Fig. 55.—Walls of Babylon (British Museum).
Paris. A raised road, 196 ft. broad, ran along the interior of this rampart, and separated it from the interior wall, itself four times as long as the circumference of Paris; the two concentric walls bear in the cuneiform texts the names of Imgur Bel and Nimitti Bel. A view of the walls of Babylon seems to be given in one of the bas-reliefs from Kouyunjik, which represent the campaign of Assurbanipal against his brother Samas-sum-ukin, king of Babylon (B.C. 651-648). Nebuchadnezzar says that his own father Nabopolassar began to build the walls, and that he himself finished them; but this does not mean that the earlier city, called by Herodotus the Royal City, was not surrounded, as in the bas-relief, by a double wall like the later. Diodorus says that Semiramis surrounded the western part of the city with three walls, and two of these are identified by M. Oppert.[34] Fifty principal streets, twenty-five of which were parallel to the Euphrates, and twenty-five at right angles to it, leading to the hundred gates, divided the city into regular squares; a single bridge, formed of wooden planks resting on stone piles, was thrown across the Euphrates, which cut the city in two diagonally. The limits of the wall of Nineveh are not yet exactly known; but the testimony of the Bible gives us reason to believe that this city scarcely yielded in point of size to Babylon. The best mode of reconciling the statements of modern explorers with those of the Book of Jonah and the historian Ctesias, is, perhaps, to adopt the suggestion of Schrader,[35] and to suppose that “the Great City” of Genesis x. 12 was a group composed of the four towns there enumerated, of which Nineveh proper was the chief, and gave its name to the whole group.
Fig. 56.—Chaldæan plan of a fortress.
In the absence of textual evidence, the very sculptures of the Assyrians place before our eyes numerous fortresses in plan or in a bird’s-eye view. One of the statues from Tello represents the patesi Gudea as an architect, holding on his knees a tablet on which is carved in outline the plan of a stronghold ([fig. 56]). There are six gates flanked by towers, and the walls are surmounted by battlements. In all the bas-reliefs in which sieges are represented, the fortress is seen to be composed of several concentric walls supported by towers of greater elevation than the rampart from which they project, and surmounted by denticulated battlements (figs. 58 and 74), which stand out on corbels beyond the perpendicular surface of the wall.