Mesopotamia was covered, then, by buildings resembling a stepped pyramid in their general outlines. We find them in the reliefs (Fig. 10), and in the oldest cities we can frequently recognize the confused ruins of their two or three lower stories. Our only doubt is connected with the possible use of these buildings, the zigguratts of the Assyrian texts. We shall not here stop to recapitulate the evidence in favour of their religious character; it will suffice to quote the description given by Herodotus of the temple of Bel or Belus at Babylon. As to whether the ruins of that building are to be identified with Babil (Fig. 37) or the Birs-Nimroud (Fig. 168) we shall inquire presently. This is the description of Herodotus:—

"In the other (fortress) was the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus, a square inclosure two furlongs each way with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half way up one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place nor is the chamber occupied of nights by any one but a single native woman.... Below in the same precinct there is a second temple, in which is a sitting figure of Jupiter all of gold ... outside the temple are two altars."[453]

This description is, of course, very short; it omits many details that we should have wished to find in it; but like nearly all the descriptions of Herodotus it is very clear. The old historian saw well, and his mind retained what he saw. From his recital it is plain that this was the finest of the Babylonian temples, and that even when partly ruinous, under the successors of Alexander, its colossal dimensions were yet able to astonish foreign visitors. We may, then, take it as the type of the Chaldæan temple, as the finest religious building in the first city of Mesopotamia. Nebuchadnezzar reconstructed it and made it higher and richer in its ornamentation than before, but he kept to the ancient foundations and made no change in the general character of the plan. In this single edifice were gathered up all the threads of a long tradition; it was, as it were, the supreme effort, the last word of the national art: and Herodotus declares plainly that it was a staged tower.

Such an assertion puts the matter beyond a doubt, and enables us to point to the staged tower as the form chosen by these people and made use of throughout their civilization for the buildings raised in honour of their gods. And having dismissed this fundamental question we have now to give a rapid description of the principal varieties of the type as they have been established by M. Chipiez. And as we go on we shall point out the authorities for each restoration; whether the ruins themselves, the inscribed texts, or the sculptured reliefs.

In the first line we must place the Rectangular Chaldæan Temple (Plate II. and Figs. 169, 170, and 171). We have put it first because the remains from which it has been reconstructed have all been found in Lower Chaldæa, that is, amongst the oldest of the Chaldæan cities. As we learn from the texts, these temples were repaired under the last kings of Babylon, and it was their antiquity that made them dear both to the people and their kings. We may believe, therefore, that in restoring them care was taken to preserve their ancient features. It would be the upper part of their retaining walls that required renewal, and these would be rebuilt on their ancient foundations. Here and there the latter exist even at the present day, and the names of the earliest Chaldæan princes may be read upon their bricks.[454]

The remains studied by Messrs. Taylor and Loftus at Warka (Fig. 172), Abou-Sharein, and Mugheir have furnished the chief elements for our restoration, which bears a strong resemblance to the ruin at Warka called Bouvariia (A on the map), and one still stronger to that temple at Mugheir whose present state is shown in our Figs. 48 and 143. This first type is characterized by the form of its lower, and the situation of its upper, stages. The latter are not placed in the centre of the platform on which they stand; they are thrown back much nearer to one of the two shorter sides than to the other, so that the building has a front and a back. The front is almost entirely taken up with wide staircases.[455] The staircase leading from the first story to the second must alone have been concealed in the interior of the building, an arrangement which avoided the necessity for breaking up the ample solidity of that imposing stage (see Plate II.).

The surroundings of the temple in our plate—the background of slightly undulating plain, the houses similar to those found by Taylor and Loftus, in which they discovered vaulted passages traversing the thickness of the walls[456]—are, of course, purely imaginary.

