§ I. General Character of the Mesopotamian Palace and History of the Excavations.

As every student of Assyro-Chaldæan art has remarked, the best preserved of its monuments are the palaces. They alone are represented by ruins in such a condition that restorations may be successfully attempted, not only so far as their general arrangements are concerned but even in minor details. The preponderant part played by the ruins of palaces in the history of Assyrian architecture is thus acknowledged by all, but it has sometimes been explained by reasons that will not bear examination. “Less religious or more servile than the Egyptians and the Greeks, they made their temples insignificant in comparison with the dwellings of their kings, to which indeed the temple is most commonly a sort of appendage. In the palace their art culminates—-there every effort is made, every ornament lavished. If the architecture of the Assyrian palaces be fully considered, very little need be said on the subject of their other buildings.”[1]

History contradicts any such theory. The asserted inequality did not exist. The piety of Chaldæans and Assyrians was no less lively and profound than that of the Egyptians. A Seti or a Rameses, the cherished son and visible image of Amen, the prince who became a god after his life was done, was no less powerful and venerable at Memphis and Thebes than were Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar at Nineveh and Babylon.

The differences to which we have pointed are to be explained by other and more simple reasons. In Egypt the temple has survived the palace because it was a dwelling built for an immortal occupant, and therefore the most durable materials, stone and granite, were used; while the palace, being no more than the resting-place of a day, a shelter raised among waving palms and flowing streams for the passenger through this life to the next, had to be content with brick and timber. In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the same materials were used for the dwellings both of gods and kings; and the same system of construction, a system dictated by the climate, was applied to both classes of buildings. It is not true that one group was neglected for the other, that Mesopotamian civilization took less trouble for Marduk, for Istar and Assur, than for its conquering princes; it is inaccurate to say that her palace architecture was all that Assyria had to show. The tomb was larger and more important in Egypt than in Mesopotamia, but in the latter country the temple was the object of as much care, both in construction and decoration, as the palace. Its arrangement was more interesting and far more original, and its outward decoration no less rich. In Babylon, at least, the inscriptions in which the kings recount their exploits for the admiration of posterity, speak oftener and with more pride of temples than of palaces. The remains of the latter are more complete simply because their chief development was over the surface of the ground, while that of the temples was toward the sky. With materials such as those of which both the one and the other were built it was inevitable that tall buildings should come to ruin before low ones. Moreover, their most interesting parts were on the exterior and more especially about their summits. Ramps and sanctuaries with their surface decorations must have begun to disappear as soon as daily care ceased to be lavished upon them. The solid interior alone would be preserved, and, before many years were over, the degradation of its substance would make it a shapeless heap of clay. The palace, of course, burnt-in the first place and then abandoned to the slow action of time, can have met the forces of destruction with no better effect than buildings of marble and granite did elsewhere; but it inclosed great empty spaces, wide quadrangles, long galleries, and spacious chambers. In their fall ceilings and the heads of walls filled up these voids and buried their inclosing walls to a considerable height in a deep bed of protecting rubbish. This had only to be taken away to lay bare the whole plan of the building and much of its ornamentation. We can thus become much more intimately acquainted with the palace than with the temple, but we have no right thence to conclude that the former was the favourite work of the Chaldæan architects, or that it contained the last word of their talent and taste.

In any case it was the Assyrian palace that, about forty years ago, began to reveal to us an early civilization to which modern research is now awarding its proper place in the history of the ancient world. About the commencement of the present century criticism had succeeded in fixing approximate dates for the few kings of Assyria and Chaldæa mentioned in the Bible and by classic authors. It was suspected that the tales of Ctesias included many a fable, and painful efforts were made to disentangle what was true from what was false, but the language, the literature, and the arts of those peoples were as yet entirely unknown. The sites of Babylon and Nineveh had been ascertained with some degree of certainty; it was known that ruins existed in the plains of Mesopotamia which had been used by the natives as open quarries for century after century, and that the towns and villages that now stud the country were built from the materials thus obtained; but nothing had been learnt as to the form and arrangement of the buildings hidden under those heaps of débris. Travellers spoke of seeing statues and bas-reliefs among the ruins, but they could not bring them away, and they made no drawings which could be depended on for accuracy. European museums could boast of nothing beyond small objects, fragments of pottery, stones and terra-cotta slabs covered with strange symbols and undecipherable inscriptions. Most of these were cones and cylinders which proved that the Mesopotamians understood how to cut and engrave the hardest stones. Such objects excited a kind of hopeless curiosity. They were sometimes pointed out to the attention of scholars, as by Millin in his paper on the Caillou Michaux, a sort of Babylonian landmark that has belonged to the Cabinet des Antiques[2] in Paris ever since 1801.

