Part 17

North-east of the Ninib temple we have cut four trenches through the hill to the plain beyond. Here we found the same strata of private houses and streets that we shall meet with again in Merkes.

Here, at the depth of the water-level, were some small plano-convex clay tablets with carefully modelled reliefs of lions, fabulous creatures, etc., on the flat side, as well as some figures in the round, also worked with great minuteness. Among these there is a fine bearded head with the hair tied up in a napkin, as, beside others, it is worn by Marduk on the piece of lapis lazuli described above. They appear to be working models for a large statue.

Beside the numerous scantily ornamented pottery vases, there were some decorated in coloured glazes with concentric lines, rosettes, and plaited bands (Fig. 152—_Frontispiece_). They come from the lower levels, which apparently date back to the time of the Assyrian domination. In one place where rubbish had been thrown, there were numerous tablets containing business, literary, or scientific inscriptions. It is possible that they came from the temple and formed part of the temple library, which, as is generally supposed, every temple possessed. No systematic storing of inscriptions has yet been discovered in any temple, including those of Babylon, Khorsabad, and Assur, all of which have been completely excavated. It is true that these were buried under a proportionately shallow covering of earth, while Esagila lay protected under fully 20 metres of untouched accumulations, and is still unexcavated.

The mound itself proves to be thickly strewn throughout with potsherds, and the mud-brick walls of the houses lie close below the surface. They are only thinly covered by a uniform layer of dust. In the plain, on the contrary, as our trenches at the Ninib temple have shown, the house ruins lie under a layer more or less high, of drifted sand, and the surface contains exceedingly few potsherds. All this is explained if we take the trouble to realise the antecedents of the formation of these ruins. At the time when the site was deserted and fell into ruins the surrounding contours were far more marked than they are at present. The heights were higher and the depths were deeper. The mud-brick walls, which at first stood out above the soil, crumbled away after they lost their roofs into dusty heaps of clay, which accumulated against the walls and covered the pavement higher and higher, while the walls themselves, so far as they over-topped these heaps, disappeared, and thus all was levelled to an irregular undulating surface.

[Illustration:

FIG. 153.—Schematic diagram of the transfer of the upper levels (A, B, left) of a mound of debris to lower-lying region (A, B, on the right). ]

But the process of destruction of the city did not end here. Every winter, however short, with its frost and rain, and the long summer with the torrid heat of the sun, split, shattered, and pulverised all that still clung together and turned it to a light powdery dust, which was easily whirled away by the strong recurrent summer winds and deposited in the lower-lying parts. Thus the heights were continually denuded and lowered and the depths were gradually raised (Fig. 153). The heavier objects, such as pieces of burnt brick and fragments of pots and sarcophagi, were thus sifted as it were and left exposed on the surface, and the higher the mound had been in which they lay scattered, the closer they would now lie together. Thus on the surface of ancient mounds that were not inhabited later we find small objects in very large numbers. Clay coffins, which at the time of burial were laid deep in the ground, are now on the surface, and as the process continues they form a small heap of sherds. A specially striking example is the appearance of the wells and sunk shafts, which consist of pottery rings placed one above another. Originally, of course, they all ended at the level of the pavement of the buildings to which they belonged. When these fell to pieces and were blown away and disappeared with a large part of the earth on which they stood, the lower part of the well which was in the ground was covered over with a small heap of fragments from the broken upper part, which stood out above the surrounding ground as an exposed drum (Fig. 154).

[Illustration:

FIG. 154.—Schematic diagram of section through Babylonian house ruins, with wells. ]

The longer the ruin as such had remained fallow the more marked are the traces of this abrasion of the fallen material and the emergence of the harder objects. In Merkes and in Ishin aswad we can, on the whole, scarcely count on more than one wind-swept stratum of habitations. At Fara (Shuruppak) there were more of them, and at Surgul and El-Hibbah there were many. Every new inhabited stratum, so long as the mounds rose, joined on new wells to the old ones as the latter disappeared from sight, while on every denuded dwelling site the well appeared on the surface together with those of the preceding layer. This is the reason why the well rings visible on very ancient ruins, such as Surgul and El-Hibbah, are so exceedingly numerous, a fact which is unintelligible to those who do not understand their origin. Many erroneous explanations have been given, among others that they were drains intended to keep the hill dry, whereas they had absolutely nothing to do with that purpose.

XLII MERKES

_Merkes_, which means a city as a trade centre in distinction to a village, is the name given by the Arabs to the line of mounds to the north of Ishin aswad (Fig. 155). Here the houses of the citizens of Babylon are easier of access than in the lower quarters of the town. They occupy in different levels, one above another, the entire mass of the hill, which rises to 10 metres above zero. Our excavations cut through the layers down to a depth of 12 metres below the surface, where the water-level stopped farther progress, although the ruins themselves continued lower. Thus the water must now stand at a higher level than in ancient times.

