§ 8.—On the Orientation of Buildings and Foundation Ceremonies.

The inhabitants of Mesopotamia were so much impressed by celestial phenomena, and believed so firmly in the influence of the stars over human destiny, that they were sure to establish some connection between those heavenly bodies and the arrangement of their edifices. All the buildings of Chaldæa and Assyria are orientated; the principle is everywhere observed, but it is not always understood in the same fashion.

Mesopotamian buildings were always rectangular and often square on plan, and it is sometimes the angles and sometimes the centres of each face that are directed to the four cardinal points. It will easily be understood that the former system was generally preferred. The façades were of such extent that their direction to a certain point of the horizon was not evident, while salient angles, on the other hand, had all the precision of an astronomical calculation; and this the earliest architects of the Chaldees thoroughly understood. Some of the buildings examined by Loftus and Taylor on the lower Euphrates may have been restored, more or less, by Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, but it is generally acknowledged that the lower and less easily injured parts of most of these buildings date from the very beginnings of that civilization, and were constructed by the princes of the early empire. Now both at Warka and at Mugheir one corner of a building is always turned towards the true north.[397] An instance of this may be given in the little building at Mugheir in which the lower parts of a temple have been recognized (Fig. 143). The same arrangement is to be found in the palace excavated by M. de Sarzec at Tello.[398]

Most of the Assyrian architects did likewise. See for example the plan of Sargon's city, Dour-Saryoukin (Fig. 144). Its circumvallation incloses an almost exact square, the diagonals of which point to the north, south, east and west respectively.[399] In the large scale plans that we shall give farther on of the palace and of some of its parts it will be seen that the parallelograms of which that building was composed also had their angles turned to the four cardinal points. It was the same with the structures sprinkled over the summit of the vast mound of Kouyundjik, in the centre of what once was Nineveh.

On the other hand in those ruins at Nimroud that have been identified with the ancient Calah, it is the sides of the mound and of the buildings upon it that face the four cardinal points (Fig. 145). The plan given by Layard of the square staged tower disengaged in his last digging campaign at the north-western angle of the mound shows this more clearly.[400] Nearly half the northern side is occupied by the salient circular mass that is such a conspicuous object to one looking at the mound from the plain. We do not know what caused this deviation from the traditional custom; a reason should perhaps be sought in the configuration of the ground, and in the course here followed by the river which then bathed the foot of the artificial hill upon which stood the royal dwellings of the Tiglath-Pilesers and Assurnazirpals.

The first of these two methods of orientation had the advantage of establishing a more exact and well defined relation between the disposition of the building and those celestial points to which a peculiar importance was attached. It must also be remembered that such an arrangement gave a more agreeable dwelling than the other. No façade being turned directly to the north there was none entirely deprived of sunlight, while at the same time there was none that faced due south. The sun as it ran its daily course would light for a time each face in turn.

The religious ideas that led to orientation are revealed in other details, in the time chosen for commencing the foundations of temples or palaces, and in certain rites that were accomplished afterwards—doubtless with the help of the priesthood—in order to place the building under the protection of the gods and to interest them in its duration. There were ceremonies analogous to those now practised when we lay foundation stones. In the Chaldee system the first stone, the seed from which the rest of the edifice was to spring, was an angle stone, under or in which were deposited inscribed plaques. These contained the name of the founder, together with prayers to the gods and imprecations on all who should menace the stability of the building. This custom dated from the very beginning of Chaldæan civilization, as is proved by a curious text translated by M. Oppert.[401] It was discovered at Sippara and dates from the time of Nabounid, one of the last kings of Babylon. Many centuries before the reign of that prince a temple raised to the sun by Sagaraktyas, of the first dynasty, had been destroyed, and its foundations were traditionally said to inclose the sacred tablets of Xisouthros, who has been identified with the Noah of the Bible. Nabounid recounts the unsuccessful efforts that had been made before his time to recover possession of the precious deposit. Two kings of Babylon, Kourigalzou and Nebuchadnezzar, and one king of Assyria, Esarhaddon, had made the attempt and failed. One of the three had commemorated his failure in an inscription to the following effect: "I have searched for the angle stone of the temple of Ulbar but I have not found it." Finally Nabounid took up the quest. After one check caused by an inundation he renewed the search with ardour; he employed his army upon it, and at last, after digging to a great depth, he came to the angle-stone: "Thus," he says, "have I recovered the name and date of Sagaraktyas."

