WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The excavations at Babylon cover

The excavations at Babylon

Chapter 35: XXXIII THE WALL OF NABONIDUS
By Robert Koldewey
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Archaeology & AnthropologyHistory - Ancient

About This Book

The work provides a detailed, chronological account of large-scale archaeological excavations at an ancient Mesopotamian city, outlining areas opened, trenching strategies, and the sequence of field campaigns. It describes uncovered architectural elements such as monumental gates, thick defensive walls, temples, palaces, processional streets, and a stone bridge, with particular attention to enamelled bricks and relief decoration. Stratigraphic observations and house-plan exposures are used to reconstruct phases of occupation and urban development. The volume includes measured plans, illustrations, and photographs, accompanied by epigraphic readings and interpretive commentary that relate finds to building history. Practical notes on excavation methodology, conservation, and logistical challenges complete the account.

XXXIII
THE WALL OF NABONIDUS

We have not yet followed the fortification wall connected with the gateway just described far to the south. The ruins here lie deep under the rubbish of the Amran mound, and are difficult to get at. On the north the excavations have laid open this wall as far as the village of Kweiresh.

The wall, which is 7.67 metres thick, with its cavalier towers stands on the river bank upon a massive projecting banquette like the older moat wall, the Arachtu wall, and the north wall of the Principal Citadel. This arrangement can thus be clearly recognised as a peculiarity of walls that lie on a water-channel. Towers, alternately broad and narrow, are placed at a distance of about 19 metres from each other. The broad ones are 7.3, the narrow ones 6.3 metres wide. In some of these towers there are fittings for double doors, from which a somewhat steep ramp leads down to the river. The walls are in very bad condition, and it is impossible to say whether there were similar doors in every tower, or, if not, at what length of interval. The pavement is .47 above zero. In the north, a short distance in front of the Southern Citadel, the wall for two mesopyrgia bends somewhat towards the west to unite by a tower with the Western Outworks (p. 144). In this tower was the outflow of the eastern canal that flowed past the Southern Citadel. The bend is obviously contrived in order to include the Western Outworks of the Southern Citadel in the city area.

Not far from the north-western corner of the peribolos we made a cross-cut through the high mounds that cover the wall, and here we found also the Arachtu wall of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar. The cut has been continued for some length to the north on the other side of the depression caused by the river-bed, and there it yielded walls of burnt-brick buildings of considerable thickness, but the river wall that corresponds with that on the left bank we have not yet uncovered. This excavation is very far from complete. The wall is apparently the same that was called by Herodotus (i. 180) αἱμασιή, which joined on to the wings of the outer city wall, and which Ctesias (Diodorus, ii. 3) called κρηπίς.