Chapter V: Architecture (2)

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 storey[68] 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-Ninâ 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-Ḳasr (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 Ḳasr 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 Muḳeyyer, and a plan of some chambers at Abû Shahrein was also made out. The house at Muḳeyyer 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 cones[70] 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 Ḳalat Sherḳat (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 Muḳeyyer (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, 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 column[76] 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 Ḳasr 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 Amran[77] 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 Phœnician 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.

B, cf. Layard, _Mon, Ser._ I, Pl. 95.

C, cf. Botta, _Ruines de Ninive_, II, p. 114.

D, E, Bas-reliefs from Kouyunjik.]

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 Nineveh[78] (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 column[81] 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”—διὰ τήν ἀξυλιαν—“because 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-Ninâ (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 Taylor[84] in his excavations at Muḳeyyer (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 Ḳasr 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. Koldewey[85] 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 Muḳeyyer (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 Ḳalat Sherḳat (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.