In the ruins of the ancient royal city recovered by M. de Sarzec at Tello the traces of similar precautions have everywhere been found. In the middle of the great mass of ruins whose plan we are still awaiting, "I found," says M. de Sarzec, "at a depth of hardly 30 centimetres (one foot English) below the original level of the soil four cubical masses consisting of large bricks cemented with bitumen, and measuring about 80 centimetres across each face. In the centre of each cube there was a cavity 27 centimetres long by 12 wide and 35 deep. In each case this hollow contained a small bronze statuette packed, as it were, in an impalpable dust. In one cavity the statuette was that of a kneeling man (Fig. 146), in another of a standing woman (Fig. 147), in another of a bull (Fig. 148). At the feet of each statue there were two stone tablets, set in most cases in the bitumen with which the cavity was lined. One of these tablets was black, the other white. It was upon the black as a rule that a cuneiform inscription similar, or nearly so, to the inscriptions on the statuettes was found."[402]

Abridgments of the same commemorative and devotional form of words are Fig. 147.—Bronze statuette. 8¼ inches high. Louvre. Fig. 147.—Bronze statuette. 8¼ inches high. Louvre. found upon those cones of terra-cotta that were discovered in such numbers among the foundations and in the interstices of the structure (Fig. 149).[403]

The Mesopotamian builder was not satisfied with relying upon talismans built into the lower part of a building or strewn under the pavements. Taylor ascertained at Mugheir and Loftus at Sinkara that engraved cylinders were built into the four angles of the upper stories. A brick had been omitted, leaving a small niche in which they were set up on end.[404] Profiting by the hint thus given Sir Henry Rawlinson excavated the angles of one of the terraces of the Birs-Nimroud at Babylon, and to the astonishment of his workmen he found the terra-cotta cylinders upon which the reconstruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar is narrated exactly at the point where he told them to dig.[405] These little tubs are called cylinders—a not very happy title. As some of them are about three feet high (Fig. 150) they can take commemorative inscriptions of vastly greater length than those cut upon small hard-stone cylinders. Some of these inscriptions have as many as a hundred lines very finely engraved. Many precious specimens dating from the times of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors have been found in the ruins of Babylon.[406]

As might be supposed the same usage was followed in Assyria. In the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, Sir Henry Layard found some alabaster tablets with inscriptions on both their faces hidden behind the colossal lions at one of the doorways.[407] The British Museum also possesses a series of small figures found at Nimroud but in a comparatively modern building, the palace of Esarhaddon. They have each two pairs of wings, one pair raised, the other depressed. They had been strewn in the sand under the threshold of one of the doors.

It was at Khorsabad, however, that the observations were made which have most clearly shown the importance attached to this ceremony of consecration. M. Oppert tells us that during the summer of 1854, "M. Place disinterred from the foundations of Khorsabad a stone case in which were five inscriptions on five different materials, gold, silver, antimony, copper and lead. Of these five tablets he brought away four. The leaden one was too heavy to be carried off at once, and it was despatched to Bassorah on the rafts with the bulk of the collection, whose fate it shared." The other four tablets are in the Louvre. Their text is almost identical. M. Oppert gives a translation of it.[408] According to his rendering, the inscription—in which the king speaks throughout in the first person—ends with this imprecation: "May the great lord Assur destroy from the face of this country the name and race of him who shall injure the works of my hand, or who shall carry off my treasure!"

A little higher up, where Sargon recounts the founding of the palace, occurs a phrase which M. Oppert translates: "The people threw their amulets." What Sargon meant by this the excavations of M. Place have shown. In the foundations of the town walls, and especially in the beds of sand between the bases of the sculptured bulls that guard the doorways, he found hundreds of small objects, such as cylinders, cones, and terra-cotta statuettes. The most curious of these are now deposited in the Louvre. The numbers and the character of these things prove that a great number of the people must have assisted at the ceremony of consecration.

Several of these amulets were not without value either for their material or their workmanship, but the great majority were of the roughest kind, some being merely shells or stones with a hole through them, which must have belonged to the poorest class of the community. In many cases their proper use could be easily divined; the holes with which they were pierced and other marks of wear showed them to be personal amulets.[409] Those present at the ceremony of consecrating the foundations must have detached them from the cords by which they were suspended, and thrown them, upon the utterance of some propitiatory formula by the priests, into the sand about to be covered with the first large slabs of alabaster.

The terra-cotta cylinders were in no less frequent use in Assyria than in Chaldæa. M. Place found no less than fourteen still in place in niches of the harem walls at Khorsabad. The long inscription they bore contained circumstantial details of the construction of both town and palace. Like that on the metal tablets, it ended with a malediction on all who should dare to raise their hands against the work of Sargon.[410]

As for the cylinders hidden in each angle of a building, none, we believe, have as yet been found in Assyria; perhaps because no search or an inefficient search has been made for them.

