Chapter I: CIVIL and Military Architecture (2)

The building at Sirtella (_Tello_) in which M. de Sarzec discovered such curious statues, was less extensive; it was only about 175 feet long by 102 wide. The faces of the parallelogram were slightly convex, giving to the building something of the general form of a terra-cotta tub (Fig. 150, Vol I.). Here the excavations were pushed far enough to give us a better idea of the general arrangement than we can get at Warka. A great central court, about which numerous square and oblong apartments are arranged, has been cleared; there is a separate quarter, which may be the harem; at one angle of the court the massive stages of a _zigguratt_ may be recognized. The walls are entirely of burnt brick. They are decorated only on the principal façade, where the ornaments belong to the same class as those of Wuswas--semi-columns mixed with grooves in which the elevation of a stepped battlement is reproduced horizontally.

In none of the ruins of habitations found in this district by the English explorers, were the chambers other than rectangular. Taylor cleared a few halls in two buildings at Mugheir (Fig. 10) and Abou-Sharein (Figs. 11 and 12) respectively. Both of these stood on artificial mounds, and it is difficult to believe that they were private dwellings. The walls of several rooms at Mugheir seemed to have been decorated with glazed bricks; at Abou-Sharein there was nothing but roughly painted stucco. In one chamber the figure of a man with a bird on his fist might yet be distinguished.

It is in Babylon that we ought to have found the masterpieces of this architecture, in that capital of Nebuchadnezzar where the Chaldæan genius, just before it finally lost its autonomy, made the supreme effort that resulted in the buildings attributed by the travelled Greeks to their famous Semiramis. We have no reason to disbelieve Ctesias when he says that there were two palaces in Babylon, one on the left and another on the right bank of the Euphrates. “Semiramis,” says Diodorus, following his usual guide, “built a double residence for herself, close to the river and on both sides of the bridge, whence she might at one and the same time enjoy the view over the whole city, and, so to speak, keep the keys of the most important parts of the capital in her own power. As the Euphrates runs southward through Babylon, one of these palaces faced the rising, the other the setting, sun. Round the palace that faced westwards, she built a wall sixty stades in circumference, &c.”[35]

The larger and more richly decorated of the two palaces was that on the left bank.[36] Its opposite neighbour has vanished and left no trace. The Euphrates has been gradually encroaching on its right bank ever since the days of antiquity, and has long ago disunited and carried away the last stones and bricks of the western palace. The eastern palace is on the other hand still represented by one of the great mounds that dominate the plain; this mound is called the Kasr, or castle (Fig. 183, vol. i.). Its circumference is now not far short of a mile.[37] Its form is that of an oblong parallelogram, with its longest side next the river and parallel to it. The flanks of the mound have, however, been so deeply seamed by searchers for treasure and building materials that no vestige of its arrangements is now to be traced. The bricks employed in the building all bore the name of Nebuchadnezzar.

South of the Kasr there is another mound, rising about one hundred feet above the plain and very irregular in shape. This is _Tel-Amran-ibn-Ali_, or _Tell-Amran_, (Fig. 183, vol. i.). It is agreed that this contains all that remains of the hanging gardens, a conjecture that is confirmed by the numerous tombs dating from the Seleucid, the Parthian, and the Sassanid periods, which have been found in its flanks whenever any excavation has been attempted.[38] Tell-Amram seems to have been a far more popular depository for corpses than either Babil, the Kasr, or the Birs-Nimroud, a preference which is easily explained. Whether we believe, with Diodorus, that the gardens were supported by great stone architraves, or with Strabo, that they stood upon several stories of vaults, we may understand that in either case their substructure offered long galleries which, when the gardens were no longer kept up and the whole building was abandoned to itself, were readily turned into burial places.[39] The palace and temple mounds did not offer the same facilities. They were solid, and graves would have had to be cut in them before a corpse could be buried in their substance. The Kasr was a ready-made catacomb into which any number of coffins could be thrust with the smallest expenditure of trouble.

Excavations in the Kasr and at Tell-Amran might bring many precious objects to light, but we can hardly think that any room or other part of a building in such good preservation as many of those in the Assyrian palaces would be recovered. To the latter, then, we shall have again to turn to complete our study of the civil architecture of Mesopotamia.

If we have placed the edifices from which the English explorers have drawn so many precious monuments in the second line, it is not only because their exploration is incomplete, but also because they do not lend themselves to our purpose quite so readily as that cleared by MM. Botta and Place. At Khorsabad there have never been any buildings but those of Sargon; city and palace were built at a single operation, and those who undertake their study do not run any risk of confusion between the work of different generations. The plan we have discussed so minutely is really that elaborated by the Assyrian architect to whom Sargon committed the direction of the work. We can hardly say the same of the ruins explored by Mr. Layard and his successors. The mounds of Nimroud and Kouyundjik saw one royal dwelling succeed another, and the architects who were employed upon them hardly had their hands free. They had, to a certain extent, to reckon with buildings already in existence. These may sometimes have prevented them from extending their works as far as they wished in one direction or another, or even compelled them now and then to vary the levels of their floors; so that it is not always easy for a modern explorer to know exactly how he stands among the ruins of their creations, or to clearly distinguish the work of one date from that of another.[40]

