearth of wood suitable for building purposes, and the consequent use of clay for roofing as well as for other parts of the structure that we are to ascribe the narrowness of most of the chambers, which in truth resemble galleries more than halls or rooms.

It must not however be supposed that all the rooms in Sargon’s palace or in the palaces of other Assyrian kings were one and all shaped like passages, or that they were one and all roofed with barrel-shaped vaults. Square rooms were discovered in the palace which we are discussing, some of which were of no mean dimensions and measured forty-eight feet each way; these clearly could not have been covered with barrel vaulting, while the difficulty of procuring timber of sufficient length would make itself felt more in the case of a large square chamber, than in an elongated gallery. The problem therefore resolves itself into an inquiry as to what other modes of roofing were adopted by the Assyrians apart from roofs made of wooden beams which were apparently only used in exceptional cases, and barrel vaults, which would have been out of the question in these large square chambers. It is here that the bas-reliefs adorning the walls of the royal palaces come to our aid. On one of these reliefs from Kouyunjik (cf. Fig. 9) are portrayed a number of buildings surmounted by domes of varying shapes and sizes, which prove conclusively that the Assyrians of Sennacherib’s time had evolved the art of constructing domed roofs, or perhaps we should say borrowed the art from their mother-country, as the principle of the domed roof seems to have been known in Babylonia in the pre-Sargonic times, for the American excavations at BismÂya have disclosed an oval-shaped room of the Sumerian period, provided with a domed roof of which the larger portions still remained, and without doubt the square chambers in Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad as well as those in the palaces of other Assyrian kings were roofed in this way. The buildings on the right (cf. Fig. 9) have flat roofs, while those on the left have either hemispherical cupolas, or conical-shaped domes; most of the doors are rectangular in shape, two of them however are arched like the famous gates at Khorsabad. These rounded roofs are to be seen all over the East even at the present day, so persistent is the influence of custom and habit when both are but the offspring of the natural environment of climate and owe their very origin to the great mother of invention.

PRIVATE HOUSES

Of the arrangement of private houses in Babylonia we know comparatively little. Taylor excavated a small house of uncertain date at Mu?eyyer, and a plan of some chambers at AbÛ Shahrein was also made out. The house at Mu?eyyer was erected on an artificial mound of crude brick upon which a pavement of burnt brick was laid, the house itself being built of the same material. The walls were very irregular, but the general plan of the building seems to have been cruciform. The outer layer of bricks was apparently set in bitumen, mud-mortar being used for the remainder, while the floor which was made of burnt brick like the walls, was laid in bitumen. In regard to the doorways, two of them consisted in arched vaults, the arch being semicircular and made of wedge-shaped bricks, and the charred remains of wooden rafters or beams were found within. The outside of the house was decorated with perpendicular grooves, or “stepped recesses,”69 and many of the bricks were coated with enamel or gypsum, and were inscribed.

The external decoration of a building at Warka (Erech) excavated by Loftus consisted on the other hand of series of coloured clay cones70 embedded in mud or plaster and arranged in various patterns, with their circular bases outwards. The patterns were mostly triangular, striped, diamond-shaped, or zigzags, and the wall of which they formed a part measured thirty feet in length. The flat part of this wall projected one foot nine inches beyond the semicircular half columns which occurred at intervals as in the Wuswas faÇade.

The rooms excavated at AbÛ Shahrein were built of crude brick, the walls being covered with a plaster on the inside and painted. In one of these chambers the walls were decorated with white, black, and red bands, about three inches broad, while in another there was a crude red picture of a man holding a bird on his wrist, and a smaller figure standing close by.

The buildings uncovered by the German excavations at FÂra appear to be chiefly characterized by the feebleness of the walls and the elaboration of the drainage system. The general plan of these brick buildings consisted in a central court surrounded by chambers of very small dimensions. Private houses, like palaces, were often occupied over and over again: thus at Nippur some of the houses excavated by Haynes had been occupied at least three times over, while in one of them three distinctly different doorways were visible, the lowest and therefore the earliest being roofed by a segmental arch. But other buildings of quite a different shape and character were found both at Surghul and FÂra; these buildings are not rectangular but circular in form, and measure from six and a half to sixteen feet across. These rotundas, which are particularly numerous at FÂra, were surmounted by arched vaults, and one of them was found to contain four skulls. For what these circular structures were used it is difficult to say. We know something about the ordinary houses of later times from the classical writers: Herodotus for example informs us that the houses were generally lofty, having three or even four stories (Herod. I, 180), while Strabo tells us that the roofs of the houses were vaulted. The latter writer informs us that the pillars of the house—when such existed—consisted in the trunks of palm trees, around which wisps of rushes were entwined, the whole being thus coated with some kind of plaster and then painted (Strab. XVI, I, 85).