But no attempt was made to define the style of the school of art by which such things were produced, and not the faintest suspicion was felt of the influence exercised by Chaldæan productions over distant races whose genius for the plastic arts was universally acknowledged. A single writer, the historian Niebuhr, seems by a kind of intuition to have divined the discoveries at which a new generation was to assist, and to have anticipated their consequences. As early as the year 1829 he wrote, “When at Rome I heard from a Chaldæan priest who lives near the ruins of Nineveh, that colossi are there found buried under huge masses of building rubbish. When he was a child one of these statues was discovered by a mere accident, but the Turks at once broke it up. Nineveh is destined to be a Pompeii for Western Asia. It will be an inexhaustible mine for those that come after us, perhaps even for our own children. The Assyrian language will also have its Champollions. You who can do so should prepare the way by the study of Zend for the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions.”[3]

Here Niebuhr showed himself a true prophet, but he was denied the joy of seeing his prophecy fulfilled. He died in 1831, and it was not till the 20th March, 1843, that the French consul at Mossoul sent his first batch of labourers to Khorsabad. The date better deserves to be remembered than that of many a battle or royal accession. His first reports to the Academic des Inscriptions were scientific events.[4] Funds were placed at his disposal, and a clever draughtsman, M. Flandin, was sent out to help in measuring plans and copying bas-reliefs. In June, 1845, the first Assyrian sculptures of any size that had ever left their native place for Europe were set afloat upon the Tigris, and in December, 1846, they arrived in France. In 1847 de Longperier was the first to read upon the Khorsabad remains that name of Sargon which is mentioned by none of the classic authors and only once by the Bible.[5] This discovery was of the greatest importance; it at once gave a date to remains whose age had been previously a mere matter of guess. The most divergent hypotheses had been started—some believed the sculptures to have belonged to the remote times of Ninus and Semiramis, others thought them no more ancient than the Sassanids;[6] it was a great point gained to make sure that their true date was the eighth century before our era.

These first discoveries excited so much attention that they were sure to attract many to the task begun with such unhoped-for success by Botta. England especially, by whom all that has the slightest bearing on Jewish history is so passionately followed up, was sure to take her part. In November, 1845, Mr. Layard began to excavate at Nimroud; he carried on his work there and at Kouyundjik, until the year 1847. The adjoining map (Fig. 1) will-give an idea of the relative position of the sites we shall so often have to mention. The beauty and variety of the monuments sent home by Mr. Layard, decided the authorities of the British Museum to intrust him with a new mission, and from 1849 to 1851 he was again busy at Nimroud; he cleared some more rooms in the great palace on the Kouyundjik mound, and he undertook some explorations on the sites of several Chaldæan cities. The objects he collected form the true foundation of the Assyrian collection in the British Museum, which is, at present, by far the richest in existence.

In 1851, France decided to resume the excavations at Khorsabad, which had been abandoned on the departure of Botta. M. Place, his successor at Mossoul, continued and completed the excavations, which had been little more than begun. His labours lasted till 1855, but unhappily most of the sculptures recovered by him are now at the bottom of the Tigris. The great work in which he was helped by the skill of Felix Thomas is the most precious result of his enterprise.

The era of heroic explorations seems to have closed with Layard and Place, but during the last thirty years there has always been some English agent sounding the flanks of the Assyrian mounds. Under the surveillance of Sir Henry, then Colonel, Rawlinson, the East India Company’s resident at Bagdad, many discoveries were made by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, Sir Henry Layard’s collaborator, and by the late William Kennett Loftus. Finally, we must mention George Smith, who died at Aleppo in 1876, on the eve of his third journey into Assyria. He had visited that country for the first time in 1873, at the expense of the Daily Telegraph, which had placed a sum of one thousand guineas at his disposal, and had afterwards presented all the objects he had sent home to the British Museum.

