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One of the fundamental characters of Chaldæo-Assyrian architecture is the exclusive use of bricks as the constructive material. This is required by the very nature of the soil of Mesopotamia, in which building-stone and wood suitable for carpenters’ work are entirely wanting, while the clay is thick, adhesive, and peculiarly adapted for fashioning in the mould and baking in the kiln. Accordingly, while the modern inhabitants of the country continue to make bricks, their manufacture is already recorded in the biblical reminiscences of the Tower of Babel: “Go to,” say the men who would build a tower that should reach to Heaven, “let us make brick and burn them thoroughly: and they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar.”[2] The prophet Nahum informs us of the method of brick-making: “Draw thee waters,” he says,” ... go into clay, and tread the mortar, make strong the brick-kiln.”[3] There were two kinds of bricks. The unbaked brick is a square of whitish clay, mixed with fine straw and simply dried in the sun when it comes out of the mould; it was generally from 8 in. to 1 ft. square by 4 in. thick. The month in which the heat of summer first becomes intolerable in these regions, namely the month of Sivan (May-June) was called “the brick month,” or that in which the clay cakes were submitted to the action of the sun. To judge by what is done in Egypt at the present day, one workman could by himself make from one thousand to fifteen hundred bricks a day. The baked brick was subjected to the action of fire in proper kilns, like those of our modern brickyards; it acquired, through the baking, a reddish colour, and was less sensible than the crude brick to the decomposing action of damp; it was also more limited in its dimensions, in order that the heat might penetrate the internal substance of the mass, without danger of calcination on the surface. On one side of every brick, baked or unbaked, the name and official titles of the reigning prince were stamped by means of a matrix or a die used as a seal; thus, at Tello most of the bricks were marked with the name of Gudea, and at Babylon bricks of Nebuchadnezzar are found by hundreds of thousands.

Fig. 1.—Brick from Tello (Louvre).

While describing the construction of the fortifications at Babylon, Herodotus shows the process followed by the Chaldæans in building a wall: “As they dug the moat, they made bricks of the earth taken out of the trench, and when they had made a certain number of bricks they baked them in kilns. Then, using boiling bitumen as mortar, and inserting mats of woven reeds at every thirtieth course of bricks, they built first the borders of the moat, and next the wall itself in the same way.”[4] Mesopotamia possesses abundant wells of bitumen, notably at Hit and at Kalah Shergat; as for the tall reeds which still grow in abundance in the marshes of Lower Chaldæa, their employment in building had the effect of giving more solidity and cohesion to the courses of bricks. For walls less carefully constructed, or for partition-walls in the interior of the houses, a simple mortar of clay was used instead of bitumen. In great structures, such as Birs Nimroud at Babylon, the bricks are bound together by mortar made of lime, solid enough to stand all tests. The ruins of Mugheir have revealed the use of a mixture of ashes and lime, which is still employed by the natives, and called by them sharûr.

The necessarily limited size of bricks baked in kilns or dried in the sun must have helped to bring about a speedier disintegration of the structures, and have been a serious obstacle to the erection of walls of a height to be compared, for instance, with that of the Egyptian temples. At certain seasons of the year in Mesopotamia the rain falls in torrents, and, filtering through walls in bad repair, would soon open cracks and bring about the ruin of the structure. In these lowlands furrowed with watercourses, the crude brick of the foundations often on this account ran the risk of returning to its condition of clayey mud without consistency. Greek tradition relates that the Medes and Chaldæans saw a part of the walls of Nineveh fall of themselves, when they prolonged a blockade which forced the besieged to admit the waters of the Tigris during many weeks into the moats beneath the ramparts. The cuneiform inscriptions themselves, while the empire founded by Nebuchadnezzar was flourishing, often point out temples and palaces falling to ruin, which the kings strive without ceasing to repair or rebuild.

