Part 2

235. Reconstruction of the Great House in Merkes 287

236. Ground-plan of the Great House in Merkes 288

237. Section of the Great House in Merkes 289

238. Steps to roof in village of Kweiresh 290

239. North-east corner of the Great House in Merkes 291

240. Façade of house with doorway, brick grave in front, Merkes 292

241. Ground-plan of house in Fara (Shuruppak) 293

242. Ground-plan from Telloh 294

243. Papsukal figure, from foundation casket of Ishtar temple 296

244. Ground-plan of temple of Ishtar of Agade, Merkes 297

245. Section of temple of Ishtar of Agade, Merkes 297

246. Ground-plan of Ezida, the temple of Nebo, in Borsippa 298

247. Temple of Ishtar of Agade in Merkes; view of cellafaçade 299

248. Inscription from Greek theatre 301

249. Plan of the mounds, Homera 302

250. General view of the Greek theatre 303

251. Statue pedestals in orchestra 304

252. View of proscenium pillars 305

253. Plan of Greek theatre, restored 306

254. Gypsum decorations of Greek theatre 307

255. Section through the northern mound of Homera 308

[Illustration:

EXPLANATION OF THE LETTERING

A The mound Amran. ADK Ancient ruined village of Kweiresh. AE Ancient Euphrates bed. AK Ancient ruined canal. AN Ancient Nil canal. AS Outer city wall. B The mound Babil. DA The village of Ananeh. DD The village of Djumdjumma. DK The village of Kweiresh. DS The village of Sindjar. E Euphrates. EM E-Mach, the temple of Ninmach. EP E-Patutila, the temple of Ninib. ES E-Sagila, the temple of Marduk. ET E-Temenanki, the tower of Babylon. F Fields. FK Farm of Karabet. G Tomb of Amran Ibn Ali. GM Garden wall. H The mound Homera. IA Ishin aswad. IS Inner city wall. K The mound Kasr. M Merkes. MR Remains of walls. N The Nil canal. NB The Nil bridge. NK New canal. P Palms. S Sachn. T The Greek theatre. TI Temple of Ishtar of Agade. W Road. WBH Road from Bagdad to Hilleh. Z Temple Z of some unknown divinity.

FIG. 1.—PLAN OF THE RUINS OF THE CITY OF BABYLON. ]

I THE OUTER CITY WALLS

In the time of Nebuchadnezzar the traveller who approached the capital of Babylonia from the north would find himself where the Nil Canal flows to-day, face to face with the colossal wall that surrounded mighty Babylon (Fig. 1). Part of this wall still exists and is recognisable at the present time in the guise of a low earthen ridge about 4 to 5 kilometres in length. Up to the present we have only excavated a small part, so that it is only possible to give a detailed description of the most noteworthy features of these fortifications, that were rendered so famous by Greek authors.

There was a massive wall of crude brick 7 metres thick, in front of which, at an interval of about 12 metres, stood another wall of burnt brick 7.8 metres thick, with the strong wall of the fosse at its foot, also of burnt brick and 3.3 metres thick (Fig. 2). The fosse must have been in front of this, but so far we have not searched closely for it, and therefore the counterscarp has not yet been found.

Astride on the mud wall were towers 8.37 metres (about 24 bricks) wide, that projected beyond the wall on both its faces. Measured from centre to centre these towers were 52.5 metres apart. Thus there was a tower at intervals of about 100 ells, for the Babylonian ell measured roughly half a metre.

Owing to the unfinished state of the excavations it is not yet possible to say how the towers on the outer wall were constructed. The space between the two walls was filled in with rubble, at least to the height at which the ruins are preserved and presumably to the crown of the outer wall. Thus on the top of the wall there was a road that afforded space for a team of four horses abreast, and even for two such teams to pass each other. Upon this crown of the wall the upper compartments of the towers faced each other like small houses.

This broad roadway on the summit of the wall, which was of world-renown owing to the descriptions of it given by classical writers, was of the greatest importance for the protection of the great city. It rendered possible the rapid shifting of defensive forces at any time to that part of the wall which was specially pressed by attack. The line of defence was very long; the north-east front, which can still be measured, is 4400 metres long, and on the south-east the ruined wall can be traced without excavation for a length of 2 kilometres. These two flanks of the wall certainly extended as far as the Euphrates as it flowed from north to south. With the Euphrates they enclosed that part of Babylon of which the ruins exist at the present time, but according to Herodotus and others they were supplemented on the other side of the Euphrates by two other walls, so that the town site consisted of a quadrangle through which the Euphrates flowed diagonally. Of the western walls nothing is now to be seen. Whether the traces of a line of wall to the south near the village of Sindjar will prove to have formed part of them has yet to be ascertained.