We have enumerated all these dates with some dryness, and without any attempt to write a taking narrative, because we wished to impress upon our readers how recent these discoveries are, how they have followed closely one upon another, and well within the lifetime of a single man. The difficulty of our task will thus be evident. We are making a first attempt to bring the results of all these explorations into a connected form, and to present them systematically to the reader. There is one thing that stands out very strongly in the whole inquiry. The monuments, by which the art of a great vanished civilization is represented in our museums, come mainly from the ruins of royal dwellings. The chief idea suggested by the words Khorsabad, Nimroud and Kouyundjik, is the excavation of the magnificent palaces raised by the Assyrian monarchs within a period of something more than three centuries. Following a custom still in vogue with the native rulers of Egypt and India, of Persia and Turkey, each prince signalized his accession by the commencement of a palace which should be entirely his own.[7] To establish himself in the dwelling which had seen the death of his predecessor would have seemed an invitation to misfortune, and his pride would have been wounded at seeing the walls of his house given up to celebrating the exploits of any one but himself. Finally, each king hoped to surpass all those who had gone before in the extent and luxury of the edifice to which his name would be thenceforward attached. Sometimes he took dressed masonry from abandoned seraglios; sometimes he raised at his doors winged bulls which had already done duty elsewhere, changing, of course, their inscriptions; sometimes he lined his chambers with alabaster slabs bearing reliefs in which the conquests of his fathers were narrated; in that case he turned the sculptured side to the wall, and caused his own prowess to be celebrated upon the new surface thus cheaply won.[8] Whether old materials were used or new, the palace was always personal to the king who built it. Thus it is that the remains of some ten palaces have been found in the mounds already attacked, although that of Khorsabad is the only one that has been completely explored.

We cannot attempt to describe the ruins of so many palaces. No one of them is an exact copy of any other; their dimensions, and many of their arrangements have much variety, but nevertheless, we may say that they all follow the same general plan. The only way to avoid continual repetition is to take, as a type of all, the example that has been most completely studied. Our choice of such a type is soon made. The palace of Sargon, at Khorsabad, may be neither the largest of the Assyrian palaces nor that in which the best sculptors were employed upon the decorations, but it is certainly that in which the excavations have been most systematically carried on. Except at a few points the explorers have only held their hands when the flat summit of the mound was reached. The whole has been cleared except the centres of some of the quadrangles and a few unimportant outbuildings. Nowhere else can the general arrangement be so clearly followed, or the guiding spirit of an Assyrian plan so easily grasped.

§ 2.—The Palace of Sargon.

The mound in which the remains of Sargon’s palace had lain concealed for so many centuries bore on its summit, before the excavations began, a small village called Khorsabad (Fig. 2). It rises about nine miles north-north-east of Mossoul on the eastern bank of the Khausser, an affluent of the Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of the mountains which begin to draw in towards the left bank of that river not far above the site of Nineveh. Botta was induced to begin his excavations at this point on account of the numerous fragments of cuneiform inscriptions which were found there by the peasants of the village. He sent a number of workmen to Khorsabad under the superintendence of his confidential servant, Charles Michel, who, twenty years afterwards, was my dragoman in Asia Minor.[9] How often during our long marches through forests and across barren steppes he entertained me with the story of how he discovered Nineveh, as, like his master Botta, he always called it, my readers may guess. “We arrived at Khorsabad towards evening, and after exploring the village I was rather puzzled as to what I should find for my men to do—we had already been so often deceived. At Kouyundjik we had raised no end of dust and found hardly anything. While turning over this question in my mind I had my supper before the door of one of the houses, and after the meal was over, I was idly scratching the ground by the side of the mat on which I was lying, with my knife. Suddenly I felt the blade strike against something very hard; I withdrew it, and thrusting my finger into the hole, I felt a stone. Working away with the knife I soon enlarged the hole, and then saw that the stone was worked and chiselled with great care. Next morning I brought my workmen to the spot, and watched them closely to see that they advanced with sufficient precaution. A few strokes of the pick-axe brought to light the head of one of the bulls. Off I went at full gallop to Mossoul, and came back next day with M. Botta.”

Whether this be a truthful narrative or not I cannot say. Michel was born in the Levant, of French parents, and I always forgot to ask whether, by any chance, his father was a Gascon. In any case, it was to Botta’s honour that he understood the value and significance of a discovery due, in the first place, to the idle scratchings of a subaltern, and that he pushed on his explorations in the face of Turkish ill-will and pecuniary difficulties, and that before he had received any encouragement from Paris.