The old sanctuaries of primitive Chaldæa, E-saggil, E-zida, the Temple of the Great Light, E-parra, E-anna, E-ulbar, and others consecrated to Sin, to Samas, to Nana, to Bel Marduk, to Nebo, are restored at great expense by Nabonidus, the last King of Babylon, who sets himself the task of recalling in his inscriptions the material difficulties of this work worthy of a pious antiquarian. Let no one be surprised after this at the striking contrast between the ruins of Mesopotamia, and those of Egypt as we now see them. In the valley of the Nile building-stone abounds, and the architect has only to make his choice among the various qualities of material. Accordingly he hews out gigantic monoliths, erects imposingly majestic pylons, rears to an aerial height forests of pillars which seem to uphold the sky, plants in the middle of the desert those massive Pyramids which will defy to the end of time even the most determined of Vandals. On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, on the contrary, there is now nothing but the uniform plain of the desert, broken here and there by mounds of débris covered with sand; here it may be said with truth that the very ruins have perished. Only in thought can the archæologist reconstruct vast buildings in accordance with the vast material buried in disorder in the mud. The use of bricks in building has been, to a greater extent than political events, the auxiliary of Jehovah’s wrath against Nineveh and Babylon.

If the nature of the soil forced the Mesopotamian architect to build with bricks, the neighbourhood of rivers and canals for irrigation and the want of outlet for the water obliged him at the same time to have recourse to an expedient peculiar to Chaldæo-Assyrian architecture. He had to raise the actual dwelling on an artificial terrace removed from the level of a soil impregnated with unwholesome damp. This platform or basement of unbaked brick on which the building was placed is met with everywhere, not only at Nineveh and Babylon, but from the beginning in the substructures of Mugheir, Tello, Warka, and Abu Shahrein. In the palace of the patesi Gudea, the mass forms a sort of immense pedestal 39 ft. high, and nearly 655 ft. at the base; at the present day the sides form in relation to the plain a slope of 164 ft. Formerly the platform was mounted by a gentle slope intended for horses and chariots, and by one or more flights of steps which broke the outline of the terrace. The stone staircases by which the terrace of the palaces of Persepolis is ascended, are still in place; in Chaldæa and Assyria, where they were built of brick, they have almost everywhere disappeared. However, Taylor discovered two on the side of the platform of the palace of Abu Shahrein; one has only twelve steps 2 ft. broad; but the other was a monumental staircase of stone, 16 ft. broad, with a slope of more than 65 ft.

The edifice which surmounts the platform at Tello is of bricks cemented together with bitumen; its exterior walls are 5 ft. 10 in. thick, and form a parallelogram 173 ft. long and 101 ft. broad. Like the palaces of Warka and Mugheir, its orientation is according to the Assyrian custom—that is to say, the angles are turned towards the cardinal points, not the sides as in the Egyptian monuments. The two longer sides bulge slightly towards the middle, thus describing two opposite elliptical curves—a peculiarity which gives to the plan of the edifice something of the appearance of

Fig. 2.—Plan of the palace at Tello (after Heuzey).

a barrel, or of two trapeziums joined at the base. The outer surface of the walls is not everywhere uniform and flat; the adjacent sides of the northern angle are ornamented by projections alternately curved and rectilineal—a system of decoration which has also been observed at Warka, among the ruins of the temple called Wuswas, and is found later in the Assyrian monuments. The great north-eastern façade exhibits in the middle, besides the outward swell of which we have spoken, a projection 3 ft. 3 in. thick and 18 ft. long. The wings of this projection are formed of square pilasters and half-columns 1 ft. 7 in. in diameter, which recall the clustered pillars of our cathedrals, and form one of the most interesting peculiarities of the primitive architecture of Chaldæa. Taylor[5] and

Fig. 3.—Section of pillar (after Heuzey).