Of the private houses in Assyria we are little better informed than of those in Babylonia. The German excavations at ?alat Sher?at (Ashur) have however thrown some light on the subject. The foundation-walls of the houses discovered on this site showed that they conformed in general plan to that of the old Babylonian house as illustrated at FÂra. The foundations themselves present some novel varieties to the student of Mesopotamian architecture; the foundation-walls referred to were sunk down through the amassed dÉbris with which the plateau had been covered, to the rock bottom; and these walls were covered with a layer of stones, upon which the actual walls of the building were superimposed. One of the houses in question measured roughly 86 × 61 feet, and is rectangular in shape. As at FÂra the rooms surround a central court. On the south side of the building two narrow corridors run east and west, and are traceable in the foundations, access to the court being gained only by passing through the outer corridor and turning two corners.

In the dÉbris beneath this house were found various graves of the capsule type.71

The drains of the early Babylonians were either made of bricks, or else of baked clay rings. Of the larger type of drain or water conduit generally used to drain the upper stages of ziggurats, we have a good example in Pl. XI. Similar drains were discovered by Loftus at Erech, though he mistook them for supporting buttresses,72 to which they bear a striking resemblance. In the temple court at Nippur numerous drains of the second class were discovered. These were constructed of terra-cotta rings set one on the top of the other, and sometimes provided with a bell-shaped top, while occasionally it was surmounted by a terra-cotta floor,73 as in Fig. 10. The average diameter of the rings composing this drain was two feet and three-quarters, and it descended some six and a half feet. At BismÂya a drain consisting of round tiles about eight inches in diameter was discovered, while similar drains made of terra-cotta rings superimposed one on the top of the other were discovered by Taylor at Mu?eyyer (Ur). Frequently these shafts were double as in the illustration (Fig. 11). The rings composing this drain were two feet in diameter and about a foot and a half broad, and in some instances they were cemented together by means of a thin layer of bitumen. “For about a foot right round these drain-pipes and throughout their whole length, were pieces of broken pottery, the more effectually to drain the mound.”74 Over the mouth of the top ring, which is of a different shape to the others, were layers of perforated bricks leading up to the top of the mound. Sometimes these drains consist of as many as forty of these rings. Numerous drains made of both bricks and tiles were discovered at BismÂya, while the drainage system at FÂra and other early Babylonian sites seems to have been very extensive.

The main drains in Babylonia and Assyria frequently assumed the form of vaulted aqueducts. Concerning the drainage of the inner rooms, the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad is our best source of information. Nearly all of the rooms were drained by a hole cut in a stone in the centre of the floor towards which the brick floor gradually sloped; the water passed through the hole into a circular brick conduit, which descended into a horizontal drain connected with the main vaulted drain to which reference will be made later on (cf. p. 174).

Windows, which to our idea form one of the most important parts of a building, were apparently taken into little account by the Babylonians and Assyrians. In the case of one-storied buildings the only windows seem to have been skylights. At all events Place discovered terra-cotta cylinders in several of the rooms at Khorsabad, which according to him, must have formed a part of the roof through which air and a modicum of light was admitted into the chamber. The buildings represented on the bas-reliefs are indeed provided with small openings, but these appear to be embrasures rather than windows properly so-called. But in any case, even if windows were cut in the walls, the extreme thickness of the latter would have excluded nearly all light.

THE COLUMN

The column never seems to have occupied a prominent position in the history of Mesopotamian architecture, a fact which was again due to the dearth of stone and wood; there is however sufficient evidence to prove that it was certainly not unknown, though it was not very frequently employed. In modern architecture the column forms the main support of arches, but in Babylonian and Assyrian architecture the archivolts and pendentives of the arch are generally supported by thick walls; this fact is testified to alike by the remains of ancient buildings and also by the figured representations of such buildings found on the bas-reliefs.