The temple itself, like the palace at Khorsabad, was raised on a vast platform upon which the city walls abutted. This platform was reached by wide flights of steps.[457] Lateral ramps led to a second platform, inclosed on every side, with which the sacred part of the building, the Haram, began. We have already spoken of the panelled ornament with which the great, flat surfaces of its walls were relieved.[458] The lowest stage of the temple was provided with buttresses like those that still exist in the temple of Mugheir (Fig. 43). A high, rectangular plinth—decorated in our restoration with glazed faïence[459]—was interposed between the first and second stage.[460] A rectangular chapel decorated, in all probability, with metal plaques and glazed polychromatic bricks, crowned the whole. Traces of this chapel have been found at Mugheir, and the wealth of its decoration is attested by many pieces of evidence.[461] At Abou-Sharein also there are vestiges of a small and richly ornamented sanctuary crowning the second stage of a ruin whose aspect now bears a distinct resemblance to that of the temple at Mugheir. The triple row of crenellations we have given to this sanctuary or chapel was suggested by the altars and obelisks (Fig. 107 and 111). Here, as at Nineveh, these battlements must have been the one universal finish to the walls. The use to which we have put them is quite in harmony with the spirit of Mesopotamian architecture, but there is no direct evidence of their presence in these buildings. In this particular our restoration is conjectural.

A glance at our longitudinal section (Fig. 169) will show that we have left the main body of this great mass of sun-dried brick absolutely solid. It was in vain that, at Mugheir, trenches and shafts were cut through the flanks of the ruin, not a sign of any apartment or void of the most elementary kind was found.[462]

This Mugheir temple rises hardly more than fifty feet above the level of the plain. The restoration by M. Chipiez, for which it furnished the elements, shows a height of 135 feet; judging from the proportions of its remains the building can hardly have been higher than that. But it is certain that many temples reached a far greater height, otherwise their size could not have made any great impression upon travellers who had seen the Egyptian pyramids. Even now the Birs-Nimroud, which has been undergoing for so many centuries a continual process of diminution, rises no less than 235 feet above the surrounding country,[463] and Strabo, the only Greek author who says anything precise as to the height of the greatest of the Babylonian monuments, writes thus: "This monument, which was, they say, overthrown by Xerxes, was a square pyramid of burnt brick, one stade (606¾ feet) high, and one stade in diameter."[464]

The arrangement by which such a height could be most easily reached would be the superposition of square masses one upon another, each mass being centrally placed on the upper surface of the one below it. The weight would be more equally divided and the risks of settlement more slight than in any other system. Of this type M. Chipiez has restored two varieties. We shall first describe the simpler of the two, which we may call the Square Single-ramped Chaldæan Temple (Figs. 173, 174, 175, 176).

The principal elements for this restoration have been taken from the staged tower at Khorsabad known as the Observatory, but M. Chipiez has expanded its dimensions until they almost reach those ascribed to the temple of Bel by Strabo. Moreover, he had to decide a delicate question which the discovery of the Khorsabad Observatory, where only the four lower stages remained, had done nothing to solve, namely the plan and inclination of the ramp. In M. Thomas's restoration of the Khorsabad tower, the last section of the ramp at the top, is parallel to that at the bottom, and the crowning platform is not exactly upon the central axis of the building.[465] In M. Chipiez's restoration the top platform is in the centre, like those below it, and the upper end of his ramp is vertically over the spot where it leaves the ground. This result has been obtained by a peculiar arrangement of the inclined plane which must have been known to the Mesopotamian architects, seeing how great was their practice and how desirable, in their eyes, was the symmetrical aspect which it alone could give. We have suggested the varied colours of the different stages by changes of tone in our engraving. In spite of the words of Herodotus M. Chipiez has only given his tower seven stages, because that number seems to have been sacred and traditional, and Herodotus may very well have counted the plinth or the terminal chapel in the eight mentioned in his description. Bearing in mind a passage in Diodorus—"At the summit Semiramis placed three statues of beaten gold, Zeus, Hera, and Rhea"[466]—we have crowned its apex with such a group. The phrase of Herodotus, "Below ... there is a second temple," has led us to introduce chapels contrived in the interior of the mass and opening on the ramp at the fifth and sixth stories. There is nothing to forbid the idea that such chambers were much more numerous than this, and opened, sometimes on one, sometimes on another, of the four faces.

The buildings at the lower part of our engraving are imaginary, but they are by no means improbable. Among them may be distinguished the wide flights of steps and inclined planes by which the platform on which the temple stood was reached.[467] At the foot of the temple on the right of the engraving there is a palace, on the left two obelisk-shaped steles and a small temple of a type to be presently described. Behind the tower stretch away the waters of a lake. Nebuchadnezzar, in one of his inscriptions, speaks of surrounding the temple he had built with a lake.