It was at Nimroud that this perplexity was chiefly felt, until the decipherment of the inscriptions came to enable different periods and princes to be easily distinguished. This name of Nimroud, handed down by the ancient traditions collected in Genesis, has been given to a mound which rises about six leagues to the south of Mossoul, on the left bank of the Tigris, and both by its form and elevation attracts the attention of every traveller that descends the stream. The river is now at some distance from the ruins, but as our map shows (Fig. 1), it is easy to trace its ancient bed, which was close to the foot of the mound. The latter is an elongated parallelogram, about 1,300 yards in one direction, and 750 in the other (see Vol. I., Fig. 145). Above its weather-beaten sides, and the flat expanse at their summit, stood, before the excavations began, the apex of the conical mound in which Layard found the lower stories of a staged tower (Fig. 13). Calah seems to have been the first capital of the Assyrian Empire and even to have preserved some considerable importance after the Sargonids had transported the seat of government to Nineveh, and built their most sumptuous buildings in the latter city. Nearly every king of any importance, down to the very last years of the monarchy, left the mark of his hand upon Nimroud.[41]

Of all the royal buildings at Calah that which has been most methodically and thoroughly cleared is the oldest of all, the north-western palace, or palace of Assurnazirpal (885–860). It has not been entirely laid open, but the most richly decorated parts, corresponding to the seraglio at Khorsabad, have been cleared. The adjoining plan (Fig. 14) shows arrangements quite similar to those of Sargon’s palace. A large court is surrounded on three sides by as many rectangular groups of apartments, each group forming a separate suite, with its own entrances to the court.

The chief entrance faces the north. Two great doorways flanked by winged and human-headed lions, give access to a long gallery (4 on plan). At the western end of this gallery there is a small platform or daïs raised several steps above the rest of the floor. Upon this, no doubt, the king’s throne was placed on those reception days when subjects and vassals crowded to his feet. Some idea of what such a reception must have been may be gained from an Indian _Durbar_, or from the Sultan of Turkey’s annual review of all his great functionaries of state at the feast of _Courban-Baïram_. I witnessed the latter ceremony in the Old Seraglio in 1857, and when those great officers, like the mollahs and sheiks of the dervishes, who had preserved the turban and floating robes of the East, bent to the feet of Abd-al-Medjid, I was irresistibly reminded of the pompous ceremonials sculptured on the walls of Nineveh and Persepolis.

The walls of this saloon were entirely lined in their lower parts with reliefs representing the king surrounded by his chief officers, offering prayers to the god of his people and doing homage for the destruction of his enemies and for successful hunts (Fig. 15). The figures in these reliefs are larger than life. A doorway flanked by two bulls leads into another saloon (2 on plan) rather shorter and narrower than the first. In this the ornamentation is less varied. The limestone slabs are carved with eagle-headed genii in pairs, separated by the sacred tree (Vol. I., Fig. 8). The inner wall of this saloon is pierced with a fine doorway leading into the central court (1), while in one corner there is a narrower opening into a third long hall (6), which runs along the eastern side of the court. It was in this latter room that the finest sculptures, those that may perhaps be considered the masterpieces of the Assyrian artists, were found. Behind this saloon there was another, rather longer, but not quite so wide (7); then five chambers, completing the palace on this side. To the south of the great court there were two large halls (3 and 5) similar in arrangement to those already mentioned but less richly decorated, and several smaller rooms opening some into the halls, others into the passages on the west of the court. As to whether the latter was inclosed or not on the west by buildings like those on the other three sides we cannot now be certain, as on that side the mound has been much broken away by the floods of the Tigris, which once bathed its foot. There is nothing to forbid the hypothesis of a grand staircase on this side leading up from the river bank.[42]

In the _central_ and _south-western_ palaces, built by Shalmaneser II. and his grandson Vulnirari III. the excavations have not been carried far enough to allow the plans to be restored. The explorers have been content to carry off inscriptions and fragments of sculpture in stone, ivory, and metal.[43]

The _south-western palace_, or palace of Esarhaddon, has been the scene of explorations sufficiently prolonged to give us some idea of its general arrangements (Fig. 16). A curious circumstance was noticed by the English explorers. While the works of Assurbanipal bore the strongest marks of care and skill, those of Esarhaddon showed signs of having been carried out with a haste that amounted to precipitation, and his palace was never finished. Nearly all the alabaster slabs were taken from older buildings.[44] Most of these were fixed with their original carved surfaces against the wall, but a few were turned the proper way. Doubtless, had time served, these would have been smoothed down and reworked. Nothing was finished, however, but the bulls and sphinxes at the doors (Vol. I. Fig. 85) and a few reliefs in their immediate neighbourhood.[45] Esarhaddon died, no doubt, before the completion of the work, which was never continued.