Botta soon recognized the true character of the building, even although he clung to the erroneous notion that he had disinterred the historical capital of Assyria, the Nineveh of classic writers and Hebrew prophets.[10] The excavations of his successor and the decipherment of the cuneiform texts have clearly proved his mistake. The monument found and partly excavated by Botta, was never included in Nineveh, vast though that city may have been. It was part of what may be called a caprice of Sargon’s put into execution between the years 722 and 705 B.C. That prince was not content with founding a new dynasty; he determined to pass the intervals between his campaigns in a palace and city which should be entirely his own creation, and should bear his name. That town and palace, with its situation a few miles from the great political and commercial capital, was the Versailles of an Assyrian grand monarque.

The connection between town and palace was very close. The fortified walls of the former inclosed a large rectangular parallelogram (Vol. I. Fig. 144), while the lofty platform on which the structures composing the king’s dwelling were reared, was placed, as it were, astride of the wall on its north-western face. Its pavement was on a level with the summit of the wall.[11] Thus attached to the enceinte the palace esplanade shared the protection of its parapet and flanking towers, while it stood boldly out, like an enormous bastion, from the stretch of wall of which it formed a part. From three of its faces it commanded a view of the plain, the river, and the neighbouring mountains, so that the requirements of health and pleasure were remembered at the same time as those of safety. As for placing the king’s dwelling, as it might have been placed by a modern architect, at some distance from the town, and upon the summit of some gentle height, such a notion was quite outside Assyrian ideas. A country site would have been too easily accessible to the numerous enemies of the Assyrian kings—those eastern Attilas, who could only feel themselves safe when sheltered by the impenetrable walls of dwellings perched upon an artificial hill, from which the whole surrounding country could be watched.

We must refer those who wish to study the arrangements of Sargon’s palace in detail to the plans and letterpress of Place. Botta discovered fourteen apartments; Place cleared one hundred and eighty-six. A few more were suggested by him on his restored plan at points where symmetry seemed to demand their existence. His plan, therefore, includes in all, two hundred and nine apartments of various sizes.[12] The adjoining plan, which shows the actual state of the ruins, is sufficient to show the general arrangement (Fig. 3).[13] The longitudinal section (Fig. 4) is taken through the central axis of the building, the position of the staged-tower showing that it is the western half of the palace that has been chosen for reproduction. A good idea of the general physiognomy of the whole may be obtained from our Plate V. This is not a mere reduction from Thomas’s restoration;[14] several details have been sensibly modified. Thus, on the principal façade, barrel vaults have been substituted for domes as being on the whole more probable; battlements have been placed on the parapet of the double ramp, and the perspective, which is very imperfect in Thomas’s plate, has been corrected. Our view is supposed to be taken at some sixteen hundred feet above the ground and at a considerable distance south-east of the platform.

We shall here confine ourselves to showing how the Assyrians understood the plan and general arrangement of a royal palace. The buildings of which it was composed were grouped upon a platform shaped like a T.[15] Each of the two parts of this platform was a rectangle. The larger of the two—that within the town walls—had a superficial measurement of about 68,500 square yards, the smaller one of about 40,000 square yards; so that the palace as a whole covered between twenty-four and twenty-five acres of ground, and the brick employed in building it may be put at about 1,750,642 cubic yards. The imagination is oppressed by such figures, especially when we remember that all this mass of material was carried to its place in baskets on men’s shoulders. This we know from those reliefs in which the construction of a palace is figured.[16]

At the first glance the labyrinth of chambers, corridors and courts presented by the above plan seems to offer a hopeless task to one anxious to grasp the principle of its arrangements and to assign its right use to each apartment. Place and Thomas tell us that such was their feeling when they first began to open up the palace, but as the work advanced they grew to understand its combinations. In certain parts of the building objects were found that cast a flood of light upon the original purposes of the rooms in which they occurred; the character and richness of the decoration varied greatly between one part of the palace and another. The arrangement of the side entrances, the rarity or multiplicity of passages, also had their significance. Thanks to the observations made on all these points during the progress of the work we can now understand the economy of the building with some completeness.

Its general arrangements were suggested to the architect by those conditions of life in the east which have changed so little during so many centuries. From this point of view it was soon perceived that the palace was divided into three distinct groups of apartments, groups corresponding exactly to the three great divisions into which every palatial residence of modern India, Persia, or Turkey may be divided. There is the Seraglio, or palace properly speaking, the rooms inhabited by the men, and the sélamlik, in which visitors are received. Then comes the Harem containing the private apartments of the prince with those of his wives and children, who are guarded by eunuchs and waited on by a crowd of female slaves and domestics. Finally there is the Khan, a collection of service chambers that we should call offices. The analogy is so absolute that in our ignorance of the Assyrian names for the three divisions of the palace, we are tempted to make use of those employed throughout the Levant, to designate the different parts of such houses, as, thanks to the wealth of their masters, are provided with all their organs.