As it did not seem advisable to accumulate great masses of rubbish in the vicinity where occupied town area was everywhere to be expected, we worked over the site with a system of pits 7 metres square, with gangways between them 3 metres wide. Thus when the first pit had been sunk completely to water-level the earth from the next one could be thrown into it, thus avoiding any possible damage to the ruins, for the upper layers at any rate had to be removed in order to reach the lower ones. I need not say that all the walls, graves, and separate finds were recorded in the drawings and sections we made of the site.

In the 2 to 3 upper metres lay the scanty ruins of the Parthian period, thin house walls of mud brick or of brick rubble, with wide spaces between them, which may be regarded as gardens or waste land.

The 4 metres below this represent the brilliant time of the city under the Neo-Babylonian kings on into the Persian and Greek periods. The houses are closely crowded together in the narrow streets. There was little open ground, and what was at first a court or the garden of a house was increasingly required for house building. It was at this time that the population was richest and most numerous. The houses have strong walls of mud brick, good brick floorings, and numerous circular wells and sunk shafts, which bear witness to the comparatively high level of the requirements demanded by the culture of that time. Greek sherds and tablets with dates of the Persian period lay at the height of 7 metres above zero, and bricks with the stamps of Nabonidus and Nebuchadnezzar at 5.5 metres.

Below, the signs of dwellings are again more scanty until the level of 2.4 above zero is reached, when there are once more thick house walls similar to those of the Neo-Babylonian level, though at wider distances apart. At this level there were tablets with the dates of Merodach-Baladan, Belnadinshum, Melishikhu, and others. Thus the stratum dates from about 1300 to 1400 B.C.

Deeper down the strata were irregular. Here they do not lie throughout in one solid uniform line. At 1 metre below zero we came once more on a uniform, clearly marked stratum with houses lying rather closely together, in which were found tablets with dates of the time of the first Babylonian kings, the immediate successors of Hammurabi (2250 B.C.), Samsuiluna, Ammiditana, Samsuditana, etc. The mud-brick walls of the houses are not very thick, but all of them rest on a foundation of burnt brick. They show numerous traces of a conflagration in which they were destroyed. The tablets lay among these undisturbed ashes, so there can be no doubt that they were contemporary (see section on Fig. 237).

[Illustration:

FIG. 155.—Plan of Merkes. ]

This is a bare outline of the find in the north of Merkes. If we dig farther in the plain, we find the Nebuchadnezzar stratum nearer the surface, and the Hammurabi stratum disappears below water-level. This means undoubtedly that as far back as the latter period the town level here was rising in the form of a mound, and that at the Parthian period no substantial buildings stood in the plain.

The streets, though not entirely regular, show an obvious attempt to run them as much in straight lines as possible, so that Herodotus (i. 180) was able to describe them as straight (ἰθέαι). They show a tendency to cross at right angles, about 16 degrees west of north, and therefore as many degrees north of east. The Procession Street on the whole follows the same direction, and so do the inner city walls and all the temples, including Esagila, which may perhaps be held mainly responsible for this orientation. Only the Palace buildings on the Kasr and the mound Babil face exactly towards the astronomical north. The lower and more ancient levels also maintain this direction, in general with very slight deviations in the lines of the streets. Too little is known of the Hammurabi period at present to give any general valid rule with certainty; the house walls that have been excavated face somewhat accurately to the north, as do those of the upper levels. It was this fact, in conjunction with the usual inexact rectangular arrangement of the plots of land, and the exact rectangles of the inner chambers that gave rise to the peculiar construction of the street walls, which on their whole length were furnished with projecting corners or steps, an extraordinary characteristic of Neo-Babylonian architecture, which we have already met with at the Southern Citadel (Fig. 156).

Where there was a house door the corner is advanced so that the door might be placed in a sufficiently wide wall surface. As the corners frequently lie very close together, we may conclude that there were no windows toward the street. Also we observe no stalls for selling or other trade facilities, although this is no proof that they may not exist in other parts of the city, not yet excavated. For this reason it is much to be wished that the streets of Babylon could be laid bare to a much larger extent than has hitherto been possible, so that we might be able to study the entire plan of a very wide area. Outside Babylon it is only in Fara and Abu-Hatab that a small part of the town has been unearthed, and there the streets are noticeably more irregular and crooked than those of the metropolis. Of other Babylonian towns nothing is known of the planning of the streets.