[Illustration:

FIG. 2.—Part of the outer city walls; ground-plan. ]

The excavations carried on up to the present time have yielded no surrounding walls beyond this fortification. The circuit extended for about 18 kilometres. Instead of this, Herodotus gives about 86 kilometres and Ctesias about 65 kilometres. There must be some error underlying this discrepancy. The 65 kilometres of Ctesias approximate so closely to four times the correct measurement that it may well be suspected that he mistook the figures representing the whole circumference for the measure of one side of the square. We shall later turn more in detail from the testimony of the ancient writers to the evidence of the ruins themselves. Generally speaking, the measurements given are not in accordance with those actually preserved, while the general description, on the contrary, is usually accurate. Herodotus describes the wall of Babylon as built of burnt brick. To an observer from without it would no doubt appear as such, as only the top of the inner mud wall could be seen from outside. The escarp of the fosse was formed of the square bricks that are so extraordinarily numerous in Babylon, that measure 33 centimetres and bear the usual stamp of Nebuchadnezzar. Those of the brick wall are somewhat smaller (32 centimetres) and unstamped. These smaller unstamped bricks are common previous to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, but nevertheless they may very well date from the early years of his reign, as we shall see farther on. To what period the mud-brick wall may be assigned we do not yet know; it is certainly older. It apparently possessed an escarp, of which there are some scanty remains within the great brick wall. It appears to have been cut through on the outside by the latter.

Up to the present we have found about 15 of the towers on the mud wall only. They are the so-called Cavalier towers, and project both at the front and the back, thus placed astride on the wall. They were, of course, higher than the walls, but we can get no clue from the ruins as to the height of walls or towers, as only the lower parts remain. The towers are 8.36 metres wide and are placed 44 metres apart. Thus on the entire front there were about 90, and on the whole circumference—provided the town formed a square—there must have been 360 towers. How many there were on the outer wall we do not know. Ctesias gives the number as 250. No gateway has yet been found, which is not surprising, considering the limited extent of the excavations.

During the Parthian period these lines of fortification can have been no longer in a condition to afford protection. On the town side of the mud wall there are Parthian sarcophagi, inserted in holes dug in the wall itself.

While the foundations of the brick wall are below the present water-level, the mud wall stands on an artificial embankment. As a general rule mud walls were not provided with deep foundations. The mortar employed for the mud wall was clay, and for the brick wall bitumen was used. The same method of construction can be recognised in other parts of the city, where it is better preserved and can be more satisfactorily studied.

At the northern end of our line of wall, which encloses the mound of ruins, called “Babil,” with a hook-like curve, the inner wall also was built of brick. This appears, at least, from the two deep trenches left by plunderers which occur here, but it must be inferred pending excavation. The digging for the valuable bricks which occurred in recent times has left deep traces in the otherwise smooth surface of the ground which we do not find in the attempted demolitions of more ancient times.

For this reason, with the exception of the portion near Babil there is nothing to be seen of the burnt-brick wall without excavating, while the mud wall, which has merely suffered from the ravages of time, has left behind a clearly marked line of ruins of some height. The town wall of Seleucia on the Tigris, likewise a mud wall, stands out similarly above its mounds of debris to a considerable height. It cannot therefore be said that a burnt-brick wall of 480 stadia, the gigantic dimensions recorded by Herodotus, must necessarily have left considerable and unmistakable traces, and it is not this consideration that leads us to doubt the existence of an encircling wall of such dimensions, which has been accepted as an established fact since Oppert’s excavations in Babylon. Neither does the immense size of itself demand dismissal as fantastic. The great wall of China, 11 metres high and 7.5 metres broad, with its length of 2450 kilometres, is just 29 times as long as that of Herodotus. There are other overwhelming considerations which we shall investigate later. In any case the city, even in circumference, was the greatest of any in the ancient East, Nineveh itself not excepted, which in other respects rivalled Babylon. But the period in which the fame of Babylon’s vast size spread over the world was the time of Herodotus, and then Nineveh had already ceased to exist.

A comparison with modern cities can scarcely be made without further consideration. It must always be remembered that an ancient city was primarily a fortress of which the inhabited part was surrounded and protected by the encircling girdle of the walls. Our great modern cities are of an entirely different character, they are inhabited spaces, open on all sides. A reasonable comparison can, therefore, only be made between Babylon and other walled cities, and when compared with them Babylon takes the first place, both for ancient and modern times, as regards the extent of its enclosed and inhabited area.

