Читать книгу History of Ancient Art - Franz von Reber - Страница 9

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THE traditional culture of the land of the Euphrates and Tigris is not younger than that of the Nile. Though the third dynasty (commencing, according to Berosos, with the twenty-third century B.C.) is the first of which we have monumental remains, it cannot be denied that long before that time an important people had inhabited the country, a nation very different from the nomadic hordes which then, as to-day, roved through the neighboring deserts. Several races of antiquity were conscious that the most primitive people of civilization had lived in the land of the two streams. The Jews considered that to have been their original home. The Patriarch Abraham had emigrated from Chaldæan Ur to Canaan. The Greek legend of Deucalion points to the history of Mesopotamia in the same manner as does the Jewish myth of the Deluge; the oldest Greek knowledge of astronomy, astrology, and the calculation of time seems to have been derived from the same source. The tale of the division of the nations in Babel, and their spreading over the face of the earth from that point, is certainly based upon the existence of a most ancient centre of civilization upon the banks of the Euphrates.

Fig. 36.—Temple of Mugheir (Ur).

The land offered no materials for monuments which, like those of Egypt, could stand uninjured through thousands of years. The narrow valley of the Nile is enclosed by the cliffs of the desert border, which seemed directly to encourage, by the excellence of the building-stone there procured, the erection of immense and indestructible works. The plain of Mesopotamia, on the other hand, spread far beyond the courses of the two streams, losing itself in deserts without any line of eminences as a demarcation. The remote mountains offered no quarries at all comparable to those of Egypt. The soil was of good clay for the manufacture of bricks, but fuel was lacking with which to burn and harden them. The inhabitants of the land were generally obliged to content themselves with drying the clay in the sun, making up by the great thickness of the masonry for the firmness lacking to the material. They further strengthened the massive walls with a facing, or with buttress-like piers of burnt brick, or solidified the interior with alternate courses of this harder substance. The bitumen which still flows at Hit, on the Euphrates, north of Bagdad at the southern border of the higher alluvial terrace of Assyria, was an excellent substance for cementing the bricks; in more important works it was used alternately with lime-mortar: in common buildings, or in the interior of the thickest walls, clay kneaded with straw answered the purpose of a cement.

It is natural that little should now remain of such structures. They could only survive the thousands of years that have elapsed since their building, when an immense thickness secured at least the kernel of the wall, or when the ruins of other buildings early covered and protected them. The remains of ancient Chaldæa are generally nothing more than formless heaps of rubbish, many of which have not yet been opened. Taylor, Loftus, and their predecessors, Ainsworth, Chesney, and Layard, discovered the ruins of over thirty cities in the lower half of the Mesopotamian plain. Of these, Mugheir (the ancient Ur), Warka (Erech), Niffer (Nipur), and Abou-Sharein offered the most important remains of great age; while the ruins of Sura, Tel Sifr, Calvadha, and Ackercuf are mainly of the later Chaldæan period.

Fig. 37.—Ruins of Warka.

Fig. 38.—Patterned Wall. Warka.

Recognizable among the rubbish-hills of Mugheir are the remains of a terrace which consisted of two oblong steps, the lowest measuring 60.35 by 40.54 m. in length and breadth, and about 12 m. in height, standing upon a platform raised 6 m. above the surrounding country. The greater part of this is overthrown and buried beneath its own material. The kernel of the solid structure is of sun-dried bricks; the facing, which is divided by buttresses, being of burnt brick cemented with bitumen. The whole is perforated by numerous small air-channels. The second step is only about half preserved, and that which it must once have supported has entirely disappeared. A remarkable inscription, repeated upon the four corners of the upper terrace, explained the purpose of the structure and the time of its erection. According to Sir H. Rawlinson’s interpretation of the cuneiform legend, this was dedicated to the deity Sin (Hurki) as a temple, and was first founded by King Urukh (about 2230 B.C.). The name of the spot is given as Ur, a city known from Biblical tradition. The inscriptions were not, however, contemporaneous with the foundation of the building, for, after giving a long line of kings, they at last name Nabonetos, the last King of Babylon, as the restorer of the temple—a fact which is further attested by the bricks themselves, those of the lower terrace having the name of Urukh, those of the upper of Nabonetos. The temple remains of Warka and of Abou-Sharein unite with these ruins of Mugheir to show that the Chaldæan temple consisted of a simple and massive terrace of few steps, crowned, without doubt, by a chapel, which must be supposed richly decorated with colors and gold ornaments from the fragments of agate, alabaster, and fine marbles, of gold-plating and gilded nails, found in Abou-Sharein, and from the blue enamelled clay tiles of Mugheir. The sides of the great steps were either plainly buttressed or treated with projections, as is the case with the terrace wall of a palace at Warka, shown by Fig. 37. There was here a complicated system of reeded projections and stepped incisions—cylinders and prisms which cannot be called pilasters, as they were without capitals, and probably also without base-mouldings. Another ruin of Warka (Fig. 38) has a colored wall-facing, made by driving conical pegs of terra-cotta about 0.1 m. long into the clay, so that the red, black, and whitish base surfaces form different patterns. This ruin is further interesting as giving some insight into the private architecture of the Chaldæans. Rooms were there found separated from one another by walls fully as thick as the enclosed spaces themselves were broad—a clumsy heaviness which shows what massive masonry the poor crumbling material necessitated. The existing remains suggest so strongly the arrangement of the later Assyrian palaces that there can be but little doubt that they, in some degree, served as a model for these latter; although the palace wall, with its revetment of alabaster, might be erected with less thickness. No trace of window-like openings can be observed in the ruins of Warka or in those of Abou-Sharein.