It is possible that the palace had some direct outlet to the open country, so that its inhabitants could escape, unknown to the population of the city, in time of tumult, or could make a nocturnal sortie upon an enemy encamped beneath the mound. If there were any such arrangement it must have consisted of staircases contrived in the mound itself and closed, perhaps, at their inferior extremities with heavy bronze doors. No traces of such passages have been found. But even on the side towards the city, the side on which lay the natural approach to the palace, there is no sign of any ramp or staircase by which the forty-six feet of difference between the levels of the platform and the soil upon which the city was built, could be overcome. The palace had two great monumental façades, each pierced with three large openings flanked by winged bulls. One of these façades (that in front of the hall lettered I on the plan) formed one side of a spacious rectangular court (H) and faced towards the north-east. Some of the buildings surrounding this court have entirely disappeared (see plan), but it is certain that it communicated with the platform of the city walls and that of the palace itself by one opening or more. On the north-eastern side Thomas has placed a wide and easy inclined-plane by which horses and other beasts of burden could mount to the platform, so that the king’s chariot could deposit him at the very door of his apartments, and the heavily laden mules and bullocks could deliver their loads in the store rooms which occupied the whole eastern angle of the mound.[17]

The other façade occupies the middle of the south-eastern face and is turned towards the town. It forms a majestic propylæum (Fig. 5) through which the largest of the courts is reached (A on the plan). In the more stately of the city gates foot prints may be traced, while in those that are less ornamental there are marks of wheels, suggesting that some entrances were reserved for pedestrians and others for carriages. It is likely enough that a similar arrangement obtained in the palace, and that in front of this south-eastern gateway there was a flight of steps instead of a continuous ramp. We find such an arrangement at Persepolis where both steps and balustrade, being cut in the rock, are still in good preservation; at Khorsabad, however, there is now no vestige of such a staircase. If the steps have not been carried away they must lie entombed at the very bottom of the débris. We cannot say then that our restoration is, in this particular, beyond contention, but it is both probable in itself and entirely in the spirit of Assyrian architecture. These steps must have been the shortest way from the town to the palace. Horsemen, chariots, convoys of provisions had to make a détour and reach both the palace platform and that of the city walls by the south-eastern ramp.

Let us, too, make use of that approach, and, when we have gained the summit of the incline, turn to our left and pass through the first doorway. This must have been carefully fortified and guarded, for it led directly to the heart of the royal dwelling. It has now entirely disappeared with the northern corner of the mound on which it stood, but we need not hesitate to restore it, with a whole suite of buildings inclosing what must have been the chief court of the palace, so far, at least, as dignity was concerned (H on the plan).[18] West and south-west of this quadrangle there is a group of chambers excavated by Botta, to which we have given the name of the seraglio.

The seraglio contained ten courts and no less than sixty rooms or passages, intimately connected by the doors pierced through their walls. M. Place divides this great collection of chambers into two distinct parts, which, he thinks, had different duties to fulfil.

He calls the first part, that in which the courts marked I, J, K, L occur, the sculptural part.[19] It contained the sélamlik proper, consisting of the largest and most splendidly decorated halls. The narrow gallery separating court I from court J is 150 feet long and 19 feet wide. The other rooms opening out of court J are 106 feet long by 26½ feet wide. This court J is the real centre of the sélamlik; it is almost exactly square, with a superficial measurement of about 11,236 square feet. The eight doors that open upon it give access to every part of the palace. Four of these doorways are supported by bulls; they were all vaulted, and their arches decorated with bands of enamelled brick. As for the walls themselves, their lower parts were cased with bas-reliefs coloured in sober tints. It is quite possible that this court was used for ceremonial purposes, as it could be easily protected from the sun by stretching between the summits of its walls, those rich stuffs the Babylonians knew so well how to weave. By covering the ground with carpets a saloon would be formed in which large numbers of people could be brought together, and one whose noble decorations would be in complete harmony with the stateliest pageants.

