Chapter I: CIVIL and Military Architecture (3)

Each of these gateways, whether for carriages or foot passengers, was a complicated edifice, and the arrangement of their 10,000 square yards of passage and chamber could scarcely have been explained without the use of plans. Military necessities are insufficient to explain such elaborate contrivances. The existence of barbican and flanking towers is justified by them, but hardly the size of the court and the two great transepts. We cease to be surprised at these, however, when we remember the part played by the city gates in the lives of the urban populations of the Levant.

In the East the town gate is and always has been what the _agora_ was to the cities of Greece and the _forum_ to those of Italy. Doubtless it was ill-adapted to be used as a theatre of political or judicial debate, like the public places of the Græco-Roman world. But in the East the municipal life of the West has never obtained a footing. The monarchy and patriarchal _régime_ have been her two forms of government; she had no need of wide spaces for crowds of voters or for popular tribunals. Nothing more was required than a place for gossip and the retailing of news, a place where the old men could find themselves surrounded by a circle of fellow townsmen crouched upon their heels, and, after hearing plaintiffs, defendants and their witnesses, could give those awards that were the first form of justice. Nothing could afford a better _rendezvous_ for such purposes than the gate of a fortified city or village. Hollowed in the thickness of a wall of prodigious solidity it gave a shelter against the north wind in winter, while in summer its cool galleries must have been the greatest of luxuries. Husbandmen going to their fields, soldiers setting out on expeditions, merchants with their caravans, all passed through these resounding archways and had a moment in which to hear and tell the news. Those whom age or easy circumstances relieved from toil or war passed much of their time in the gates talking with all comers or sunk in the sleepy reverie in which orientals pass so much of their lives.

All this is painted for us with the most simple fidelity in the Bible. “And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot seeing them, rose up to meet them.”[90] When Abraham buys a burying place in Hebron he addresses himself to Ephron, the owner of the ground, “and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city.”[91] So too Boaz, when he wishes to marry Ruth and to get all those who had rights over the young Moabitess to resign them in his favour, “went up to the gate, and sat him down there ... and he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, sit ye down here. And they sat down.”[92] And these old men were called upon to witness the acts of resignation performed by Ruth’s nearest relatives.[93]

So too, in later ages, when the progress of political life led kings to inhabit great separate buildings of their own, the palace gates became for the courtiers what the city gates were for the population at large. At Khorsabad they were constructed on exactly the same plan as those of the town; they are even more richly decorated and the chambers they inclose are no less spacious. In them servants, guards, military officers, foreign ambassadors and wire-pullers of every kind could meet, lounge about, and await their audiences. Read the book of Esther carefully and you will find continual allusions to this custom. “In those days, while Mordecai sat in the king’s gate, two of the king’s chamberlains, Bigthan and Teresh, of those which kept the door, were wroth, and sought to lay hands on the king Ahasuerus.”[94] The gates of the palace must have been open to all comers for a man of despised race and a butt for the insults of Haman, like Mordecai, to have been enabled to overhear the secret whispers of the king’s chamberlains. In the sequel we find Mordecai hardly ever moving from this spot.

Assis le plus souvent aux portes du palais,

as Racine says, he thence addresses to Esther the advice by which she is governed. He did not stand up, as he must have done in a mere passage, for Haman complains that he did not rise and do him reverence.[95]

This use of gates has not been abandoned in the East. At Mossoul, for instance, the entrances to the city are buildings with several rooms in them, and in the gate opening upon the Tigris M. Place often saw the governor of the province seated among his officers in an upper chamber and dispensing justice.[96] In the same town the doorways of a few great private houses are frequented in the same fashion by the inhabitants of the quarter. This was the case with the French Consulate, which was established in a large house that had been the ancestral home of a family of independent beys, now extinct. At the entrance there was a chamber covered with a depressed cupola and surrounded by stone benches. Right and left were four lodges for porters, and on one side a staircase leading to four upper rooms built over the vault. One of these served as a divan. All this was separated by a large courtyard from the dwelling place proper, and even after the building had become a part of France, the neighbours kept up their habit of coming to sit and gossip under its dome.[97]

The word _porte_ has thus acquired a significance in every European language that could hardly be understood but for the light thrown upon it by such customs as those illustrated by the remains of Assyrian architecture, and alluded to so often in the sacred writings. Every one who has visited Stamboul, has seen in the first court of the Old Seraglio, that arched doorway (_Bab-i-Houmaioun_) in whose niches the heads of great criminals and rebellious vassals used once to be placed; it formerly led to the saloons in which the Ottoman sultans presided at the great council, listened to the reports of their officers, and received foreign ambassadors. The doorway through which the august presence was reached ended by representing in the imagination of those who passed through it; first, the whole of the building to which it belonged, and secondly, the sovereign enthroned behind it. The decrees in which the successors of Mohammed II. made known their will ended with these words: “_Given at our Sublime Gate, at our Gate of Happiness_.” In later years the Old Seraglio was abandoned. The different public departments were removed into a huge edifice more like a barracks than an eastern palace, but the established formula was retained. In the Constantinople of to-day “to go to the Porte” means to go to the government offices, and even the government itself, the sultan, that is, and his ministers, are known in all the chancelleries of Europe as _the Porte_, _the Sublime Porte_, _the Ottoman Porte_.