In seeking to vary the effect produced by these external ramps, the idea of a more complicated arrangement than the one last noticed may have occurred to the Chaldees. This M. Chipiez has embodied in his restoration of a Square Double-ramped Chaldæan Temple (Plate III. and Figs. 177, 178, and 179). As in the last model, there are seven stages, each stage being square on plan, but the difference consists in the use of two ramps leading from base to summit. Each of these keeps to its own side of the building, only approaching the other on the front and back façades at the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages (see (Plate III). In order that the building as a whole should have a symmetrical and monumental appearance, it was necessary that all its seven stages—with the exception of the first, to which a rather different rôle was assigned—should be of equal height. But their length and width differed in proportion to their height in the building. The continual shortening of the distance within which the incline had to be packed, would, if we suppose each ramp confined to one side of the tower, have required the slope to become steeper with each story. Such a want of parallelism would have been very ugly, and there was but one means of avoiding it, and that was to continue the ramps nearly to the centre of the front at the fourth and sixth stages, and to the centre of the posterior façade at the fifth. The advantages of such an arrangement are obvious. Banished mostly to the flanks the double ramp left four stages clear both at front and back, providing an ample promenade. On the other three it showed itself just sufficiently to "furnish" the building and diversify its aspect without in any way encumbering it. The whole structure terminated in a chapel placed on the central axis of the tower, and surmounted by a cupola. The inscriptions mention the dome covered with leaves of chiselled gold which crowned at Babylon that temple "to the foundations of the earth" which was restored by Nebuchadnezzar.[468]

In these texts another sanctuary included in the same building and placed half way between the base and summit is mentioned. This was the sepulchral chamber of Bel-Merodach in which his oracle was consulted; in M. Chipiez's restoration the entrance to this sanctuary is placed in the middle of the fifth story.

The vast esplanade about the base of the temple was suggested by the description of Herodotus. It is borne by two colossal plinths flanked and retained by buttresses. In our plate the lower of these two plinths is only hinted at in the two bottom corners. In the distance behind the temple itself may be seen one of those embattled walls which divided Babylon into so many fortresses, and, still farther away, another group of large buildings surrounded by a wall and the ordinary houses of the city.

This double-ramped type is at once the most beautiful and the most workmanlike of those offered by these staged towers. With a single ramp we get a tower whose four faces are repetitions of each other, but here we have a true façade, on which a happy contrast is established between the unbroken stages and those upon which the ramps appear—between oblique lines and lines parallel with the soil. The building gains in repose and solidity, and its true scale becomes more evident than when the eye is led insensibly from base to summit by a monotonous spiral.

We cannot positively affirm that the architects of Mesopotamia understood and made use of the system just described; there is no positive evidence on the point.[469] It contains, however, nothing but a logical development from the premises, nothing but what is in perfect keeping with Mesopotamian habits, nothing that involves difficulties of execution or construction beyond those over which we know them to have triumphed. Besides, we have proofs that they were not content to go on servilely reproducing one and the same type for twenty centuries; their temples were not all shaped in the same mould. The type of the Mugheir temple differed sensibly from that of the Khorsabad Observatory. One of the Kouyundjik sculptures reveals a curious variant of the traditional theme, so far as Assyria was concerned, in an arrangement of the staged tower that we should never have suspected but for the survival of this relief (Fig. 34). The picture in question is no doubt very much abridged and far from true to the proportions of the original, but yet it has furnished M. Chipiez with the elements of a restoration in which conjecture has had very little to say. This we have called the Square Assyrian Temple (see Plate IV. and Figs. 180-182).

According to the relief the tower itself rises upon a dome-shaped mound in front of which there are a large doorway and two curved ramps. From all that we know of Assyrian buildings of this kind we may be sure that the original of the picture was so placed. The form of the mound may be described as reproducing the extrados of a depressed arch. This is the only form on which flights of steps with a curve similar to that here shown could be constructed. The design of the steps in our plate corresponds exactly to that indicated more roughly by the sculptor; no other means of affording convenient access to the base of the tower—at least outside the mound—could have been contrived. Two doors were pierced at the head of the steps through the large panels with which the lower stage of the tower itself was decorated, and from that point, so far as we can tell from the relief, the ascent was continued by means of internal staircases. The sculptor has only shown three stages, but—unless the absence of anything above has been caused by the mutilation of the slab—we may suppose that he has voluntarily suppressed a fourth.[470] In any case the third story is too large to have formed the apex of the tower. The general proportions suggest at least one more stage for the support of the usual chapel. The latter we have restored as a timber structure covered with metal plates, skins, or coloured planks. The three stages immediately below the chapel we have decorated with painted imitations of panels, carried out either in fresco or glazed brick. As for the internal arrangements we know very little. The great doorway with which the mound itself is prefaced in the relief must have led to some apartment worthy of its size and importance; we have therefore pierced the mass in our section with a suite of several chambers. At the second story another doorway occurs; it is much smaller and more simple, and the chamber to which it led must have been comparatively unimportant. In our Fig. 180 it is restored as the approach to the internal staircase.