We cannot attempt to describe the seven great chambers that surrounded the courtyard. They were all decorated with sculptured slabs and enamelled brick; the doors that led from one to the other were flanked by colossi. At one point (looking towards the court marked L) the spectator could look down a vista of no less than eight of these arched and decorated doorways.

All these large rooms opening from a single court made up a combination in which everything was calculated for show. Their size alone made such rooms uninhabitable, and, as life has everywhere much the same requirements, M. Place found to the south of these state apartments a collection of smaller and less richly ornamented chambers in which the king could sleep, eat, and receive in private audience, and in which the officers of his chancellery and his personal attendants could be lodged within easy call. These are the rooms about the courts marked M, M´, N, O, P in our plan. They contain a few sculptures. The walls as a rule are coated with a coloured stucco, and sometimes decorated with fresco paintings. There are in all forty-nine of these rooms, covering, with their courts, about 6,000 square yards.

A short study of the plan is enough to make its presiding idea clear to us. “Each court, taken by itself and with the chambers radiating from it, forms a distinct group of apartments communicating with other groups only on one side and often only by a single door.”[20] Each of these groups must have afforded lodgings for the personnel of one department of the king’s household. Ctesias says that fifteen thousand officers and domestics found board and lodging in the palace of the King of Persia, and although he may be here guilty, as in so many other instances, of some exaggeration, we are willing to accept this figure as being comparatively near the truth. Travellers who visited Constantinople in the days of the Solimans and Amurats, tell us that the walls of the old seraglio crave shelter to thousands of individuals who were fed from the kitchens of the sultan.

Before quitting this part of the palace we must point out several other buildings that belong to it both by position and character. In the first place, our readers will see that the northern angle is occupied by a group of chambers abutting on one corner of the seraglio but not communicating directly with it. This group opens on the state quadrangle and upon the external platform. “This building was decorated in the most splendid fashion. It contained eight vast halls and a few smaller chambers. It was like a second seraglio attached to the first and rivalling it in magnificence. What could have been its destination? We can hardly answer that question with certainty, but we may hazard the suggestion that, in the lifetime of Sargon, his son Sennacherib was already a great personage and must have had his own particular palace, or suite of apartments, in the house of the king, his father.”[21]

In the western angle of the platform stands the isolated and irretrievably ruinous building taken by Botta for a temple, and restored by Thomas as a throne room.[22] In either case it played its part in the official and public life of the king. We may say the same of the building near the centre of the south-western face of the mound, in which we have recognized a temple, although we have not scrupled to make use of the title given to it by M. Place. The chief sanctuary of the town that lay so far below its summit, it must have been the scene after each campaign, of the royal homage to Assur; the observatory of the astrologers, it must have had constant and intimate relations with the palace, where the bulletins issued from it must have been awaited with anxiety whenever the propitious moment for any great enterprise was sought.

At the southern angle of the seraglio and to the south-east of the Observatory, there is an almost completely separate building. Its isolation, the few points of access and the way they are arranged, the style of its decorations, their richness, and the disposition of its chambers, all combine to suggest that this part of the palace was the royal harem. An inscription upon the threshold of one of the rooms confirms this conjecture; it prays for the blessing of fertility upon the royal alliances.[23] In our Fig. 6 we give a large scale plan on which its arrangements may be more easily followed. The total area of the harem was about 10,912 square yards.

In the walls inclosing all this space there were but two openings; one in the south-western façade, facing the city, the other leading into the great court of the palace. The first opening was a narrow passage leading to a small square chamber, which must have been a eunuch’s guard-room. The passage from it into the main court of the harem is at right angles with the first named passage, so that no glimpse of the inside could be caught from the external platform, or vice-versâ. The second entrance also leads to this same court (Q on plan) which thus acts as a kind of vestibule to the rest of the harem. This entrance leads from the southern angle of the large court (A on first plan) into a rectangular guard-room like that already mentioned. This guard-room has four doors. One leading through a small square vestibule into the large court, two sides of which were taken up with stables, workshops, and store-rooms; a second leading, as we have seen, into the harem court; a third into the first of several rectangular chambers that surround this court on the south-east; and the fourth into a kind of corridor that runs between the harem wall (U) and that of the great quadrangle, ending finally on the platform round the Observatory. By this last named entrance the king could reach his wives’ apartments by a route which, though longer, was far more private than that through the great quadrangle. The passage may, perhaps, have been covered by a wooden gallery, allowing it to be used in all states of the weather.