Nebuchadnezzar frequently mentions this great work in his inscriptions. The most important passage occurs, in his great _Steinplatten_[1] inscription, col. 7 l. 22–55: “That no assault should reach Imgur-Bel, the wall of Babylon; I did, what no earlier king had done, for 4000 ells of land on the side of Babylon, at a distance so that it (the assault) did not come nigh, I caused a mighty wall to be built on the east side of Babylon. I dug out its moat, and I built a scarp with bitumen and bricks. A mighty wall I built on its edge, mountain high. Its broad gateways I set within it and fixed in them double doors of cedar wood overlaid with copper. In order that the enemy who devised (?) evil should not press on the flanks of Babylon, I surrounded it with mighty floods, as is the land with the wave-tossed sea. Its coming was like the coming of the great sea, the salt water. In order that no breach should be made in it, I piled up an earthen embankment by it, and encompassed it with quay walls of burnt brick. The bulwark I fortified cunningly and made the city of Babylon into a fortress” (cf. H. Winckler, _Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek_, vol. iii. 2, p. 23). It can hardly be expected that we can yet reach absolute certainty as to the meaning of all the details here given. That can best be afforded by a complete excavation, which is urgently to be desired.

Footnote 1:

Usually called in England The East India House Inscription.

II THE MOUND BABIL

[Illustration:

FIG. 3.—Plan of the mound “Babil.” ]

[Illustration:

FIG. 4.—Section of a canal when newly constructed (B), and after long use (C). ]

Following the ridge of the ruined city wall from the excavated portion farther to the north-west, one reaches a gap in the wall where it was ruthlessly broken down by later canals, now themselves dried up (Fig. 3). They were forerunners of the present Nil Canal. The Arabic word _nil_ denotes the blue colour which is generally produced by indigo, and has given its name to various watercourses on Arab soil; the name of the Egyptian Nile is probably connected with it. The Nil Canal runs to-day a few hundred metres to the north-east along the city wall and roughly parallel with it. The embankments of these canals, which in places are of immense height, intersect the plain with a sharp line. The contrast with the plain is most striking when they are seen on the horizon, where the mirage comes to their aid and makes them look like hills of some importance. At first sight, also, they appear to be entirely out of proportion with the small amount of water that flows so slowly through the canal. That, however, is only the case where the canal has been in use for some long time. When the canal is first constructed each embankment, under normal circumstances, consists of no more than half of the earth which is dug out, as these irrigation works, wherever the lie of the ground permits, are so arranged that the surface of the water may be higher than the surrounding plain. Only in this way would it be possible with comparatively small expenditure, and without special machinery for raising water, to provide the field with a gentle supply of the fructifying moisture. But the Euphrates at the period of high water, when the irrigation takes place, bears a quantity of material in suspension that is specially valuable for agriculture. If the water stands quiet for long, as it does in a lake, it becomes clear as glass, and is no longer suitable for irrigation, it is “dead,” as the Arabs say. As the water flows slowly through these canals it deposits this precious material in the canal-beds, and especially sand and mud in great quantities. Thus it is necessary every year to clear out the canals, and the material thrown out on to the embankments continually raises them in height (Fig. 4). Obviously there must come a moment in the history of each canal when it is more expensive to clear it out than to construct a new one, and thus every canal bears within it the germ of its own destruction. The sanding up of the canal-bed is naturally more insistent in portions nearest the river, and hence it is that this canal displacement occurs so frequently in the neighbourhood of the river-course. On the way from Bagdad to Hilleh in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates, one crosses extraordinarily numerous groups of abandoned canals, most of which are nothing else than the older courses of the same irrigation system that is in use to-day.

[Illustration:

FIG. 5.—View of the mound “Babil.” ]

This explanation must be borne in mind when bewildered by the first sight of these ruined canals, either in reality or on a plan. As one approaches the mound Babil from the north or the east—the mound, by the way, which alone has preserved its ancient name to the present day—one encounters the annoyance of this ruthless disturbance of the ground; it is hardly possible to see the mound till one has climbed the embankment nearest to it, but the impression is then all the more striking (Fig. 5).