We have dwelt at some length upon the orientation of buildings, upon the importance attached to their angle stones, and upon the precautions taken to place an edifice under the protection of the gods, and to preserve the name of its founder from oblivion. We can point to no stronger evidence than that furnished by these proceedings as a whole, of the high civilization to which the people of Chaldæa and Assyria had attained at a very early date. The temple and palace did not spread themselves out upon the soil at the word of a capricious and individual fancy; a constant will governed the arrangement of its plan, solemn rites inaugurated its construction and recommended its welfare to the gods. The texts tell us nothing about the architects, who raised so many noble monuments; we know neither their names, nor their social condition, but we can divine from their works that they had strongly established traditions, and that they could look back upon a solid and careful education for their profession. As to whether they formed one of those close corporations in which the secrets of a trade are handed down from generation to generation of their members, or whether they belonged to the sacerdotal caste, we do not know. We are inclined to the latter supposition in some degree by the profoundly religious character of the ceremonies that accompanied the inception of a building, and by the accounts left by the ancients of those priests whom they called the Chaldæans. It was to these Chaldæans that Mesopotamian society owed all it knew of scientific methods and modes of thought, and it is, perhaps, fair to suppose that they turned to the practice of the arts those intellects which they had cultivated above their fellows. Architecture especially requires something more than manual skill, practice, and natural genius. When it is carried so far as it was in Chaldæa it demands a certain amount of science, and the priests who by right of their intellectual superiority held such an important place in the state, may well have contrived to gain a monopoly as architects to the king. In their persons alone would the scientific knowledge required for such work be combined with the power to accomplish those sacred rites which gave to the commencement of a new building the character of a contract between man and his deity.

NOTES

§ 9.—Mechanical Resources.

The Chaldæans and Assyrians were never called upon to transport such enormous masses as some of the Egyptian monoliths, such as the obelisks and the two great colossi at Thebes. But the stone bulls that decorated the palaces of Nineveh were no light weight, and it was not without difficulty that the modern explorers succeeded in conveying them to the borders of the Tigris and loading them on the rafts upon which they began their long journeys to Paris and London. In moving such objects from place to place the Assyrians, like the Egyptians, had no secret beyond that of patience, and the unflinching use of human arms and shoulders in unstinted number.[411] We know this from monuments in which the details of the operation are figured even more clearly and with more pictorial power than in the bas-relief at El-Bercheh, which has served to make us acquainted with the methods employed in taking an Egyptian colossus from the quarry to its site.

In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, there were waterways that could be used at any season for the transport of heavy masses. Quarries were made as near the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris as possible, and when a stone monster had to be carried to a town situated at some distance from both those rivers the canals by which the country was intersected in every direction supplied their place. Going down stream, and especially in flood time, no means of propulsion were required; the course of the boats or rafts was directed by means of heavy oars like those still used by the boatmen who navigate the Tigris in keleks, or rafts, supported on inflated hides; in ascending the streams towing was called into play, as we know from one of the Kouyundjik bas-reliefs.[412] In this the stone in course of transport is oblong in shape and is placed upon a wide flat boat, beyond which it extends both at the stern and the bows. It is securely fastened with pieces of wood held together by strong pins. There are three tow ropes, two fastened to the stone itself and the third to the bow of the boat.

The towers pull upon these cables by means of smaller cords passed round the shoulders of each and spliced to the main ropes; by such means they could bring far more weight to bear than if they had been content to hold the cable in their hands, as in Egypt. The bas-relief in question is mutilated, but we may guess that a hundred men were attached to each cable, which would make three hundred in all obeying the single will of the superintending engineer who is perched upon the stone and directing their movements. On each flank of the gang march overseers armed with swords and rattans that would be quick to descend on the back and loins of any shirker.

More than one instance of such punishment may be seen on the bas-relief reproduced in part in our Fig. 151. In its lower division two or three of these slave-drivers may be seen with their hands raised against the workmen; in one case the latter sinks to the ground beneath the blows rained upon him. The way in which the whole series of operations is represented in this Kouyundjik relief is most curious. High up in the field we often find the king himself, standing in his chariot and urging on the work. The whole occupies several of Layard's large plates. We can only reproduce the central group, which is the most interesting to the student of engineering in ancient Mesopotamia.

The block of alabaster that we saw a moment ago on a boat towed by hundreds of human arms has been delivered to the sculptors and has put on, under their hands, the rough form of a mitred, human-headed bull. It will be completed after being put in place; the last touches of the chisel and the brush will then be given to it; but the heaviest part of the work is already done and the block has lost much of its original size and weight. Firmly packed with timber, the bull lies upon its side upon a sledge which is curved in front like a boat, or a modern sleigh. Two cables are fastened to its prow and two to its stern. The engineer is again seated upon the stone and claps his hands to give the time, but now he is accompanied by three soldiers who appear to support his authority by voice and gesture. In order to prevent friction and to facilitate the movement of the sledge, rollers are thrust beneath its runners as they progress. Before the huge mass will start, however, the straining cords and muscles have to be helped by a thrust from behind. This is given by means of a huge lever, upon which a number of men pull with all their weight, while its curved foot is engaged under the sledge. A workman is occupied with the reinforcement of the fulcrum by thrusting a wedge in between its upper surface and the lower edge of the lever. When everything is ready a signal will be given, the men behind will throw their weight upon the lever, the sledge will rise a little, the ropes will strain and tighten, and the heavy mass will glide forward upon the greased rollers until arms and legs give out and an interval for rest is called, to be followed presently by a repetition of the same process. Every precaution is taken to minimize the effect of any accident that may take place in the course of the operation. Behind the sledge spare ropes and levers are carried, some upon men's backs, others on small handcarts. There are also a number of workmen carrying rollers.