The harem had three courts, around which were distributed a number of small rooms and several large halls, destined, no doubt, for use on festive occasions. There were no bas-reliefs on the walls, which were decorated merely with a coat of white stucco crossed at the foot by a black dado thirty-two inches high. Unlike the floors of beaten earth in the seraglio, most of those in the harem were paved with bricks or stone slabs.

The heart of the harem was the court marked U in our plan. Its decorations were rich in the extreme. On at least one side the foot of the wall was decorated with a sort of mosaic of enamelled brick surmounted by groups of semi-columns (Fig. 101 and Plate XV.). The doors were flanked by statues and by tall timber shafts cased in metal, carrying on their summits tufts of palm leaves in gilded bronze, giving a free rendering of the tall stem and graceful head of the date-tree. We have restored one part of this court in perspective (Fig. 7) introducing nothing conjectural but the upper parts of the wall.[24]

In this woodcut an arrangement may be noticed (it is still more clearly shown in the plan) which is encountered nowhere else. The area of the brick-paved court was intersected by two lines of stone slabs crossing each other in the centre and standing slightly above the general level of the pavement. These paths lead to three bedrooms in three corners of the quadrangle and to a small unimportant-looking room in the fourth corner. The three bedrooms were exactly similar to each other and unlike anything to be found in the rest of the palace. They were large oblong rooms; about a third of their area was occupied by a kind of daïs twenty-four inches above the rest of the floor, and approached by five brick steps. In the centre of the end wall there was a kind of alcove, the floor of which was again four feet three inches above that of the daïs. This alcove was decorated with grooves and surmounted by an arch of enamelled brick (Fig. 90, Vol. I.). Its dimensions were nine feet wide by three feet four inches deep, or just a convenient space for a bed, which might be reached by movable steps. Thomas has not hesitated to introduce one into his restoration. The bas-reliefs furnished him with a model.[25]

Observe that the courts of the harem give access to three main groups of chambers, and that those groups have no direct communication with each other. Each of the three has its own separate entrance. Observe also that the three bed chambers we have mentioned have no entrances but those from the inner court; that they are all richly decorated, and that nothing in their shape or arrangement admits of the idea that they were for the use of attendants or others in an inferior station—-oriental custom having at all times caused such persons to sleep on carpets, mats, or mattresses, spread on the paved floors at night and put away in cupboards during the day—and you will allow that the conclusion to which those who have studied the plan of Sargon’s harem have arrived, is, at least, a very probable one. Sargon had three queens, who inhabited the three suites of apartments; each had assigned to her use one of the state bedrooms we have described, but only occupied it when called upon to receive her royal spouse.[26] On other nights she slept in her own apartments among her eunuchs and female domestics. These apartments comprised a kind of large saloon open to the sky, but sheltered at one end by a semi-dome (T, X, and especially Z, where the interior is in a better state of preservation). Stretched upon the cushions with which the daïs at this end of the room was strewn, the sultana, if we may use such a term, like those of modern Turkey, could enjoy the performances of musicians, singers, and dancers, she could receive visits and kill her time in the dreamy fashion so dear to Orientals. We have already given (Vol. I. Fig. 55,) a restoration in perspective of the semi-dome which, according to Thomas, covered the further ends of these reception halls.[27]

Suppose this part of the palace restored to its original condition; it would be quite ready to receive the harem of any Persian or Turkish prince. The same precautions against escape or intrusion, the same careful isolation of rival claimants for the master’s favours, would still be taken. With its indolent and passionate inmates a jealousy that hesitates at no crime by which a rival can be removed, is common enough, and among: the numerous slaves a willing instrument for the execution of any vengeful project is easily found. The moral, like the physical conditions, have changed but little, and the oriental architect has still to adopt the precautions found necessary thirty centuries ago.

We find another example of this pre-existence of modern arrangements in the vast extent of the palace offices. These consist of a series of chambers to the south-west of the court marked A, and of a whole quarter, larger than the harem, which lies in the south-eastern corner of the mound, and includes several wide quadrangles (B, C´, C, D, D´, F, G, &c.).[28] We could not describe this part of the plan in detail without giving it more space than we can spare. We must be content with telling our readers that by careful study, of their dispositions and of the objects found in them during the excavations, M. Place has succeeded in determining, sometimes with absolute certainty, sometimes with very great probability, the destination of nearly every group of chambers in this part of the palace. The south-west side of the great court was occupied by stores; the rooms were filled with jars, with enamelled bricks, with things made of iron and copper, with provisions and various utensils for the use of the palace, and with the plunder taken from conquered countries; it was, in tact, what would now be called the khazneh or treasury. The warehouses did not communicate with each other; they had but one door, that leading into the great court. But opening out of each there was a small inner room, which served perhaps as the residence of a store-keeper.

