The excavations at Babylon

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).

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.

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.