And yet his architect was by no means lacking in ambition. Upon the southern face of the building he intended to build the largest hall, which, so far as we know, was ever attempted in an Assyrian palace. This saloon would have been about 170 feet long by 63 feet wide. As soon as the walls were raised he saw that he could not roof it in. Neither barrel vault nor timber ceiling could have so great a span. He determined to get over the difficulty by erecting a central wall down the major axis of the room, upon which either timber beams or the springers of a double vault could rest. This wall was pierced by several openings, and was stopped some distance short of the two end walls. It divided the saloon into four different rooms (marked 1, 2, 3, 4 on our plan) each of which was by no means small. Even with this modification the magnificence of the original plan did not entirely disappear. The two colossal lions opposite the door were very wide apart, and all the openings between the various subdivisions were large enough to allow the eye to range freely over the whole saloon, and to grasp the first thought of the architect in its entirety.

As to the buildings on the other sides of the court and the total extent of the palace, we know very little; towards the west the walls of several saloons have been recognized, but they have been left half cleared. On the east, landslips have carried away part of the buildings.[46]

Between the palace of Assurnazirpal and that of Esarhaddon Layard found what seemed to him the remains of the second story of some building, or at least of a new building erected over one of earlier date (Fig. 17). Impelled, no doubt, by the rarity of the circumstance, he gives a plan of these remains, and goes so far as to express his belief that the arrangements shown in the plan were repeated on the three other faces of a tower of which he encountered the summit, still partly preserved.[47]

Although Calah was never abandoned, it fell, after the accession of the Sargonids, from the first place among Assyrian cities; on the other hand Sargon’s attempt to fix the seat of government in his own town of Dour-Saryoukin does not seem to have met with permanent success. From the eighth century to the end of the seventh the Assyrian kings appear to have made Nineveh their favourite place of residence.

The site of this famous city has been much discussed,[48] but at last the question appears to be settled. Nineveh was built on the left bank of the Tigris, opposite to the site occupied by modern Mossoul. Two great mounds rising some five-and-thirty feet above the level of the plain, represent the substructures upon which the royal homes of the last Assyrian dynasty were raised; they are now famous as _Kouyundjik_ and _Nebbi-Younas_. Like the mound of Khorsabad these two artificial hills were in juxtaposition with the city walls, which may still be traced in almost their whole extent by the ridge of earth formed of their materials (Fig. 18).

The mound of Nebbi-Younas has so far remained almost unexplored. It is fortified against the curiosity of Europeans by the little building on its summit and the cemetery covering most of its surface. The inhabitants of the country, Mussulman as well as Christian, believe that Jonah lies under the chapel dome, and they themselves hope to rest as near his body as possible. Some slight excavations, little more than a few strokes of the pick-axe, have been made in the scanty spots where no graves occur, but enough evidence has been found to justify us in assuming that Nebbi-Younas also hides its palaces. They too will have their turn. Thanks to the prestige of the prophet they are reserved for excavations to be conducted perhaps in a more systematic fashion than those hitherto undertaken on the site of Nineveh.

At Kouyundjik, on the other hand, no serious obstacle was encountered. The village transported itself to the plain; it was not necessary to persuade the inhabitants to quit it, as it had been at Khorsabad. When Botta, who had begun certain inquisitions at this spot, abandoned his attempts, the English explorers were left free to sound the flanks of the artificial hill at their leisure, and to choose their point of attack. If they had gone to work in the same fashion as Botta and Place, they might have laid bare palaces excelling that of Sargon in the scale and variety of their arrangements. Of this we may judge from Mr. Rassam’s plan (Fig. 19). But after the departure of Mr. Layard the excavations, frequently interrupted and then recommenced after long intervals, aimed only at discovering such objects as might figure in a museum. A trench was opened here and another there, on the inspiration of the moment. The explorers often neglected to measure the buildings in which they were at work, so that we have only partial plans of the two principal buildings of Nineveh, those palaces of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal from which so many beautiful monuments have been taken to enrich the British Museum.

The mound of Kouyundjik in its present state is an irregular pentagon. Its circumference is rather more than a mile and a half. The palace of Sennacherib occupies the south-western corner, and forms a rectangle about 600 feet long by 330 wide. The two chief entrances were turned one towards the river, or south-west, the other towards the town, or north-east. The latter entrance was flanked by ten winged bulls. The four central ones stood out beyond the line of the façade, and were separated from each other by colossal genii.[49] About sixteen halls and chambers have been counted round the three courtyards. As at Khorsabad, some of these are long galleries, others rooms almost square. The fragmentary plan shown in our Fig. 20 brings out the resemblance very strongly. It represents a part of the building explored in Layard’s first campaign. In the rooms marked 2, 3, and 4, small niches cut in the thickness of the walls may be noticed. They are not unlike the spaces left for cupboards in the modern Turkish houses of Asia Minor. The hall marked 1 in the plan is about 124 feet long and 30 wide. In another part of the palace a saloon larger than any of those at Khorsabad has been cleared. It measures 176 feet long by 40 wide. The average size of the rooms here is about one-third more than in the palace of Sargon, suggesting that the art of building vaults and timber ceilings made sensible progress during the reign of that king. As in the case of the Khorsabad palace, the explorers believed they could distinguish between the seraglio and the harem; but the plan given by Layard has too many blanks and leaves too many points uncertain for the various quarters to be distinguished with such ease and certainty as at Khorsabad.[50] The walls were everywhere covered with rich series of reliefs, from which we have already taken some of our illustrations (Vol. I., Figs. 151 and 152), and shall have to take more. The military promenade figured upon page 49 will give a good idea of their general character (Fig. 21).