Loftus[6] had already remarked, at Abu Shahrein and Warka respectively, pillars and half-columns of brick-work; M. de Sarzec has found the same architectural features in one of the secondary mounds of Tello, which he calls the tell of pillars,[7] and which seems to represent the ruins of the temple of the god Nin Girsu. Two of these pillars, which measured 6 ft. in thickness, and were separated by a space of 6½ ft., still consisted of twenty-four courses of bricks. “Each pillar,” says M. de Sarzec, “is formed of a cluster of four round columns close together, and built entirely of brickwork.... If one of the four round columns is taken to pieces it is found that every alternate course is formed of a circular brick in the centre, round which radiate eight triangular bricks grooved at their interior angle, and rounded on the outer surface, so that they describe by their union a complete circle. In the next course the circle is composed, on the contrary, of eight triangular bricks ending in a point, which are united at the centre of the column, and of six other curved bricks which enclose the first eight. The space between the four circles thus formed is filled up with two large bricks hollowed out in the form of an arc of a circle, which fit exactly into it. These curious pillars, thus ingeniously constructed, recall the Egyptian order, modelled upon vegetable forms, which imitates four lotus-stalks in a bouquet; they show how skilfully the Chaldæans could dispense with the stone column. The base consisted of a square mass of bricks forming a pedestal projecting on all sides 2 ft. 11 in. beyond the shaft. The whole group was covered with a thick bed of plaster.”[8]

Yet, whatever skill was displayed in the manufacture of these specially moulded bricks, round, triangular, or forming a section of a circle, pillars of this construction could not, like the Egyptian column, show sufficient solidity to support a heavy mass; they would soon have bent under the burden. Accordingly they could only be employed exceptionally and almost entirely for decoration, whether to support the roof of a grand staircase or to shelter the cella in which a deity delivered his oracles.

The defective side of Chaldæan architecture, therefore, consists in the lack of stone supports rising proudly into space like the Egyptian column, and upholding on their bold heads, quite as well as the thickest walls, the foot of the arch, the architraves, the roof, the upper terraces or the upper stories of the building. But the proof that the architects would have hewn columns of stone, if nature had furnished them with the necessary material, is just this ingenious artifice by which they succeeded in replacing them; and moreover they did not hesitate to employ small columns of wood or metal in the construction of small buildings, such as the shrines of their gods. A stela of King Nabu-ablu-iddin (about B.C. 900), found at Abu Habbah, represents the shrine of the god Samas, supported by small wooden pillars, covered with plates of bronze overlapping each other so as to resemble the trunk of a palm tree (see fig. 29). The base and the capital are alike; they are composed of a double volute shaped like a lotus-flower, approaching somewhat the Ionic capital; in short, the Chaldæans knew how to make use of the column in minor architecture.

One doorway at least was opened in each façade of the palace of Tello, but these openings were not on the axis of the structure, nor even symmetrical. The principal side (the north-east) had two entrances; the largest, nearly in the middle of the swell, had an opening 3 ft. 11 in. broad. It was constructed at a later period—that is to say, at the time near the Christian era when the Græco-Parthian kings of Characene conceived the idea of restoring Tello and installing themselves there. Like the Arab houses of our day, the outer walls of the palace of Gudea show no other openings; there are neither windows nor lights of any sort, admitting the air and the day, and looking out over the country or the town.