Probably the best examples of an early Babylonian column are those discovered by De Sarzec at TellÔ in 1881, though strictly speaking they are not columns, but piers formed by the union of four circular columns (cf. Fig. 12). The piers are composed of circular, semicircular, or triangular bricks, which bear an inscription, DÉc. en Chald. Fig. 12. (Cf. DÉc. en Chald., Pl 53, 2.) from which we gather that the new construction of which they presumably formed a part was largely made of cedar-wood, a statement confirmed by the discovery of fragments of this wood amid the ruins.

Evidence of the very early use of the column on the same site was forthcoming in the discovery of a series of eight brick bases, situated some thirteen feet from the ancient building of Ur-NinÂ, the charred remains of pillars of cedar-wood by which these bases were once surmounted being still visible. Probably the most familiar example of the use of the column in Babylonia, afforded by the excavations, is that of the Court of columns at Nippur (cf. Pl. X). This court is over forty-eight feet square; its floor consists of a thick pavement made of unburnt bricks, and is over six feet in depth; around three of the sides of this square, Peters tells us, ran a kind of edging formed by a double row of burnt bricks, out of which arose four brick columns, round in shape, but resting on square brick pillars which descended some three feet or so below the surface; the fourth side was without doubt similarly occupied with columns, but nearly every trace of even the foundations of them has been washed away owing to the slope of the hill. On the other sides of the platform the columns remain standing to a height of about three feet; they appear to have tapered upwards, the diameter at the base being just over three feet. They were built of bricks especially made for the purpose: these bricks, in shape, are segments of circles, the apexes of which are truncated, and the hollow thus left in the centre of the circle compounded of these deformed segments was filled in with fragments of bricks. The segmentary bricks are well baked though somewhat brittle, and they were laid in mortar. According to Peters, these columns were carefully dressed with a sharp instrument, to remove any irregular projections there might be owing to the malformation of any of the component bricks. The columns are moreover not arranged with mathematical accuracy, being only roughly equidistant from one another. The corner-columns differ from the others in being half-round and half-square. Peters dates this colonnade in the second millennium and assigns it to the Cassite period. Hilprecht however believes it to be a product of the Parthian times, and dates it about 300 B.C.

But yet other columns were found at Nippur, some rectangular and oblong in shape, others assuming an oval form, both kinds however being made of brick like the columns in the court. In one room in a building close to the court, two columns were found built into the wall, and two more round columns on square bases, the latter being composed of four courses of bricks, and resting on a foundation of mud-brick. The circumference of these round columns is over twelve feet. On the south-east of the court the remains of another pair of round columns of gigantic size were discovered; the base of one of these was found still in its original position, while the remains of the shafts lay strewn about promiscuously. The diameter of these columns at the base must have been between six and seven feet, that is to say more than double the size of the columns in the court itself.

TellÔ and Nippur are however not the only sites which have yielded evidence of the use of the column in the Babylonia of antiquity. Loftus in his excavations at the Wuswas mound at Warka (Erech) came across the remains of seven half-columns repeated seven times,75 and used for the decoration of a faÇade; these half-columns were made of semicircular bricks. There is no trace of capital, base, cornice or any of the features which columns generally exhibit, they therefore occupy an early place in the development of columnar architecture, and Loftus assigns the building in which they were discovered to the second millennium B.C.,—not later than 1500 B.C. The excavations at AbÛ Adham, a mound situated near TellÔ, revealed a building with brick columns exactly like those found by Peters at Nippur, while at AbÛ Shahrein (Eridu) Taylor discovered the remains of a column76 consisting, in contradistinction to those mentioned above, of “slabs of sandstone twenty inches square and four inches thick, which disposed in a circular form, and joined together by lime, formed the chief material; between each layer were cylindrical pieces of marble, and the whole had a thick coating of lime; successive layers of which, mixed with small stone and pebbles, were laid on till it had attained the desired size and thickness. Its base was shaped like a bowl, and rested upon a layer of sun-dried bricks, under which again was fine sand.” No doubt the column was used in Babylonia more frequently than might be inferred from the paucity of the cases in which the excavations have actually produced tangible evidence of its employment, and the fact that Nebuchadnezzar represented columns with great voluted capitals on coloured tiles in the ?asr shows that they must have been a comparatively familiar architectural feature in his day, in spite of the fact that, as Koldewey points out, their pictorial representation on coloured tiles was probably an artistic substitute for the real things, for which there was apparently neither place nor use, as in every place where one might expect them, simple doors are found; two column-shafts consisting in palm-trunks, sunk into the ground and surrounded at the foot, by a circular brick walling strengthened with asphalt and lime, were however actually found in one of the courts, but Koldewey assigns the restored building of which they form a part to the Persian period. In the Amran77 mound at Babylon Koldewey discovered the truncated remains of twenty-two brick columns, which evidently formed part of a columned building, but the date of this building seems to be uncertain.