In order to vary the framework of our restorations and to show Assyrian architecture in as many aspects as possible, we have placed this temple within a fortified wall, like that of Khorsabad. Within a kind of bastion towards the left of the plate we have introduced one of those small temples of which remains have been found at Khorsabad and Nimroud. The walls of the town form a continuation of those about the temple. In front of the principal entrance to the sacred inclosure we have set up a commemorative stele.

Aided by these restorations we hope to have given a clearer and more vivid idea of Chaldæan art than if we had confined ourselves to describing the scanty remains of their religious buildings. We have now to give a rapid review of those existing ruins whose former purposes and arrangements may still to a certain extent be traced.

NOTES

§ 2.—Ruins of Staged Towers.

In describing the first of our four types we had occasion to point to the buildings at Warka and Mugheir, which enabled us to restore what may be called the Lower Chaldæan form of temple. The mounds formed by the remains of those buildings had not been touched for thousands of years, they had entirely escaped such disturbance as the ruins of Babylon have undergone for so many centuries at the hand of the builders of Bagdad and Hillah; and it is probable that explorations carried on methodically and with intelligent patience would give most interesting results. If, for instance, the foundations of all walls were systematically cleared, we should be enabled to restore with absolute certainty the plans of the buildings to which they belonged. To the monuments discovered by the English explorers we must now add a find made by M. de Sarzec at Tello, of which, however, full details have yet to be furnished.[471] We take the following from the too short letter that was read to the Academy of Inscriptions on the 2nd of December 1881. "Finally, it was in that part of the building marked h that opens upon the court b that I found the curious structure of which I spoke to you. This solid mass of burnt brick and bitumen, with diminishing terraces rising one above the other, reminds us of those Chaldæo-Babylonian structures whose probable object was to afford a refuge to the inhabitants from the swarms of insects and burning winds that devastate these regions for nine months of the year." Here, we believe, M. de Sarzec is in error; the only refuges against the inflamed breath of the desert were the serdabs, the subterranean chambers with their scanty light and moistened walls, and the dark apartments of Assyrian palaces with their walls of prodigious thickness. The great terraces erected at such a vast expenditure of labour were not undertaken merely to escape the mosquitoes; we may take M. de Sarzec's words, however, as a proof that at Sirtella as in all the towns of Lower Chaldæa, the remains of a building with several stories or stages are to be recognized.

The ruins on the site of Babylon may be divided into four principal groups, each forming small hills that are visible for many miles round; they are designated on the annexed map by the names under which they are commonly known. These are, in their order from north to south, Babil, El-Kasr (or Mudjelibeh) and Tell-Amran, on the left bank; on the right bank the most conspicuous of them all, the Birs-Nimroud.[472] Most of those who have studied the topography of Babylon are disposed to see in the Kasr and in Tell-Amran the remains of a vast palace, or rather of several palaces, built by different kings, and those of the famous hanging gardens; while in Babil (Plate I. and Fig. 37) and the Birs Nimroud (Fig. 168) they agree to recognize all that is left of the two chief religious buildings of Babylon. Babil would be the oldest of them all—the Bit-Saggatu or "temple of the foundations of the earth" which stood in the very centre of the royal city and was admired and described by Herodotus. The Birs-Nimroud would correspond to the no less celebrated temple of Borsippa, the Bit-Zida, the "temple of the planets and of the seven spheres."