Let us now penetrate into the interior of the Chaldæan edifice, of which the blind and dumb walls leave in our imagination an impression of gloom and cold uniformity. The walls seem never to have exhibited the smallest architectural decoration; they are entirely bare, and only characterised from time to time by depressions and projections; no traces of mouldings, of plinths, of cornices, and of those devices to which the architects of all countries have recourse in order to break the lines of the walls, and to call forth effects of light and shade. It must be supposed that the interior decoration of the palace consisted entirely of colouring and hanging draperies. The thickness of the wall varies from 8 ft. 6 in. to 2 ft. 7 in. All the partitions cut one another at right angles, forming thirty-six square or rectangular chambers; the largest measures 39 ft. 4 in. by 12 ft. 2 in., and the smallest 10 ft. 11 in. by 9 ft. 9 in. The disproportion which exists, especially in the state saloon, between the length and breadth, the extreme thickness of the walls, even of those which are the least important in the structure, form essential peculiarities to which we shall draw attention later in the Assyrian edifices. At Nineveh it has been proved that it is the thrust of the semicircular vaulting, which roofs the chambers, that has forced the architect to bring the parallel walls near to one another and to give them an enormous thickness. Are we, in the absence of palpable proof, to draw the same conclusion with regard to the palaces of old Chaldæa? Are we authorised to assert that the vault was known three thousand years before our era? In a word, how were the halls of Gudea’s building covered? Was it everywhere by means of transverse rafters supporting a floor and a terrace? or was it oftener by a bricked vault? As far as we have read M. de Sarzec’s narrative, or M. Heuzey’s studies on the excavations of Tello, we have found no direct answer to this question. Perhaps the present state of the ruins or the successive alterations to which the primitive structure has been subjected do not allow a categorical solution of the problem to be given. However, important indications authorise us to believe that the Chaldæans of the time of Gudea already understood the vault and used it for roofing their houses. In several parts even of the palace of Tello, M. de Sarzec found small vaulted passages, 3 ft. 3 in. high and 1 ft. 11 in.[9] thick, in a perfect state of preservation; in one of the secondary mounds he brought to light a small vaulted drain which carried the sewage of the town far away into the plain. Taylor found, in an underground chamber of the necropolis at Mugheir, the most primitive kind of vault that has ever been known—that called the corbelled vault. In this false vault the courses of bricks ascend in parallel rows on each side until they meet one another, every fresh course projecting perceptibly beyond that beneath it, until the opposite courses touch and form one.

Fig. 4.—Corbelled vaulting at Mugheir (after Taylor).

It was, then, as it seems, the Chaldæans who invented the vault;[10] the want of timber compelled them in early times to contrive to defend themselves at once against the heavy rains and the ardour of a torrid sun; the creation of the vault was in their case instinctive and spontaneous. They raised, two or three thousand years before our era, vaults and domes like those which are built to this day by the rudest masons at Mosoul or Bagdad. No doubt the present state of the Chaldæan ruins and the insufficient explorations which have been undertaken among them do not enable us to say whether these Proto-Chaldæans knew every kind of vault, as the Assyrians did in the age of the Sargonids, or the Babylonians at the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar; but the remarkable perfection observed in their monumental structures, and in the very manufacture of the bricks, are so many arguments in favour of the inference that the palaces and houses of the Chaldæans in the time of Gudea were surmounted, for the most part, by semicircular vaults or by cupolas, as were later, according to Strabo,[11] the houses of the Babylonians. The vaults supported a terrace formed of clay; this layer of earth would be less thick over rooms roofed only with a ceiling of palm-beams and reed-matting. The ascent was by staircases, an example of which seems to have been found in the palace at Tello.[12]

While clearing away the material accumulated between the courts A and B, the workmen employed by the French explorer came into contact (at the point H) with a structure of baked brickwork, which proves that the Chaldæans at the remotest epoch had already invented one of the most interesting and characteristic elements of their architecture—the zikkurat or staged tower. The lower layers in the palace of Gudea alone exist, and are composed of two solid masses in stages one above the other. In its present condition the upper terrace is a mass 26 ft. square, 13 ft. less on all sides than the lower stage; perhaps there still exists a third and lower step, which has not been reached by the soundings, which are imperfect at this point. The zikkurat of Tello was not in any case so lofty or so important a structure as those of the Ninevite palaces or those represented by the ruins of Babil or Birs Nimroud at Babylon. It was even much less considerable than that which Taylor observed at Abu Shahrein, and which was equally old. These towers always had, from the first, seven stages, each painted of a different colour, and connected with the worship of the sun (Samas), the moon (Sin), and the five planets of the astronomical system of the Chaldæans.