It is here however that the bas-reliefs come to our aid; in Pl. XIV we have a reproduction of the famous Sun-god Tablet which was made by NabÛ-aplu-iddina, king of Babylonia in the first half of the ninth century B.C., in which there is a shrine, the roof of which is supported by a column in the form of a palm-trunk which was probably overlaid with plates of metal, for plain unadorned wood would hardly be suitable for the shrine of Shamash, and moreover the capital and base, both of which are much the same, could only have assumed this form in metal, the one material that would easily adapt itself to such motifs. Similarly the curved back wall and roof were probably made of metal, for wood of the kind procurable in Babylonia would not readily bend in this manner. But this notwithstanding, the column always appears to have occupied a subordinate position in Babylonian architecture.

Such also appears to have been the case in Assyria: there too the excavations have done little in the way of recovering the actual columns used by the Assyrian monarchs, and for our knowledge of the general form and appearance of Assyrian columns we are in the main dependent on the information afforded us by the wall bas-reliefs. Another source of great fruitfulness would be the series of ivories found in the north-west palace of NimrÛd (Calah), but as these are the work of either Egyptian or Phoenician artists, the columns therein represented can hardly be regarded as illustrations of Assyrian columns.

Of remains of actual columns, the best-preserved is probably that discovered by Victor Place at Khorsabad; it comprises the capital and a portion of the shaft (cf. Fig. 13, a) both in one piece; it is made of limestone, and the surviving fragment is some forty inches high. The decoration of the capital proper is a variety of the volute, a device which probably originated in a more or less accurate imitation of the horns of the goat, and which is a characteristic feature of Babylonian and Assyrian decoration.

Sometimes columns represented on the bas-reliefs are actually surmounted by goats (cf. Fig. 14, G) but more often, the horn-shaped volutes (cf. Fig. 14, F) are the only artistic elements borrowed by the Assyrians from the animal world, in the formation of their column capitals. A variety of the same design is seen on the four circular limestone pedestals discovered by Layard at Nineveh78 (cf. Fig. 14, A) which doubtless at one time supported wooden pillars; the diameter of these bases varied from eleven and a half inches in the narrowest to two feet seven inches in the broadest part.

Sometimes the backs of lions (cf. Fig. 14, E), sphinxes or other composite monsters formed the bases of columns, and two such bases in the form of winged sphinxes were found by Layard in the south-west palace at NimrÛd, but they were in such a state of decay that they crumbled soon after excavation, though not before Layard was able to take a sketch of one of them (cf. Fig. 14, B).

An interesting example of a capital of a column is the small stone capital preserved in the British Museum (cf. Fig. 13, b). It probably formed the upper part of one of the diminutive columns adorning a balustrade, and doubtless when complete was a more or less faithful miniature replica of the full-sized capital discovered by Place (Fig. 13, a).

Until recently, owing to the fact that the columns portrayed on Assyrian bas-reliefs, and also the scant remains of actual columns which had been recovered, yielded no examples of shafts other than round,79 or possibly square (cf. Fig. 14, C) it was thought that polygonal-shafted columns were unknown, but the German excavations at Ashur have brought to light a capital of a column made of black basalt,80 together with a portion of the shaft which is sixteen-sided, and probably belongs to about the time of Tiglath-Pileser I (1100 B.C.).

This column at one time bore an inscription, but unfortunately it is worn away. The remains of another polygonal-shaped basalt column81 was discovered on the same site. It is eight-sided, and bears an inscription of Shamhsi-Adad, the son of Tiglath-Pileser I.