At Babil no explorations have thrown the least light upon the disposition of the building. In the whole of its huge mass, which rises to a height of some 130 feet above the plain, no trace of the separate cubes or of their dimensions is to be found. All the restorations that have been made are purely imaginary. At Birs-Nimroud the excavations of Sir Henry Rawlinson in 1854 were by no means fruitless but, unhappily, we are without any detailed account of their results. So far as we have been told, it would appear that the existence of at least six of the seven stages had been ascertained and the monument, which, according to Sir Henry Rawlinson's measurements, is now 153 feet high; can have lost but little of its original height. We can hardly believe however, that the violence of man and the storms of so many centuries have done so little damage.[473] It seems to be more clearly proved that, in shape, the temple belonged to the class we have described under the head of The Rectangular Chaldæan Temple.[474] The axis of the temple, the vertical line upon which the centre of the terminal chapel must have been placed, was not at an equal distance from the north-western and south-eastern sides, so that the building had its gentlest slope—taking it as a whole—towards the south-east.[475] On that side the cubical blocks of which it was composed were so placed as to leave much wider steps than on the north-west. The temple therefore had a true façade, in front of which propylæa, like the one introduced in our restoration from the ruins at Mugheir, were placed. The difference consists in the fact that here the stages are square on plan. The lowest stage was 273 feet each way; it rested upon a platform of sun-dried brick which rose but a few feet above the level of the plain.

Supposing these measurements to be exact they suggest a building which was nothing extraordinary either in height or mass. The dimensions furnished by Rich and Ker-Porter are much greater. Both of these speak of a base a stade, or about 606 feet, square, which would give a circumference of no less than 2,424 feet—not much less than half a mile. In any case the temple now represented by Babil must have been the larger of the two. M. Oppert mentions 180 metres, or about 600 feet, as one diameter of the present rather irregular mass. That would still be inferior to the Pyramid of Cheops, which is 764 feet square at the base, and yet the diameter of 600 feet for Babil is, no doubt, in excess of its original dimensions. The accumulation of rubbish must have enlarged its base in every direction.

It seems clear, therefore, that the great structures of Chaldæa were inferior to the largest of the royal tombs of Egypt, both in height and lateral extent. We do not know how far the subsidiary buildings by which the staged towers are surrounded and supplemented in our plates may have extended, but it is difficult to believe that their number or importance could have made the ensemble to which they belonged a rival to Karnak, or even to Luxor.

If we may judge from the texts and the existing ruins, the religious buildings of Assyria were smaller than those of Chaldæa. When the Ten Thousand traversed the valley of the Tigris in their famous retreat, they passed close to a large abandoned city, which Xenophon calls Larissa. As to whether his Larissa was Calah (Nimroud), or Nineveh (Kouyundjik), we need not now inquire, but his short description of a staged tower is of great interest: "Near this town," he says, "there was a stone pyramid two plethra (about 203 feet) high; each side of its base was one plethron in length."[476]

The tower cleared by Layard at Nimroud is perhaps the very one seen by Xenophon.[477] The Greek soldier speaks of a stone pyramid while the Nimroud tower is of brick, but the whole of its substructure is cased with the finer material to a height of nearly twenty-four feet, which is quite enough to account for Xenophon's statement. As for his dimensions, they should not be taken too literally. In their rapid and anxious march the Greek commanders had no time to wield the plumb-line or the measuring-chain; they must have trusted mainly to their eyes in arriving at a notion of the true size of the buildings by which their attention was attracted. The tower at Nimroud must have been about 150 feet square, measured along its plinth; the present height of the mound is 141 feet, and nothing above the first stage now exists. As Layard remarks, one or two stories more must be taken into the account, and they would easily make up an original elevation of from 200 to 240 feet, or about that of the Larissa tower. Xenophon made use of the word pyramid because his language furnished him with no term more accurate. Like the true pyramid, the staged tower diminished gradually from base to summit, and there can be no doubt as to the real character of the building seen by the Greeks, as may be gathered from their leader's statement, that the "barbarians from the neighbouring villages took refuge upon it in great numbers." Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and Ethiopia could have afforded no refuge of the kind. A few could stand upon their summits, supposing them to have lost their capstones, but it would require the wide ramps and terraces of the staged tower to afford a foothold for the population of several villages.[478]

Nothing but the first two stages, or rather the plinth and the first stage, now remain at Nimroud of what must have been the chief temple of Calah. There is no trace either of the ramp or of the colours with which the different stories were ornamented. The Khorsabad tower discovered by Place is more interesting and much more instructive as to the arrangement and constitution of these buildings.[479]