Assurbanipal, the grandson of Sennacherib, built his palace towards the north of the mound. The excavations of Mr. Rassam have been the means of recovering many precious bas-reliefs from it, but we may see from the plan (Fig. 19) that a very small part of the building has been cleared. Much more must remain of a palace so richly decorated and with rooms so large as some of those explored in the quarter we have called the sélamlik. One of these saloons is 145 feet long and 29 wide. The plan of its walls suggests a very large building, with spacious courts and a great number of rooms.[51]

In many other mounds of Assyria, such as those of _Arvil_,[52] of _Balawat_,[53] of _Kaleh-Shergat_,[54] of _Karamles_,[55] and in the valley of the _Khabour_,[56] the explorers have encountered the remains of buildings and of ornamental figures that must have formed parts of royal palaces, or at least of the dwellings of great nobles. We shall not stop to notice all these discoveries. None of the mounds in question have been explored with sufficient care and completeness to add anything of importance to what we have learnt by our study of Khorsabad. The chief thing to be gathered from these widely scattered excavations is that during the great years of Assyria there was no town of any importance in which the king did not possess a habitation, arranged and decorated in the same spirit as the great palaces at Calah and Nineveh, and differing from these chiefly in the size of their courts and chambers.

No doubt the pavilions sprinkled about the park, or paradise, as the Greek writers called it, in which the king sought amusement by exercising his skill as an archer upon the beasts that roamed among its trees, were ornamented in the same fashion, although in all probability, wood and metal played a more important part in their construction. As for the dwellings of the great officers of the crown and of vassal princes, they must have reproduced on a smaller scale the plan and ornamentation of the royal palace.

Of the house properly speaking, the dwelling of the artizan or peasant, whether in Assyria or Chaldæa, we know very little. We are unable to turn for its restoration to paintings such as those in the Egyptian tombs, which portray the life of the poor with the same detail as that of the rich or even of the monarch himself. The Assyrian bas-reliefs, in which the sieges of towns are often represented, always show them from the outside (Fig. 22), nothing is to be seen but the ramparts and the towers that flank them. The only bas-relief in which we can venture to recognize one of the ordinary houses of the country belongs to the series of pictures in which Sennacherib has caused the transport of the materials and colossal bulls for his own palace to be figured. We there see two very different types of edifice, one covered with hemispherical or elliptical domes, the other with flat roofs supporting a kind of belvedere[57] (Vol. I., Fig. 43).

This latter type may be found several times repeated in a relief representing a city of Susiana (Vol. I., Fig. 157). Here nearly every house has a tower at one end of its flat roof. Was this a defence, like the towers in the old Italian towns and in the Greek villages of Crete and Magnesia? We do not think so. The social conditions were very different from those of the turbulent republics of Italy, where the populace was divided into hostile factions, or of those mountainous districts whose Greek inhabitants live in constant fear of attack from the Turks who dwell in the plains. The all-powerful despots of Assyria would allow no intestine quarrels, and for the repulse of a foreign enemy, the cities relied upon their high and solid lines of circumvallation. We think that the towers upon the roofs were true belvederes, contrivances to get more air and a wider view; also, perhaps, to allow the inhabitants to escape the mosquitoes by rising well above the highest level reached by the flight of those tiny pests.

It was, then, between these two types, as Strabo tells us, that the civil buildings of Mesopotamia were divided. They all had thick terraced roofs but some were domical and others flat.[58] At Mugheir Mr. Taylor cleared the remains of a small house planned on the lines of an irregular cross; it was built of burnt brick and paved with the same material. In the interior the faces of the bricks were covered with a thin and not very adhesive glaze. Two of the doors were round-headed; the arches being composed of bricks specially moulded in the shape of voussoirs; but the numerous fragments of carbonized palm-wood beams which were found upon the floors of each room, showed that the building had been covered with a flat timber roof and a thick bed of earth. Strabo justly observes that the earth was necessary to protect the inmates of the house against the heats of summer. As a rule houses must have been very low. It was only in large towns such as Babylon, that they had three or four stories.[59]

* * * * *

We need say no more. We have studied the palace in detail, and the palace was only an enlarged, a more richly illustrated edition of the house. It supplied the same wants, but on a wider scale than was necessary in the dwelling of a private individual. To complete our study of civil architecture it is only necessary to give some idea of the fashion in which palaces and houses were grouped into cities, and of the means chosen for securing those cities against hostile assault.

§ 4. _Towns and their Defences._

Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has been the most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world; her name has stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than any other city of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city _par excellence_, the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that were admired and feared by the Hellenic population even after their political weakness had been proved more than once. In the centuries that have passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and fame of Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of those Hebrew prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and poetic books of the Old Testament with their hatred of the Mesopotamian city, an ardent hate that has found an echo across the ages in the religion which is the heir of Judaism.

Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

There is, then, no city of the ancient world in which both our Christian instincts and our classic education would lead us to take a deeper interest, or to make more patient endeavours towards the recovery of some knowledge of its passed magnificence by the interrogation of its site and ruins, than this town of Babylon. At the same time it happens, by a strange series of chances, that of all the great cities of the past Babylon is the least known and the most closely wrapped in mystery. The descriptive passages of ancient writers are full of gaps and exaggerations, while as for the monuments themselves, although the size of their remains and the vast extent of ground they cover allow us to guess at the power and energy of the people to whom they owed their existence, there are no ruins in the world from which so little of the real thoughts and ideas of their constructors is to be learnt. Not only has the ornamentation of palace and temple disappeared, the ruling lines and arrangements of their plans are no longer to be traced. It is this no doubt that has discouraged the explorers. While the sites of Calah, Nineveh, and Dour-Saryoukin have been freed of millions of cubic yards of earth, and their concealed buildings explored and laid bare in every direction, no serious excavations have ever been made at Babylon. At long intervals of time a few shafts have been sunk in the flanks of the Kasr, of Babil and the Birs-Nimroud, but they have never been pushed to any great depth; a few trenches have been run from them, but on no connected system, and only to be soon abandoned. The plain is broken by many virgin mounds into which no pick-axe has been driven, and yet they each represent a structure dating from some period of Babylonian greatness. It would be a noble undertaking to thoroughly explore the three or four great ruins that rise on the site itself, and to examine carefully all the region about them. Such an exploration would require no slight expenditure of time and money, but it could not fail to add considerably to our present knowledge of ancient Chaldæa; it would do honour to any government that should support it, and still more to the archæologist who should conduct the inquiry to completion, laying down on his plan the smallest vestige remaining of any ancient detail, and allowing himself to be discouraged by none of the numerous disappointments and deceptions that he would be sure to encounter.

Meanwhile it would be profitless to carry our readers into any discussion upon the topography of Babylon. In the absence of ascertained facts nothing could be more arbitrary and conjectural than the various theories that have been put forward as to the direction of the city walls and their extent. According to George Smith the only line of wall that can now be followed would give a town about eight English miles round. Now Diodorus says that what he calls the _Royal City_ was sixty stades, or within a few yards of seven miles, in circumference.[60] The difference between the two figures is very slight. “In shape the city appears to have been a square with one corner cut off, and the corners of the walls of the city may be said roughly to front the cardinal points. At the north of the city stood the temple of Belus, now represented by the mound of Babil; about the middle of the temple stood the royal palace and hanging-gardens.”[61]

The _Royal City_ was the city properly speaking, the old city whose buildings were set closely about the great temple and the palace, the latter forming, like the _Old Seraglio_ at Constantinople, a fortified town in itself with a wall some twenty stades (4043 yards) in circumference. A second wall, measuring forty stades in total length, turned the palace and the part of the city in its immediate neighbourhood into a sort of acropolis. Perhaps the nobles and priests may have inhabited this part of the town, the common people being relegated to the third circle. In the towns of Asia Minor at the present day the Turks alone live in the fortified inclosures, which are called _kaleh_, or citadels, the rest of the town being occupied by the _rayahs_ of every kind, whether Greek or Armenian.

There is, then, nothing in the description of Diodorus at which we need feel surprise. Our difficulty begins when we have to form a judgment upon the assertion of Herodotus, who speaks of an inclosure 120 stades (13 miles 1385 yards) square.[62] According to this the circumference of Babylon must have been nearly 55¼ English miles, which would make it considerably larger than what is called Greater London, and more than three times the size of Paris. Here, strangely enough, Ctesias gives a more moderate figure than Herodotus, as we find Diodorus estimating the circumference of the great _enceinte_ at 360 stades (41 miles 600 yards).[63]

We can hardly read of such measurements without some astonishment. It seems difficult, however, to doubt the formal statement of such a careful eye-witness as Herodotus. Although the Greek historian was quite ready to repeat the fantastic tales he heard in the distant countries to which his travels led him--a habit we are far from wishing to blame--modern criticism has never succeeded in convicting him of falsehood or exasperation in matters of which he could judge with his own eyes. Our surprise at his figures is diminished when we remember with what prodigious rapidity buildings of sun-dried bricks could be erected. The material was at hand in any possible quantity; the erection of such a length of wall was only a question of hands. Now if we suppose, with M. Oppert, that the work was undertaken by Nebuchadnezzar after the fall of Nineveh, that prince may very well have employed whole nations upon it, driving them into the workshops as the captive Jews were driven. In such a fashion the great wall that united into one city towns which had been previously separated--such as the original Babylon, Cutha, and Borsippa--might have been raised without any great difficulty. It is certain that the population of such a vast extent of country cannot have been equally dense at all points. A large part must have been occupied by royal parks, by gardens, vineyards, and even cultivated fields. Babylon must, in fact, have been rather a vast intrenched camp than a city in the true sense of the word.