[Illustration:

FIG. 156.—View of street in Merkes. ]

The latest researches do not uphold the statement that is to be found in modern literature of some years back, that the Babylonian buildings were orientated with their corners towards the four points of the compass. The orientation is different in every town, and in every case the circumstances determining it must be studied separately.

With the exception of the Procession Street and a few streets in other quarters, such as to the south of the Ninib temple, the streets are usually unpaved. Remains of systems of drainage, such as those to the south of the “great house” of Merkes, are rare.

The smaller temples, “Z,” the Ninib temple, and the temple of Ishtar of Agade to the north of our excavations in Merkes, lay in the midst of the bustle of the houses, except that in front of the latter the street widened somewhat on its southern façade.

At the south end of the excavations in Merkes, on the street which broadens at that place, there is a quadrilateral block of mud-brick building, which in default of a better explanation might be regarded as the altar. On three sides it has broad ornamental grooves, and on the west side it has two narrow ones. Similar blocks, which perhaps were built for the same purpose, have been found in Telloh. There they consist of semicircular fillets (de Sarzec, _Fouilles de Telloh_), of which the elements, though they only project from the main building as semicircles, are in reality built completely round like pillars, for which they have been mistaken. The mouldings in the ruin called Wuswas in Warka are treated in the same way, with this difference, that there the working of one course is semicircular, and the succeeding one is round.

XLIII THE SMALL OBJECTS, PRINCIPALLY FROM MERKES

Among the small objects, the tablets take the first place. Our predecessors merely turned over the upper layers, the middle and more especially the lower ones were untouched. Of the inscriptions found we shall learn more of the contents when they have been worked through by experts. The most ancient, those of the time of Hammurabi, consist, as do many of the middle and upper levels, of business documents (Fig. 157). Letters also are frequently found still in the clay cases which, by some, are regarded as the equivalents of our envelopes; if this be right, it is extraordinary to observe how very large a percentage of these letters can never have been opened in ancient days. There were also numerous specimens of omen-literature. According to Weber (_Literatur der Babylonier und Assyrer_, p. 189), these include “all texts that had for their object the observation and meaning of signs, of whatever nature they might be, which were sent to men by the gods as indications of their wishes, and form perhaps the most extensive group of cuneiform texts that still exists.” To the same class we must certainly ascribe some of our tablets, which bear curious groups of linear scroll-work interspersed with script (Fig. 158). A series of designs on tablets of horses and chariots, fights between wild beasts (Fig. 159), etc., and some charming reliefs are interesting from an artistic point of view.

[Illustration:

FIG. 157.—Tablets of the first dynasty. ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 158.—Labyrinthine lines on a tablet. ]

When these tablets were found in their original position they were in jars, which appears to have been the usual method of storing tablets that were not too large (Fig. 160). In Fara, in a room of a house that was destroyed by fire, there was a number of larger tablets lying together in disorder, not on the floor-level but on a heap of rubbish, so that their original storage-place could not be identified with certainty. It appeared that they were lying above the fragments of the ruined ceiling of the room, and that they had fallen from the storey above, or from the roof, on which they may perhaps have been laid out to dry at the time when the house was burnt down.

[Illustration:

FIG. 159.—Drawing on a tablet. ]

We found the tablets far more frequently in an early secondary position than in the original one, a fact which clearly proves that these documents were often thrown away when they were of no further use. They are found in groups, either in the street or inside the houses. The Hammurabi tablets in room 25 _þ_ (cf. Fig. 155) lay immediately under the floor in the filling of the foundations, and had been laid level with some care; that these were cancelled documents is shown by certain examples which were struck through across and across, and also that besides those that were complete a very large proportion were

[Illustration:

FIG. 160.—Pottery urn with tablets. ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 161.—Bowls. ]

in fragments. In the house in Fara just mentioned there were a number of smaller ones in good condition embedded in the mud mortar between the courses of mud brick. It seems as though a certain reverence for written documents frequently led the Babylonians, the graphomaniacs of the ancient world, to cherish the specimens of their beloved art even after they were no longer needed and had to be put out of the way, for a later period unforeseen by them, when after thousands of years the lucky people of to-day can gain the information conveyed by them.

[Illustration:

FIG. 162.—Aramaic incantation bowl. ]

The specimens of ceramics are so extremely numerous that we cannot attempt in this place to obtain even an approximate knowledge of them, and thus we can only occasionally point out the changes in form and ornamentation of the different periods. We include in the following observations some finds that occurred on other parts of the site.