Two interesting column-bases made of limestone were also discovered at Ashur,82 under the brick-pavement of a late Assyrian dwelling-house. One of these consists in a plinth, a torus and a thin over-plate, all made in one piece, while in the other case a part of the shaft is preserved with the torus.

Judging from the bas-reliefs the corner columns of a building were generally more massive than those which were intermediate (cf. Fig. 14, C, D), a circumstance which added not only to the stability of the building itself, but also to the elegance of its appearance. But in both Babylonia and Assyria the column was used more often as an adornment to the faÇades of buildings than as an actual support for the structure itself. As we have so little positive evidence of the use of stone columns in Mesopotamia, it seems probable that as a rule columns were made of wood or bricks, the disappearance of almost all trace of which would be adequately accounted for by the natural destructibility of such materials, though the disappearance of stone columns, for such were clearly used, at all events sometimes, might be readily explained on the supposition that they had been subsequently used as rollers or for some other purpose.

THE ARCH

It has been truly said that the arch was first invented by people whose building materials were of a small size, and however open to objection this generalization may be, it is certainly true in the case of Babylonian architecture, and also in a somewhat lesser degree in that of the later Assyrian architecture. Strabo informs us that “all the houses in Babylonia were vaulted”—d?? t?? ?????a?—“because of the dearth of wood,” XVI, 1, 5—but however reliable or unreliable his statement may be, the dearth of wood and stone in the alluvial plain of Lower Mesopotamia of necessity taxed the inventive powers of the Babylonian architect to the utmost, when he was confronted with the problem of roofing the buildings he had erected, and the various rooms which they were destined to contain. But his genius seems to have arisen to the occasion, and evolved the principle of the arch as the best, and indeed the only means of coping with an otherwise insurmountable difficulty, for the construction of flat roofs depended on the existence of slabs of stones or timber-beams, alike large in size and durable, but both stone and wood of the kind wanted were not to be found in Babylonia, and the architect would clearly be unable to fetch wood or stone from the distant mountains for the purpose of roofing the chambers of an ordinary house. His inventive faculties were thus stimulated by the urgency of the case, and the result produced by these combined factors is to be seen in the early appearance of the arch, crude indeed as regards its structure, but none the less involving the same principles upon which all arches are built.

The early arches in the tomb-passages in Egypt are supposed to owe their origin to the removal of the lower part of the buttress-walls erected to keep the side walls of the passages from collapsing: such buttress-walls would of course fulfil their function in preventing the side walls from falling in, but they would frustrate their own ends by completely blocking the passage, thus rendering it perfectly useless. Accordingly the lower portion of the buttress-wall was removed, the upper part being allowed to remain, and forming in fact a rudimentary arch, and it is possible that the Babylonian arch owes its origin to like fortuitous circumstances. It is perhaps more probable, however, that the origin of the arch-shaped structure, if not the discovery of the principle of the arch, is to be traced to the peculiar form assumed by the native reed-huts, which doubtless bore a close resemblance to those commonly used in the Euphrates valley to-day. This view is advocated by Heuzey, and is the one which Hilprecht is disposed to favour.

Most of the ancient buildings of Babylonia have succumbed to the concurrent ravages of time and climate, and have consequently bequeathed to us very little material for the study of Babylonian architecture; the roofs of buildings, and of the chambers comprised therein, have long since ceased to be, and we can thus only theorize as to the general mode of roofing adopted, but the drains and aqueducts constructed beneath the buildings have luckily survived to tell their tale, and we owe our knowledge of the early existence of the arch in Babylonia chiefly to these comparatively insignificant remains.