We shall only refer to one more of these reliefs and that the one with which the series appears to close (Fig. 152). This carved picture has been thought, not without reason, to represent the erection of the bull[413] in its destined place. After its slow but uninterrupted march the huge monster has arrived upon the plateau where it has been awaited. By one great final effort it has been dragged up an inclined plane to the summit of the mound and has been set upon its feet. Nothing remains to be done but to pull and thrust it into its place against the doorway it has to guard and ornament. The same sledge, the same rollers, the same lever, the same precautions against accident are to be recognized here as in the last picture. The only difference is in the position of the statue itself. Standing upright like this it is much more liable to injury than when prone on its flank. New safeguards have therefore been introduced. It is packed under its belly with squares of wood and inclosed in scaffolding to prevent dangerous vibration. Additional precautions against this latter danger are provided by gangs of men who walk at each side and hold, some ropes fastened to the uprights of the scaffolding, others long forked poles engaged under its horizontal pieces. By these means equilibrium could be restored after any extra oscillation on the part of the sledge and its burden.

All these manœuvres are remarkable for the skill and prodigality with which human strength was employed; of all the scientific tools invented to economise effort and to shorten the duration of a task, the only one they seem ever to have used was the most simple of all, the lever, an instrument that must have been invented over and over again wherever men tried to lift masses of stone or wood from the ground. Its discovery must, in fact, have taken place long before the commencement of what we call civilization, although its theory was first expounded by the Greek mathematicians.

In a relief in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, there is a pulley exactly similar to those often seen over a modern well.[414] A cord runs over it and supports a bucket. There is no evidence that the Assyrians employed such a contrivance for any purpose but the raising of water. We cannot say that they used it to lift heavy weights, but the fact that they understood its principle puts them slightly above the Egyptians as engineers.

NOTES

§ 10.—On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations of Buildings.

The Chaldæans and Assyrians knew as little of perspective as they did of mechanics. When they had to figure a building and its contents, or a landscape background, they could not resist the temptation of combining many things which could not be seen from a single standpoint. Like the painters and sculptors of Thebes they mixed up in the most naive fashion those graphic processes that we keep carefully apart. All that they cared about was to be understood. We need not here reproduce the observations we made on this subject in the corresponding chapter of Egyptian Art;[415] it will suffice to give a few examples of the simultaneous employment by Ninevite sculptors of contradictory systems.

It is not difficult to cite examples of things that may, with some little ingenuity, be brought within the definition of a plan. The most curious and strongly marked of these is furnished by one of the most ancient monuments that have come down to us; we mean a statue found at Tello in Lower Chaldæa by M. de Sarzec. It represents a personage seated and holding on his knees an engraved tablet on which two or three different things are represented (Fig. 153). On the right there is one of those styles with which letters or images were cut in the soft clay, at the bottom of the tablet there is a scale which we know from another monument of the same kind to have been originally 10·8 inches in length, i.e. the Babylonian half-cubit or span. By far the larger part of the field, however, is occupied by an irregular figure in which the trace of a fortified wall may be easily recognized. When these monuments were first brought to France this statue was supposed to be that of an architect. When the inscriptions were interpreted, however, this opinion had to be modified in some degree. They were found to contain the same royal title as the other figure of similar style and material discovered by M. de Sarzec on the same spot, the title, namely, of the individual whom archæologists have at present agreed to call Gudea.[416] It therefore seems to represent that prince in the character of an architect, as the constructor of the building in which his statues were placed as a sacred deposit. Must we take it to be the plan of his royal city as a whole, or only of his palace? It is difficult to answer this question, especially while no precise information has been obtained from the inscriptions, whose interpretation presents many difficulties. There can, however, be no doubt that the engraver has given us a plan according to his lights of a wall strengthened by flanking towers, of which those with the boldest salience guard the six passages into the interior.

We find a still more simple plan upon an Assyrian monument of much later date, namely, upon the armour of beaten bronze that formerly protected the gates of Balawat. In this example (Fig. 154) the doorways, the angles, and the centres of the two longer curtains are strengthened by towers.