The small flattish bowls are innumerable, they have no brim or only a very simple one, and small inadequate bases (Fig. 161). They have often owner’s marks made of punctured rows of dots. The deeper round bowls have generally no base, and the walls of some of them are extremely thin. In the upper layers there lay Aramaic incantation bowls (Fig. 162) inscribed with signs resembling letters arranged in a spiral, and with rough drawings of men and of demons. When found undisturbed, the rims of two of them are placed together like a small double-urn coffin. Also birds’ eggs are found with fine Aramaic writing. The beakers are cylindrical or bell-shaped, with a poorly-worked base (Fig. 163), and the pointed vases are cylindrical or of cup form (Fig. 164).

[Illustration:

FIG. 163.—Beakers. ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 164.—Vases. ]

Small vases have often a white glaze, some of them a yellow or a blue one, or a blue edge. Such vases occur as early as the old Kassite times, when they are also made of a coarse frit. The outline is globular, or like a calyx, or a reversed calyx. Here also the bases are small and very poor. The larger vases of coloured enamels, which we have already referred to (cf. Fig. 152), are completely rounded in profile. Their footless base is sometimes slightly rounded, and is added to the body at an angle.

[Illustration:

FIG. 165.—Storage jars, on ring stands below. ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 166.—Large storage jars. ]

Jars for containing liquids (Figs. 165, 166) are always of a specially long form, rather like the pupa of an insect. They were pointed below, and were either leant up against a wall or some other support or were placed in ring stands. Their rounded throats resembled the profile of an upright cup, or of a deep bowl turned upside down. During the Greek and later periods, amphorae, bearing the stamp of the Greek amphora on the handle (Fig. 167), were used. In the later Parthian period a rounded jar with a neck and no foot was common, made in two halves, and worked together. The join is quite obvious on the outside. These jars are often washed over, inside and outside, with asphalt. The long jars for storage were also used for drain pipes by cutting off the ends and placing the jars one inside another. Covers for these jars are found in numbers, in the form of small bowls either bored through to attach a handle, or with a projecting knob, an _omphalos_.

[Illustration:

FIG. 167.—Fragments of Greek Vases. ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 168.—Flasks. ]

Small jars or flasks for storing liquids have very much the same form, with a handle, a short neck, and a plain flattened base (Fig. 168). Some are found still closed with a pottery stopper surrounded by a bit of rag. On the stopper there is an impressed sealing. As early as the time of Nebuchadnezzar the alabastron was in general use, both in pottery and also in white alabaster; they vary from very small dimensions to a considerable size. The amount of the contents is frequently marked on them in cuneiform characters. Several fragments of large alabaster vases bear Egyptian inscriptions. The handles of the alabastron are typical; they are semicircular pierced discs placed on a small flat surface which projects slightly, broadening from below, and looks like a rag hanging down. Flat circular vases, usually glazed, are common both in the late and early periods (Fig. 169).

[Illustration:

FIG. 169.—Flat circular vases. ]

The early Babylonian lamp consists of a rather high vase with a long protruding curved nozzle (Fig. 170). It is often represented in this form on the ancient _kudurru_, for it is the emblem of the god Nusku. In the later forms the vase is flatter and the nozzle shorter. In both forms the vase is made on the wheel and the nozzle is fashioned by hand. The earlier higher form is only found unglazed. Some of the later form are glazed, and some of them, with their blistered surface, resemble the ancient enamel. Contemporary with these there are always some poor examples which were entirely made by hand, as is the case with other forms of pottery. But even in the most ancient ruins, the deepest levels of Fara or Surgul, we have never penetrated to depths where the potter’s wheel was unknown. Occasional instances of hand-made pottery can always be identified as direct copies of contemporary ware made on the wheel, so that it would appear that in Babylonia pottery and the potter’s wheel were invented at the same time.

[Illustration:

FIG. 170.—Lamps. ]

The older higher form of lamp which, like the bowls, has often owner’s marks punctured in groups of dots, is not intended to stand, and the base is always rounded while the later lower form has a small flattened base. Handles first make their appearance on the shallow glazed lamps, often in the form of a separate piece added on. On these lamps also the usual ornamentation of rows of dots and beads first appears. In this and in the development of shape, the influence of the Greek lamp that came in about this period is not to be ignored. This was a shallow pottery lamp with a short semi-cylindrical nozzle, always well glazed and of the finest clay, and combined an elegance of appearance with a high level of practical utility such as had not been approached in Babylonia during the course of thousands of years. In the later Parthian forms the nozzle became less and less distinct from the body of the lamp, which was then moulded in two separate pieces, an upper and a lower half. They were rarely unornamented and were invariably glazed. Green glazed polylychnae were also produced in Greek fashion with several nozzles on one side, or with many all round them. All of these are apparently oil lamps.