At the opposite side of the court lay what Place calls the active section of the offices (la partie active des dépendances), the rooms where all those domestic labours were carried on without which the luxurious life of the royal dwelling would have come to a standstill. Kitchens and bakehouses were easily recognized by the contents of the clay vases found in them; bronze rings let into the wall betrayed the stables—in the East of our own day, horses and camels are picketed to similar rings. Close to the stables a long gallery, in which a large number of chariots and sets of harness could be conveniently arranged, has been recognized as a coach-house. There are but few rooms in which some glimpse of their probable destination has not been caught. In two small chambers between courts A and B, the flooring stones are pierced with round holes leading to square sewers, which, in their turn, join a large brick-vaulted drain. The use of such a contrivance is obvious.[29]

We may fairly suppose that the rooms in which no special indication of their purpose was found, were mostly servants’ lodgings. They are, as a rule, of very small size.

On the other hand, courts were ample and passages wide. Plenty of space was required for the circulation of the domestics who supplied the tables of the seraglio and harem, for exercising horses, and for washing chariots. If, after the explorations of Place, any doubts could remain as to the purpose of this quarter of the palace, they would be removed by the Assyrian texts. Upon the terra-cotta prism on which Sennacherib, after narrating his campaigns, describes the restoration of his palace, he says, “the kings, my predecessors, constructed the office court for baggage, for exercising horses, for the storing of utensils.” Esarhaddon speaks, in another inscription, of “the part built by the kings, his predecessors, for holding baggage, for lodging horses, camels, dromedaries and chariots.”[30]

We have now made the tour of the palace, and we find ourselves again before the propylæum whence we set out. This propylæum must have been one of the finest creations of Assyrian architecture. It had no fewer than ten winged bulls of different sizes, some parallel, others perpendicular, to the direction of the wall. There were six in the central doorway, which was, in all probability, reserved for the king and his suite. A pair of smaller colossi flanked each of the two side doors, through which passed, no doubt between files of guards, the ceaseless crowd of visitors, soldiers, and domestics. The conception of this façade, with its high substructure, and the ascending: lines of a double flight of steps connecting it with the town below, is really grand, and the size of the court into which it led, not much less than two acres and a half, was worthy of such an approach.

The huge dimensions of this court are to be explained, not only by the desire for imposing size, but also by the important part it played in the economy of the palace. By its means the three main divisions, the seraglio, the harem, and the khan, were put into communication with each other. When there were no particular reasons for making a détour, it was crossed by any one desiring to go from one part to another. It was a kind of general rendezvous and common passage, and its great size was no more than necessary for the convenient circulation of servants with provisions for the royal tables, of military detachments, of workmen going to their work, of the harem ladies taking the air in palanquins escorted by eunuchs, and of royal processions, in which the king himself took part.

As to whether or no any part of the platform was laid out in gardens, or the courts planted with trees and flowers, we do not know. Of course the excavations would tell us nothing on that point, but evidence is not wanting that the masters for whom all this architectural splendour was created were not without a love for shady groves, and that they were fond of having trees in the neighbourhood of their dwellings. The hanging gardens of Babylon have been famous for more than twenty centuries. The bas-reliefs tell us that the Assyrians had an inclination towards the same kind of luxury. On a sculptured fragment from Kouyundjik we find a range of trees crowning a terrace supported by a row of pointed arches (Vol. I., Fig. 42); another slab, from the same palace of Sennacherib, shows us trees upheld by a colonnade (Fig. 8). If Sargon established in any part of his palace a garden like that hinted at in the sculptured scene in which Assurbanipal is shown at table with his wife (Vol. I., Fig. 27), it must have been in the north-western angle of the platform, near the temple and staged tower. In this corner of the mound there is plenty of open space, and being farther from the principal entrances of the palace, it is more quiet and retired than any other part of the royal dwelling. Here then, if anywhere, we may imagine terraces covered with vegetable earth, in which the vine, the fig, the pomegranate and the tall pyramid of the cypress, could flourish and cast their grateful shadows. The existence of such gardens is, however, so uncertain, that we have given them no place in our attempts at restoration.