The mound rises with a steep slope to the height of 22 metres above the plain. Its area forms a square of about 250 metres, and this hill, consisting of broken brick or clayey earth, is pierced by deep ravines and tunnels, while on the north and south-west remains of walls of very considerable height are still standing, with courses of mud brick held together by layers of well-preserved reed stems. They date from a later period, and may have belonged to a fort which was erected in Sassanide or Arabic times on the already ruined Babylonian building.

The astoundingly deep pits and galleries that occur in places owe their origin to the quarrying for brick that has been carried on extensively during the last decades. The buildings of ancient Babylon, with their excellent kiln bricks, served even in antiquity, perhaps in Roman times, certainly in Parthian days, as a quarry for common use. Later centuries appear to have done less to destroy the ruins, but in modern times the quarrying for bricks has assumed far more important dimensions. About twenty years ago, when the Euphrates first began to pour its life-giving waters into the Hindiyeh, a side branch somewhat farther above Babylon, near Musseyib, an attempt was made to head back the river into its old bed by building up a dam, the _Sedde_, which with us has a somewhat evil reputation. Building was carried on year after year without interference at this dam, as long as the height of the water permitted, and that with bricks from Babylon. Quite recently this outrage has been checked by the powerful influence of Halil Bey, Director-General of the Ottoman museums, and of Bedri Bey, the Turkish Commissioner on the excavations; so now there is a well-grounded hope that the ruins of the most celebrated city of the East, or perhaps of the world, shall go down to posterity without further injury. Soon after the commencement of the excavations I had interested myself in checking this spoliation, but that was possible only for the Kasr, at Babil it still went on. Even at the Kasr I had to drive these workers out of their pits, and we set the people to work in our diggings, as the Arab is entirely indifferent as to the method by which he earns his scanty wage. The only objectors were the contractors, through whom the materials for the Sedde building were sold. Very recently the latter also made an attack on the tower of Borsippa, but their barbarous attempt was promptly stopped by the action of the Turkish Government.

The robbers carried away the walls layer after layer, carefully leaving the adjoining earth untouched, as the trench grew daily deeper, since a downfall would render it inaccessible. This enables us to make some instructive observations in the interior even before beginning our excavations at this place.

It was a building consisting of many courts and chambers, both small and large, a palace upon a substructure about 18 metres in height. The latter is so constructed that the building walls throughout are continuous and of the same thickness above and below, while the intermediate spaces are filled up to the height of the palace floor with earth and a packing of fragments of brick. As on part of the Kasr, the floor consists of sandstone flags on the edge of which is inscribed, “Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon.” There are also many portions of a limestone pavement that consists of a thick rough under stratum, and a fine upper stratum half a centimetre thick, and coloured a fine red or yellow. This pavement is similar to those of the best Greek period, and it may be considered to be an addition of the time of the Persian kings, or of Alexander the Great and his successors. All the bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, of which we learn more when we turn to the Kasr, were laid either in asphalt or in a grey lime mortar, both of which also occur at the Kasr.

All these things considered, it is impossible to doubt that Babil was a palace of Nebuchadnezzar’s. The parallel passage in his great inscription very probably refers to it (_K.B._ iii. 2, p. 31), col. 3 l. 11–29: “On the brick wall towards the north my heart inspired me to build a palace for the protecting of Babylon. I built there a palace like the palace of Babylon of brick and bitumen. For 60 ells I built an _appa danna_ towards Sippar; I made a _nabalu_, and laid its foundation on the bosom of the underworld, on the surface of the (ground) water in brick and bitumen. I raised its summit and connected it with the palace, with brick and bitumen I made it high as a mountain. Mighty cedar trunks I laid on it for roof. Double doors of cedar wood overlaid with copper, thresholds and hinges made of bronze did I set up in its doorways. That building I named ‘May Nebuchadnezzar live, may he grow old as restorer of Esagila’” (translated by H. Winckler). Various expressions remain extremely obscure, and their explanation awaits the excavation of the building. Especially should we like to know what was meant by the _appa danna_. These words in Babylonian mean a “strong nose,” which taken absolutely literally is nonsense. In this connection, however, as the appendage of a palace they recall so strongly the _apadana_ with which the Persian kings in Persepolis denoted their palaces that one can hardly be mistaken in thinking there must be some esoteric connection. An apadana in Persia had the ground plan of a many-fronted Hilani (see Fig. 77), and it would be very interesting and of the highest importance in the history of architecture to discover what a building of Nebuchadnezzar’s in Babylon looked like, that at any rate, bore a name so exactly similar in sound. It is only excavation that can give the long-delayed answer to that question.

III GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY

[Illustration:

FIG. 6.—General view of Babylon, seen from the north-west. ]