At the time when Herodotus and Ctesias visited Babylon, this wall--which was dismantled by the Persians in order to render revolt more difficult--must have been almost everywhere in a state of ruin, but enough of it remained to attract curious travellers, just as the picturesque fortifications of the Greek emperors are one of the sights of modern Constantinople. The more intelligent among them, such as Herodotus, took note of the measurements given to them as representing the original state of the great work whose ruins lay before their eyes and confirmed the statements of their guides.[64] The quarter then still inhabited was the _Royal City_, the true Babylon, whose great public works have left such formidable traces even to the present day. Naturally no vestige of the tunnel under the Euphrates has been found; we may even be tempted to doubt that it ever existed.[65] But we cannot doubt that the two sections of the town were put in communication one with another by a stone bridge; the evidence on that point is too clear to admit of question.[66] The descriptions of the structure give us a high idea of the engineering skill of the Chaldæans. To build such a bridge and insure its stability was no small undertaking. The river at this point is about 600 feet wide, and from twelve to sixteen deep at its deepest part.[67] We need hardly say that for many centuries there has been no bridge over the Euphrates either in the neighbourhood of Babylon or at any other point in Mesopotamia. As for the quays, Fresnel found some parts in very good preservation in 1853.[68] At the point where this discovery was made the quay was built of very hard and very red bricks, completely covered with bitumen so as to resist the action of the water for as long as possible. The bricks bore the name of Nabounid, who must have continued the work begun by Nebuchadnezzar.

The description given by Herodotus of the way in which Babylon was built and the circulation of its inhabitants provided for must also be taken as applying to the Royal City. “The houses are mostly three and four stories high; the streets all run in straight lines, not only those parallel to the river, but also the cross-streets which lead to the waterside. At the river end of these cross-streets are low gates in the fence that skirts the stream, which are, like the great gates in the outer wall, of brass and open on the water.”[69]

We may perhaps form some idea of Babylon from the appearance of certain parts of Cairo. Herodotus seems to have been struck by the regularity of the plan, the length of the streets, and the height of the houses. In these particulars it was very different from the low and irregularly built Greek cities of the fifth century B.C. The height of the houses is to be explained partly by the necessity for accommodating a very dense population, partly by the desire for as much shade as possible.[70]

The decadence of Babylon had begun when Herodotus visited it towards the middle of the fifth century before our era;[71] but the town was still standing, and some of the colossal works of its later kings were still intact. The last dynasty had come to an end less than a century before. We are ready, therefore, to believe the simple and straightforward description he has left us, even in those particulars which are so well calculated to cause surprise. The evidence of Ctesias, who saw Babylon some half century later, seems here and there to be tainted with exaggeration, but on the whole it agrees with that of Herodotus. Supposing that he does expand his figures a little, Ctesias is yet describing buildings whose ruins, at least, he saw with his own eyes, and sometimes his statements are borne out by those of Alexander’s historians.[72]

The case of Nineveh is very different. Of that city Herodotus hardly knew more than the name; he contents himself with mere passing allusions to it.[73] Ctesias is trammelled by fewer scruples. When he wrote his history Nineveh had ceased to exist for more than two centuries; the statements of Xenophon[74] prove that at the time of the famous retreat its site was practically deserted and its name almost forgotten in the very district in which its ruins stood. But the undaunted Ctesias gives us a description of the Assyrian capital as circumstantial as if he had lived there in the days of Sennacherib or Assurbanipal. According to his account it formed an elongated rectangle, the long sides being 150 stades (17 miles 380 yards), and the shorter 90 stades (10 miles 595 yards), in length, so that the total circumference was 480 stades (55 miles 240 yards).[75] The whole of this space was inclosed by a wall 100 Greek feet (103 feet English) high, and with towers of twice that height.

It is hardly necessary to show that all this is pure invention. To find room for such a Nineveh we should have to take all the space between the ruins opposite Mossoul and those of Nimroud. But all the Assyrian texts that refer to Nineveh and Calah speak of them as two distinct cities, each with an independent life and period of supremacy of its own, while between the two sites there are no traces of a great urban population. The 1,500 towers on the walls were the offspring of the same brain that imagined the tower of Ninus nine stades (5458 feet) high. We can scent an arbitrary assertion in the proportion of two to one given to the heights of the towers over that of the wall. In the fortified walls of the bas-reliefs the curtain is never greatly excelled in height by its flanking towers (see Vol. I. Figs. 51, 60, 76, and 158, and above, Fig. 23).

Ctesias has simply provided in his Nineveh a good pendant to Babylon. Being quite free to exercise his imagination, he has laid down even a greater circumference than that of the city on the Euphrates. The superiority thus ascribed to the northern city is enough by itself to arouse our suspicions. We cannot point to any particular text, but contemporary history as a whole suggests that Babylon was more populous than Nineveh, just as Bagdad is now more populous than Mossoul. Nineveh, and Calah before it, were the capitals of a soldier nation, they were cities born, like Dour-Saryoukin, of the will of man. Political events called them into life, and other political events caused them to vanish off the face of the earth. Babylon, on the other hand, was born of natural conditions; she was one of the eternal cities of the world. The Turks do their best to make Hither Asia a desert, but so long as they do not entirely succeed, so long as some light of culture and commerce still flickers in the country, it will burn in that part of Mesopotamia which is now called _El-Jezireh_ (_the island_), where the two streams are close together, and canals cut from one to the other can bring all the intermediate tract into cultivation.