It was, no doubt, by a metonomy of the same kind that the capital of ancient Chaldæa, the town into which the principal sanctuaries of the national gods were gathered, was called _Bab-ilou_, the _Gate of God_, which was turned by the Greeks into Βαβυλών, or Babylon.

After our careful description of the remains left by the city of Sargon we need enter into few details as to the other fortified _enceintes_ that have been explored in Mesopotamia. The same rectangular plan, the same thick walls and carefully arranged gateways are to be found in them all. With the Assyrians as with their neighbours, every town was fortified. The square form seems to have been universally employed for the flanking towers. It is quite by exception that we find in one of the pictures of a siege on the Balawat gates, tall and slender towers that appear to be round on plan and to be much higher than the curtain they defend (Fig. 28). Besides these town walls there were, no doubt, at the mouths of the valleys opening into the basin of the Tigris, strong forts and isolated towers, perched upon some abrupt rock or ridge: the siege of such a fortress seems to be going on in the relief figured on the next page (Fig. 29). The platform at the top of the tower seems to be raised and strengthened by a structure of wood, which stands out beyond the crenellations and is protected by a row of shields, like the bulwarks of a Roman galley. This contrivance resembles those _ourdeys_ of which the military engineers of the middle ages made such constant use. The garrison still show a bold front from behind their defences, but the women and old men, foreseeing the fall of their stronghold, are decamping while there is yet time.

The military successes of the Assyrians are partly to be explained by their engineering skill. In all that concerned the attack and defence of places they seem to have left the Egyptians far behind. In addition to mines and battering rams they employed movable towers which they pushed forward against such walls as they wished to attack point blank, and thought either too high or too well lined with defenders to be open to escalade (Vol. I., Fig. 26). In the relief partly reproduced on page 75, the defenders have not ceased their resistance, but in the lower section, in what we may call the _predella_ of the picture, we see a long band of prisoners of both sexes being led off by soldiers. These we may suppose to be captives taken in the suburbs of the beleaguered city, or in battles already won.[98]

The Assyrians not only understood how to defend their own cities, and to destroy those of their foes, they were fully alive to the necessity for good carriage roads, if their armies and military machines were to be transported rapidly from place to place. How far these roads extended we do not know, but Place ascertained the existence of paved causeways debouching from the gates of Dour-Saryoukin,[99] and unless they stretched at least to the frontiers, it is difficult to see how the Assyrians could have made such great use as they did of war chariots. Not one of their series of military pictures can be named in which they do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid disks of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage with its tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of to-day can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number (Figs. 21 and 31).

In the interior of the town--we are still speaking of the town of Sargon--these same causeways formed the principal streets. They were about forty feet wide. Their construction was, of course, far inferior to that of a Roman road. There were no footpaths, either within or without the cities; the stones were small, irregular in shape, and not of a very durable kind. They were placed in a single layer, and the pavement when finished looked like a mere bed of broken stones. All Mesopotamia, however, cannot now show a road that can be compared to these ancient ways. Wherever the traveller goes, his beasts of burden and the wheels of his carts sink either into a bed of dust or into deep and clinging mud, according to the season. It is no better in the towns. Whoever has had the ill luck to be out, in the rainy season, in the sloughs and sewers that the Turks call streets, will be ready to acknowledge that the civilization of Assyria in the time of Sargon was better furnished than that of Turkey in the days of Abdul-Hamid.

At Khorsabad, where the main streets must, like those of Babylon, have intersected each other at right angles, how were the buildings, public and private, arranged? We might have had an answer to this interesting question had M. Place been in command of enough time and means to clear the whole interior of the _enceinte_. Even as it was he found enough to justify him in asserting that the great inclosure of some eight hundred acres was not, as we might be tempted to imagine at first sight, a royal park attached to the palace, but a city. He sunk trenches at three points where low mounds suggested the presence of ruins, and all his doubts soon disappeared. Several yards below the present level of the ground he found the original surface, with the pavements of streets, courtyards and rooms; doorways with their thresholds and jambs; walls covered with stucco, cut stone and even alabaster slabs; potsherds, fragments of brick and utensils of various kinds--decisive evidence, in fact, that one of those agglomerations of civilized human beings that we call towns, had formerly occupied the site.