WOOD
Assyria afforded a better supply of wood than Babylonia, the latter country being as poor in wood as it is in stone. The only trees from which beams sufficiently long to be of any use could be obtained, were the poplar and the palm tree. Wood being more perishable than either clay or stone, we naturally do not expect to find the same amount of material evidence of its usage; sufficient however has survived the ravages of time to establish the certainty of its usage in Mesopotamia as a building material from the earliest to the latest times. Thus for example at Nippur, Peters found charred beams of palm-wood which evidently had at one time formed the roof of the corridor in which it was discovered; pieces of tamarisk were in like manner found upon the brick threshold of a doorway, which probably represented all that remained of the doors and door-posts. Similarly at Lagash not far from Ur-Ninâ’s storehouse were found the charred remains of pillars made of cedar-wood, which doubtless at one time supported a portico made of the same material, while Ur-Ninâ himself records that he fetched wood from the mountains, as did his descendants of later days. In like manner the roof of a temple erected by Enannatum I a successor of Ur-Ninâ was constructed of cedar-wood. So too at Muḳeyyer (Ur), large quantities of charred wood were discovered,[55] while at Abû Shahrein (Eridu), the casement wall of the ziggurat is studded with square holes—three inches square, which are filled with wood.[56] After the establishment of Babylonian sovereignty over the land of Amurru, (i.e. Syria and Palestine) by Shar-Gâni-sharri and Narâm-Sin, the kings of Babylonia regularly obtained cedar-wood from the Lebanon, as did the early kings of Egypt. In a room at Nippur used apparently for storing unbaked tablets in the time of Gimil-Sin (c. 2350 B.C.) wooden shelves had seemingly been used for the purpose, while the roof of the famous castle at Babylon, rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar, was made of cedar-wood, as also were the doors, and the portal-like entrance of one of the buildings at Babylon excavated by Koldewey was roofed throughout with a ceiling of timber.
Of the use of wood in Assyria, the wall reliefs would alone afford ample evidence, for parts of some of the structures there encountered could only possibly have been made of wood. Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.) in commemorating his reconstruction of the temple of Anu and Adad at Ashur, says that he roofed it over with beams of cedar, and those of the larger rooms of the palaces which were not vaulted must have been roofed with wood, because there is no evidence of the existence of slabs of stone of sufficient size to have effected the purpose, and large flat brick roofs would be out of the question. In like manner Tiglath-Pileser III states that he made a palace of cedar-wood[57] while Esarhaddon says that the doors of one of the palaces which he erected for himself were made of cypress-wood and were covered with silver and copper,[58] while in another passage he states that in his building operations at Babylon he used oaks, terebinths and palms. At Khorsabad, Place further found fragments of cedar-beams which had been clearly used for architectural purposes, and probably formed part of the lintels of the doorways in which they were found; so too Layard in the course of his excavations found the charred remains of wood together with a beam of cedar-wood, all of which are now in the British Museum. The scantiness of the remains of wood thus used is adequately accounted for by the destructibility of that material.