One of the most ancient arches as yet discovered is that which was brought to light during the course of the excavations carried on by Peters, Harper, Haynes and Hilprecht at the ancient city of Nippur (cf. Fig. 15). It was found at a great depth below the surface of the mound, being more than twenty-two and a half feet below the pavement of Ur-Engur (circ. 2400 B.C.), and fourteen feet below that of NarÂm-Sin (circ. 2700 B.C.); it is a true keystone arch pointed in shape, made of well-burnt plano-convex bricks, and measuring a little over two feet in height and having a span of about one foot eight inches, while its length is about three feet, but it seems probable that originally the tunnel was vaulted throughout. The irregularity of its construction somewhat diminishes the significance that it would otherwise have, but it is of supreme interest as testifying to the fact that the principle of the arch was known at this very remote period, however crude the embodiment of that principle may happen to be. The plano-convex bricks composing this arch measure 12 × 6 × 2-1/2 inches and bear the impress of finger-marks on their convex side, a characteristic feature of pre-Sargonic bricks at Nippur, TellÔ and elsewhere, while the clay from which the bricks are made is of a light yellow colour. The tunnel itself seems to have been “a protecting structure for a drain,”83 rather than a drain itself, for below the pavement two terra-cotta pipes were discovered, the existence of which can only be explained on this hypothesis. At the top of the arch were found the remains of another terra-cotta pipe, the object of which must have been to drain off the percolating rain-water, and thus prevent it penetrating through and disintegrating the vaulted structure below. The T-shaped centre-piece, which was similarly made of plano-convex bricks, doubtless served the purpose of keeping the sides of the arch from falling in. Haynes further informs us that in one of the private houses at Nippur which had been occupied at least three times, the earliest of the three doorways traceable in the ruins, consisted in a segmental arch.

Another very early arch was discovered by M. De Sarzec at TellÔ, close to the building of Ur-Nin (cf. Fig. 16), having much the same shape as the Nippur arch illustrated in Fig. 15 and doubtless used for a similar purpose, while vaulted passages of which the arch was semicircular, were discovered by Taylor84 in his excavations at Mu?eyyer (Ur), as early as 1855.

Again the German excavations at FÂra (Shuruppak) in 1902 and 1903 revealed a number of circular rooms, each of which was roofed by means of an arch formed by overlapping bricks placed horizontally, somewhat after the fashion of the later corbelled arch at Nippur seen in Fig. 17, to which Hilprecht assigns a provisional date of 2500 B.C. We know that the dome was invented in Babylonia at a very early date, thanks to Dr. Banks’ discovery at BismÂya of an oval-shaped room in the vicinity of the temple, the lower parts of the domed roof of which were found still in place. Its antiquity is attested by the date of the temple itself which would appear to have belonged to the pre-Sargonic period, as the ziggurat was faced with the plano-convex bricks characteristic of that period, and the pottery furnace, not far distant, was composed of bricks of the same kind.

In later times the arch was doubtless used more frequently in Babylonia. A good example of a late Babylonian arch was discovered by the German excavators on the ?asr at Babylon; the arch in question (cf. Fig. 18) which is Roman in character, forms the roofing of a lofty gate cut in the fortification wall. Koldewey85 is of opinion that the wall in which this arched gate occurs, is a good deal older than the Nebuchadnezzar period.

But Assyria, the more or less faithful imitator of Babylonia in all matters great or small, is also known to have employed the arch as an architectural device, though, as in Babylonia, most of the Assyrian arches which the excavations have brought to light are connected with the drainage system with which all the principal buildings were provided. The best examples of an Assyrian arch of ordinary dimensions are those found at Khorsabad, the gateways of which town were roofed with semicircular vaults. One of these gateways was pulled down by Place in order to make a close examination of its construction. The height from the pavement to the top of the arch was found to be twenty-four and a half feet, the width being a little over fourteen feet. The arch was made of crude bricks, all of which were of the same size, and had the same shape, the bricks being cemented together with soft clay. The vault itself had long since become disintegrated, but the materials of which it was made were discovered in the ruins. Of the brilliantly painted friezes which adorned these rounded openings (cf. Pl. XXX), something will be said in the chapter on Painting.