The disposition of the royal apartments showed a striking analogy with that which we shall meet with again later in the palaces of Nineveh; there were the convenience and comfort which we find in the palaces of modern oriental sovereigns. To the Chaldæans again we must give the credit of having invented that architectural arrangement which springs from the necessities of oriental life, and is so well fitted to its needs that for four thousand years it has never varied. There were in the palace of Gudea three interior courts (A, B, C, fig. 2), round each of which the rooms radiated, and from which they received air and light. Each of these three groups had its own entrance, and communicated with the next group only by a single passage easy to guard or to close. The group of chambers situated in the northern angle (C) was especially isolated and removed from the others; it was the hareem or women’s apartments. At the eastern angle (B) were the rooms composing the seraglio or selamlik—that is to say, the part of the palace inhabited by the king and his officers; there was the saloon for official receptions, of which we have given the dimensions. This part of the royal dwelling communicated on one side with a state courtyard, measuring 55 ft. 8 in. by 68 ft. 9 in., and on the other with the outside by means of a smaller room serving as an antechamber; beside the door opening on the façade, boxes or recesses had been arranged in which the guards were posted. The third group of chambers, on the south-east (A), formed the Khan—that is to say, the dependencies of the palace, the kitchens, the slaves’ lodgings, and the stables.

All the rooms were paved with bricks; they very rarely led into one another, and had an opening looking on to the court. The largest of the doorways, that which opened into the state saloon, was of the unusual breadth of 6 ft. 6 in.; it was probably a folding door. Under each of the principal doors there was a great threshold of marble or alabaster, sometimes covered with an inscription and placed on a bed of bitumen and crushed bricks; under this concrete, finally, cylinders of precious stone and talismanic amulets were generally found.

The leaves of the door turned on pivots, the point of which rested in a cavity hollowed out for this purpose in a great block of diorite. M. de Sarzec brought to the Louvre a large number of these natural blocks, which were found buried in the pavement so as only to rise an inch or two above the surface. On the smooth surface of each of them it is seen that the socket, hollowed out in the form of a conical cup, has undergone an incessant friction; round the hole an inscription, sometimes circular, was engraved (fig. 5). To prevent the wooden pivot of the doors from wearing out too rapidly, it was enveloped in a metal sheath, which took the form of a funnel, and which was fixed to the wood by means of nails. One of these bronze cups has been found at Tello, still in place on the socket.[13]

Fig. 5.—Socket for pivot of door, from Tello (Louvre).

Fig. 6.—Terra-cotta cone from Tello (Louvre).

The discoveries of Loftus and Taylor show us how the façades and the rooms of the Chaldæan palaces were decorated. The principal façade of the buildings at Abu Shahrein and Warka had a mural decoration of a kind as primitive as it was singular.[14] First it was plastered with a thick layer of clay stucco; then, before this plaster was completely dry, cones of baked clay were buried in it, like metal nails. Only the head of these cones is visible on the surface of the wall. While the stem is plunged into the thick clay and sticks there unseen. To the heads of these cones, disposed at regular distances, and acting perhaps also as talismans, various colours are applied; they are black, red, white, or yellow. Moreover, each head is separated from its neighbours by coloured geometrical lines, so that it became to the eye the centre of a lozenge or a square.

If the interior of the rooms was lined in monochrome with white stucco, or with fresco painting, nothing of this decoration is left. But we have in sufficiently large quantities, although always much mutilated, the remains of another more original system of wall decoration, of which the Chaldæans are the inventors—that is to say, enamelled bricks. By applying a coloured paste, which the fire would vitrify, to one of the surfaces of the bricks before baking, a glaze or enamel was produced, closely united to the clay and immovably solid. It was again necessity and their ungrateful climate which induced the Chaldæans to have recourse to this ingenious method. They were in great need of a remedy for the want of stone and a means of preventing the heavy rains from spoiling the colours applied to the walls. They succeeded so perfectly in this that even at the present day the brilliancy of these glazed tiles is not affected. The colours with which they are painted are of the simplest, and vary little; they are blue, white, black, yellow and red. Unfortunately, those fine fragments which have been brought to our museums are only so far interesting that they teach us the technical methods of a manufacture which involves that of opaque glass; even those which are least mutilated contain at the most a few floral designs or portions of the figures of animals, and moreover these last are not older than the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar.