Sennacherib speaks thus of his capital: “Nineveh, the supreme city, the city beloved of Istar, in which the temples of the gods and goddesses are to be found.”[76] With its kings and their military guards and courts, with the priests that served the sanctuaries of the gods, with the countless workmen who built the great buildings, Nineveh must have been a fine and flourishing city in the days of the Sargonids; but even then its population cannot have equalled that of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. The latter was something more than a seat of royalty and a military post; it was the great entrepôt for all the commerce of Western Asia.[77]

All the travellers who have visited the neighbourhood of Mossoul are agreed that, on the left bank of the Tigris, there is no trace of any wall but that which forms a rather irregular parallelogram and embraces the two mounds of Nebbi-Yonnas and Kouyundjik (Fig. 18).[78] According to M. Oppert this wall was about ten thousand metres (nearly 6¼ miles) in circumference, which would make it cover about one-eleventh of the ground covered by modern Paris. There is nothing here that is not in accord with our ideas as to the character and importance of Nineveh. If we add to the town inclosed within such a wall suburbs stretching along the right bank of the river on the site of modern Mossoul, we shall have a city capable of holding perhaps two or three hundred thousand people.

In the northern part of the inclosure, not far from the north-western angle, Sir Henry Layard made some excavations that brought one of the principal gates of ancient Nineveh to light.[79] The passage was probably vaulted, but its upper part had disappeared. The gateway, which was built by Sennacherib, had a pair of winged bulls looking towards the city and another pair looking towards the country outside. The limestone pavement in the entrance still bears the mark of wheels. Two great chambers are hollowed out of the thickness of the walls and open into the entrance passage. The walls must be here about 116 feet thick, judging from the proportion, in Layard’s plan,[80] between them and one of the two chambers, which has a diameter, as we are told by its finder, of 23 feet. We need say no more of this doorway. The town attached to the palace of Khorsabad will give us a better opportunity for the study of a city gate.

The “town of Sargon,” _Dour-Saryoukin_ or _Hisr-Sargon_, according as we follow one or the other method of transcribing the Assyrian name, was far smaller than Babylon, was smaller even than Nineveh. It formed a parallelogram two sides of which were about 1,950 yards, the other two about 1,870 yards long, which would give a surface of considerably more than a square mile. This city is interesting not for the part it played in history, for of that we know nothing, and it is quite possible that after the death of Sargon it may have been practically abandoned, but because, of all the cities of Assyria, it is that whose line of circumvallation has been best preserved and most carefully studied (Vol. I. Fig. 144).

Like all inhabited places of any importance Dour-Saryoukin was carefully fortified. Over the whole of Mesopotamia the words town and fortress seem to have been almost convertible terms. The nature of the soil does not lend itself to any such distinctions as those of upper and lower city, as it does in Italy and Greece; there was no _acropolis_, to which the inhabitants could fly when the outer defences were broken down. In case of great need the royal palace with its massive gates and cincture of commanding towers might be looked upon as a citadel; while in Babylon and some other towns several concentric lines of fortification made an attack more arduous and prolonged the defence. But, nevertheless, the chief care of the Mesopotamian engineers was given to the strengthening of the external wall, the _enceinte_, properly speaking.

At Khorsabad this stood on a plinth three feet eight inches high, above which began the sun-dried brick. The whole is even now nowhere less than forty-five feet high, while in parts it reaches a height of sixty feet. If we remember how greatly walls built of the materials here used must have suffered from the weather, we shall no longer be astonished at the height ascribed by Herodotus to the walls of Babylon: “These were, he says, 200 royal cubits (348 feet) high.”[81] This height was measured, no doubt, from the summit of the tallest towers into the deepest part of the ditch, which he adds, “was wide and deep.” It is possible that the interpreters who did the honours of Babylon to the Greek historian exaggerated the figures a little, just as those of Memphis added something to the height of the pyramids. That the exaggeration was not very great is suggested by what he says as to the thickness of the wall; he puts it at fifty royal cubits, or eighty-six feet six inches. Now those of Khorsabad are only between six and seven feet thinner than this, and it is certain that the walls of Babylon, admired by all antiquity as the masterpieces of the Chaldæan engineers, must have surpassed those of the city improvised by Sargon both in height and thickness.

Far from abusing our credulity, Herodotus is within the mark when he says that on the summit of the wall “enough room was left between the towers to turn a four-horse chariot.”[82] As for Ctesias, he speaks of a width “greater than what is necessary to allow two chariots to pass each other.”[83] Such thicknesses were so far beyond the ideas of Greek builders that their historians seem to have been afraid that if they told the truth they would not be believed, so they attenuated rather than exaggerated the real dimensions. If we give a chariot a clear space of ten feet, which is liberal indeed, it will be seen that not two, but six or seven, could proceed abreast on such walls.