But in regard to the study of what may be called the arch-principle, the subterranean channels which formed part of the system of drainage employed by the Assyrians are of greater importance. These aqueducts are found in all the palaces, both at NimrÛd and Kouyunjik, but Khorsabad furnished the best preserved examples, and therefore afforded the most valuable material for the careful examination of this architectural contrivance. At Khorsabad, Place discovered several arched drains of different shapes, some of them being round, others elliptical, while others again were pointed, but apparently in every case the stones or bricks were set at an angle, so that each course had the support of the course preceding it, and thus the pressure on the centre of the arch was reduced to the minimum. In the case of the pointed arched aqueducts found by Place, the arches in question are no true keystone arches, indeed they have no keystones of any kind as will be seen in Figs. 19, 20; this arched drain measures four feet eight inches from the ground to the centre of the vault, its width is about three feet nine inches, while its original length is unfortunately not known, though Place succeeded in tracing it for some two hundred and twenty feet. The floor was made of large slabs of limestone set in asphalt, while the ends of the stone-slabs extended beyond the walls of the vault on either side. The rounded type of arch is seen in Fig. 21; it is semicircular in shape and is formed of three voussoirs on each side, which together with the key, thus make seven in all, but owing to some miscalculation, the keystone appears to have been too small, in consequence of which there was a gap between it and the top voussoir on the right, which was filled in by means of a stone wedge which can be seen in the figure. Its width and height vary at different points, in some places it is said to be wide enough for two men to walk abreast in it.86 The floor was composed of slabs of limestone which were laid in asphalt just like the floor of the pointed arch described above. An elliptical-shaped arch, also found at Khorsabad, is illustrated in Fig. 22: it is formed of eight voussoirs and a keystone, the gap on either side of which is filled in by means of two stone wedges. The failure to make the keystones sufficiently large, and the consequent necessity for these supplementary wedges may be due to the architects not having allowed for the shrinkage of the bricks.

In regard to the arched structures at NimrÛd (Calah) Layard says he found a vaulted room and more than one arch. He tells us that “the arch was constructed upon the well-known principle of vaulted roofs, the bricks being placed sideways, one against the other, and having been probably sustained by a framework until the vault was completed.” Knowledge of the principle of dome-shaped roofs in Assyria as well as in the mother-country, is evidenced both by the discovery of rooms whose dimensions would have rendered any other mode of roofing impossible, and also by the representations on Assyrian bas-reliefs, as we have already seen.87

The arch-principle is further embodied in some of the Babylonian and Assyrian graves, and as there is no other opportunity of discussing the burial-places of the Babylonians and Assyrians in this volume, it may be permissible to give here a brief and general description of one or two of the best preserved of these burial-vaults. At Mu?eyyer (Ur) Taylor found a number of arched vaults (cf. Fig. 24) which in most cases measured about 5 feet in height, and 3 feet 7 inches in breadth, while they were about 7 feet long at the bottom and 5 feet long at the top. The arch is formed by successive layers of overlapping bricks. It is interesting to compare the burial vaults discovered by Andrae at ?alat Sher?at (Ashur), one of the best preserved of which is seen in Fig. 23.88 This vault was discovered about 16 feet below the level of the floor of a Parthian door in the neighbourhood, and over 13 feet below a later Assyrian pavement. At the time of its construction the vault would appear to have been about 9 feet beneath the surface of the soil. The perpendicular walls forming the sides of the lower part of the tomb are set upon a brick pavement, the bricks being about 10-1/2 inches square and nearly 2-1/2 inches thick. The height of these perpendicular walls is approximately 30-1/2 inches and the layers of bricks which each contains number 13. The vault itself, which of course commences where the perpendicular walls cease, is more or less oval in shape, has a span of 5 feet 2 inches, and is 2 feet 11 inches high, the total height of the tomb from the floor to the top of the arch thus being nearly 5-1/2 feet. The arch, upon the construction of which much care had evidently been bestowed, was formed of forty-six courses of quasi-wedge-shaped bricks, each resembling a truncated segment of a circle. The interstices between the courses were filled in with stones, broken pieces of clay and clay mortar. The outside of the vault was coated with clay, but the inside was left plain. The walls at either end incline inwards, while they are built separately from the arch and are also rather higher. Access to the tomb from outside is gained by a slanting and somewhat winding entrance-shaft built close to the western wall, in which there is a small arched opening. The threshold of this opening, which was filled in with loosely laid bricks, lies 23-1/2 inches above the floor of the tomb. In the eastern wall the usual recess was found, the floor of which was some 35 inches above the floor of the burial chamber. This recess was about 19 inches in height and 13 inches in breadth, while the depth of the recess was greater than that of the wall, and it was therefore necessary to build another wall on the outside to close it up. In the recess of another double grave found by Andrae on the same site, a clay lamp was found, but this was not the case here; possibly there was at one time a lamp in the recess of this tomb, its disappearance being due to the disintegration to which the long infiltration of damp subjects all articles of unburnt clay. The entrance-shaft was 39 inches square, while its bottom was level with the threshold of the small opening in the western wall; 4 feet 2 inches above this floor was a second floor made of gypsum blocks which were supported by the walls of the shaft. The interstices between these blocks were filled in with stones and pieces of clay, while the upper part of the shaft (i.e. the part above these blocks), the walls of which had only half the thickness of the walls below, was similarly filled in right up to the surface level. The uppermost part of the shaft had been disturbed by a later building. In the vault, Andrae found three skeletons, one of which apparently belonged to a man, and the other two to women. The arms of these skeletons were at right angles to the bodies, and the legs were contracted and apart, while the man lies on his right side and the two women on their left. Traces of a decayed whitish material were found in the tomb, which Andrae believes to be the remains of grave-clothes. Bone needles and pottery had also been deposited with the corpses. The most interesting articles of pottery were three wide-necked bottles, two of which were decorated with dark horizontal lines, while the neck of the third was adorned with white painting on a dark ground, a technique well known in early Assyrian times. What were the contents of the vessels we do not know; rams’ bones were found near the door as well as elsewhere, and without doubt these vessels once contained meat offerings and drink offerings for the dead. There was evidence for at least three different periods of occupation in the strata above the grave, two of which belonged to the Assyrian era and one to the Parthian times.