The trenches dug among the massive terraces of Chaldæa have revealed other curious details of construction. We know, for instance, what steps were taken to prevent the sewage of the houses or the rain-water which fell upon them from filtering through the platforms of crude brick on which the buildings stood; a rapid disintegration would have followed. They, therefore, planned a complete system of water-channels and drainage. In one of the mounds at Tello, M. de Sarzec found a series of cylindrical pipes or tubes of baked clay, fitted into one another, and forming together a conduit for the water.[15]

Fig. 7.—Drainage pipe at Mugheir (after Loftus).

But the place where this method has been carried out with peculiarly ingenious skill is the necropolis at Mugheir. The top of the platform, in the body of which the tombs are sunk, is covered with a brick pavement laid with special care, in which every chink is filled up with bitumen. Under this upper crust the coffins are ranged in order, one above the other, each one being placed separately in a small chamber. At intervals brick tubes are met with, fitted into one another and forming a sort of immense flue hidden in the structure. The lower extremity of the pipes opened into a drain; the upper end, on a level with the surface of the pavement of the terrace, was furnished with a cap pierced with an infinite number of small holes like a skimmer. Through these the rain-water was carried off, and this system of drainage was so wonderfully well understood and carried out, that it has remained intact to our own day, and, according to Loftus, the tombs have been so well preserved that they are found perfectly dry, including the bodies and their furniture. We shall see the Assyrians take similar precautions to preserve the terraces of the Ninevite palaces from the percolation of water.

The construction of a temple or palace was the occasion of a religious ceremony analogous to that which we call the laying of the first stone. In a hollow formed in the foundation-wall a cylinder of baked clay was deposited (fig. 8), on which an inscription was written describing the erection of the building and setting forth the piety and great deeds of the prince; this cylinder was accompanied by various talismanic objects: cones and statuettes of bronze and baked clay, cylindrical seals, votive tablets, sometimes of silver or gold. Among the foundations of the palace of Gudea, M. de Sarzec found four of these cavities in the wall measuring 1 ft. 1 in. by 10 in. by 4 in.; they still contained the cylinders and amulets deposited there.

Hiding-places of the same kind have been observed at Senkereh, at Mugheir, and among the ruins of almost all the Chaldæan and Assyrian buildings. The Assyrians themselves, when they wished to restore an old ruined temple, took pains first to find out the hiding-place of the foundation-cylinder or timmennu.

The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, relates in one of the official inscriptions of his reign how he happened to find the timmennu of the earliest builders of the temple of the Sun at Larsa. King Kurigalzu (about B.C. 1350), and later Esarhaddon (B.C. 680-667), and Nebuchadnezzar himself, had repaired this venerated sanctuary, and sought vainly for the hiding-place of the talismans. “Then I, Nabonidus, inspired by my piety towards the goddess Istar of Agade, my sovereign, caused an excavation to be made. The gods Samas and Rammanu granted me their constant favour, and I found the foundation-cylinder of the temple of E-Ulbar.” It bore the name of the king Sagasaltias (about b.c. 1500). After reading the inscription, Nabonidus restored it to its place and himself made another cylinder to record his researches and his own works; he deposited it in the foundation by the side of the ancient cylinder. Modern explorers, no doubt also favoured by Samas and Rammanu, found in a sufficiently good state of preservation the mysterious hiding-places and the precious objects which had been piously placed there 550 years before our era.[16]

Fig. 8.—Foundation-cylinder from Khorsabad (Louvre).