The nature of the materials did not allow walls to be thin, and in making them very thick there were several great advantages. The Assyrians understood the use of the battering-ram. We see it employed in several of the bas-reliefs for opening a breach in the ramparts of a beleaguered town (Vol. I. Fig. 60 and above, Fig. 23). They also dug mines, as soon as they had pierced the revetment of stone or burnt brick.[84] To prevent or to neutralize the employment of such methods of attack they found no contrivance more effectual than giving enormous solidity to their walls. Against such masses the battering-ram would be almost powerless, and mines would take so much time that they would not be very much better. Finally, the platform at the summit of a wall built on such principles would afford room for a number of defenders that would amount to a large army.

Throughout the circumference of the _enceinte_ the curtain was strengthened by rectangular flanking towers having a front of forty-five, and a salience of rather more than thirteen feet.[85] These were separated from each other by intervals of ninety feet, or double the front of a tower. Only the lower parts of the towers are now in existence, and we have to turn to the representations of fortresses in the reliefs before we can restore their super-structures with any certainty. In these sculptures what we may call the head of the tower equals on an average from a fourth to a fifth of the height of the curtain. By adopting an elevation half way between these two proportions, M. Place has given to his towers a total height of 105 feet to the top of their crenellations, a height which is near enough to the 100 Grecian feet attributed by Diodorus to the Nineveh walls. The description borrowed by that writer from Ctesias, is, as we have shown, in most respects quite imaginary, but it may have contained this one exact statement, especially as a height of about 100 feet seems to have been usually chosen for cities of this importance.

The parapets of the towers were corbelled out from their walls and pierced with loopholes, as we know from the reliefs. Each doorway was flanked by a pair of towers, the wall between them being only wide enough for the entrance. Our Plate V. will give a very exact idea of the general appearance of the whole _enceinte_. Including those of the palace mound, it has been calculated that the city of Sargon had one hundred and sixty-seven towers. Was there a ditch about the wall like that at Babylon? We are tempted to say yes to this, especially when we remember the statement of Herodotus that the earth taken from the ditch served to afford materials for the wall. Moreover such a ditch could have been easily kept full of water by means of the two mountain streams that flow past the mound. But the explorers tell us they could find no trace of such a ditch.[86] If it ever existed it has now been so completely filled up that no vestige remains.

Upon each of its south-eastern, south-western and north-eastern faces the city wall was pierced with two gates. One of these, decorated with sculptures and glazed bricks, is called by Place the _porte ornée_, or state entrance, the other, upon which no such ornament appears, he calls the _porte simple_. On the north-western face there is only a _porte simple_, the palace mound taking the place of the state gateway. The plinth and the lower courses of burnt brick are continued up to the arches of these gates; the latter are also raised upon a kind of mound which lifts them about eight and a half feet above the level of the plain.

In size and general arrangement these gateways were repetitions of each other. Our Figs. 50 in the first volume, 24 and 25 in this, show severally the present condition, the plan and the restored elevation of a _porte simple_.

The entrance was covered by an advanced work, standing out some eighty-three feet into the plain. Each angle of this sort of barbican was protected by a low tower, about forty feet wide. Through the centre of the curtain uniting these towers there is a first vaulted passage, leading to a large courtyard (A in Fig. 24), beyond which are the space (B) between the great flanking towers of the gate proper and the long vaulted passage (C--G) which gives access to the town. This passage is not a uniform tunnel. The mass through which it runs is 290 feet thick, and in two places it is crossed at right angles by transepts wider than itself (D and F). The tunnel ends in a kind of open vestibule interposed between the inner face of the wall and the commencement of the street. All these courts, passages and transepts are paved with large limestone slabs except the small chamber that opens from one end of the outer transept (I). This small apartment was not a thoroughfare, but it has been thought that signs of a staircase leading either to upper rooms or to the battlements could be traced in it. We have seen that the Egyptian pylons had such staircases and upper chambers.[87] It would be curious to find the arrangement repeated here, but we cannot certainly say that it was so. On the other hand the situation of the doors by which the entrance into the city was barred is very clearly marked. At the point where the passage C opens into the transept D the sockets in which the metal feet of the door pivots were set, are still in place.[88]

The state doorways are distinguished from their more humble companions, in the first place by a flight of eleven brick-built steps which have to be mounted before the court A can be reached from the outside; in the ordinary gateways a gentle inclination of the whole pavement of the court makes such steps unnecessary. A second difference is of more importance. At the entrance to the passage marked C on our plan the state doorways have a pair of winged bulls whose foreparts stand out a little from the wall while their backs support the arch. The latter is decorated with the semicircle of enamelled bricks of which we have already spoken at length in our chapter upon decoration (Vol. I., Figs. 123 and 124, and below, Fig. 26). Behind the bulls there are two winged genii facing each other across the passage and about thirteen feet high (Fig. 27).

That these monumental doorways with their rich decorations were reserved for pedestrians, is proved by the flight of steps. It was not thought desirable to subject their sculptures to the dangers of vehicular traffic. In the _portes simples_ the marks of wheels can be distinctly traced on the pavements.[89]