The vaulted graves at Ashur do not however all belong to the same time; some of them may be assigned to the early Assyrian period, while others were built at a later date. One of these later brick burial-vaults was excavated and carefully examined by Andrae in the spring of 1909.89 The construction of this vault apparently involved the demolishment of an earlier Assyrian building. The bricks of which the vault was composed in some cases bore the inscription of Tukulti-Ninib I, but in spite of this fact, the grave itself was not built till a later date. Access to the vault was gained by means of an entrance-shaft the lower end of which was connected by means of a passage with the door of the burial-chamber. A few inches above the ruined dÉbris of the entrance-shaft the remains of a Parthian building were discovered. The passage was entirely destroyed, though the shape of the displaced bricks led to the conclusion that it was roofed by a barrel-vault. The arched door into the grave-room which measures nearly 4 feet in height and has a span of about 22-1/2 inches is composed of very small bricks 6-1/2 × 2-1/8 inches. It is built into one of the small walls of the grave-room, and the threshold is made of bricks like its other parts.

The bricks composing the barrel-vaulted roof of the grave-room are 11-3/4 inches square and 2-3/8 inches thick. At the other end of the burial-chamber is a small arched door leading into another room, also barrel-vaulted. This latter room which measures nearly 5 feet in length, and 35-1/2 inches in breadth, is built with less care and regularity than the main burial-chamber. The side-walls of the annexed room are 5-1/8 inches thick, but the thickness of the back wall is only 2 inches. The threshold of the entrance-door to the main burial-chamber is 20-3/4 inches lower than the pavement of the entrance-shaft, and nearly 19 inches above the floor of the burial-chamber. Asphalt and plaster were both used extensively in the interior.

North-east of the entrance-door, there was a lamp-niche, 3 feet 11-1/4 inches above the floor, and measuring 12-1/2 × 13-3/4 inches in size, and 12-1/2 inches in depth. In this niche, three terra-cotta pots were discovered, and Andrae thinks that these pots were probably used as lamps. The burial-chamber contained two bath-shaped sarcophagi, one of which measured 6 feet 7-1/2 inches in length, 28 inches in breadth and 18-1/8 inches in height, while the other was just over 6 feet 6 inches long, 31 inches wide, and 17 inches deep. The lids of both these sarcophagi were slightly arched and were tightly cemented. The top end of one of the covers bore the rough outline of two flowers.

Upon the brick floor of the annex was the extended skeleton of a man, while in one of the sarcophagi four skulls and three skeletons were found. Two of the skeletons belonged to men, but the third and best-preserved was that of a woman, while the skeleton to which the fourth skull belonged was not found. The funeral furniture was of the ordinary type and consisted chiefly in terra-cotta dishes and vases, copper bangles and glass beads.