History of Ancient Art

by Franz von Reber

Though the subjugation of the land by Assyria had not been without effect upon the civilization of Chaldæa, the general character of Babylonian art remained much the same through all these political changes. The last king, Nabonetos, could complete the temple of Ur, which Urukh had founded seventeen centuries before, as though there had been no interruption in the work. The terraced ruins show that there was no great difference in the architectural treatment of ages so removed. Other city ruins show such an intermixture of ancient Chaldæan and Babylonian walls that their date can be determined only by inscriptions or by stamps upon the bricks. The earlier remains are predominant in Mugheir, Warka, and Abou-Sharein; but the later capital of the country, Babylon, the city of Nebuchadnezzar, is known almost exclusively by the imposing structures of the modern kingdom. Greek antiquity, up to the time of Alexander, was acquainted with this city of wonders only by fables. Even the explicit description of Herodotos is in great degree mythical, especially his astonishing account of the city walls: 480 stadia (96.557 m.) in length, 200 ells (100 m.) high, and 50 ells (25 m.) broad. The ruins have also proved the account of the famed hundred gates of the city walls, and the square network of straight streets which ran from these, to be hyperbolical. Such immense masses of masonry would, as Layard has maintained, certainly have left heaps of rubbish; and, in fact, the ruins of a much smaller city enclosure have been traced. The irregular orientation of the palace plan is also incompatible with the conception that the city was divided up into squares with the regularity of a chess-board. The traditional account that the enormous terraced temple of Bel was built on the borders of the stream opposite the palace structures is certainly incorrect; for, while these latter are still represented by extensive brick ruins, there is not a trace upon the other bank, the supposed site, of massive terraces which could not possibly have so entirely disappeared. Nor could the stream have swept away so colossal a building; for a little north of Hillah, in the immediate vicinity of the spot where Herodotos describes the temple of Bel, there have been found the remains of a small Mylitta temple, which would have offered almost no resistance to an inundation. Yet Herodotos undoubtedly related, besides his fables, much that was correct about Babylon. His account of the temple of Bel seems only questionable in so far as the site is concerned; the rest of his description agrees perfectly with ruins which have been found about eleven kilometers westward, and are known by the name Bors-Nimrud. (Fig. 40.) The temple thus could not have belonged to the city proper of Babylon; and inscriptions mention the place as Borsippa, spoken of by Greek writers as a separate town, which could at best be regarded as a distant suburb of the extended Babylon. The immense hill of rubbish standing entirely isolated in the desert has a lower circumference of 685 m. This dimension agrees tolerably well with the six stadia given by Herodotos as the measure of the first step of the terraced pyramid. The regularly diminished seven steps, the “towers” of Herodotos, 7.5 m. high, reaching altogether a total altitude of 75 m., rose from a square substructure with a side of two stadia (180 m.) and a height of 22.5 m. The diagonals of these different terraces were not directly above one another, the steps being 9 m. broad in front and only 3.9 m. broad behind, while the sides were equal—6.3 m. This peculiarity of the ruin agrees with the flights of stairs described by Herodotos, which, notwithstanding the analogy of the palace temple of Kisr-Sargon, may here naturally be supposed to have been upon the front, where the terraces were sufficiently broad for this purpose. Fig. 41 is an attempt to restore the chief lines of the structure by means of the dimensions given by Oppert. Upon the summit of this terraced pyramid stood the necessarily small temple, which, according to Herodotos, contained a spacious couch and a golden table, but no statue of the deity. The sides of the terraces are directed to the cardinal points of the compass, as was the case also with the ancient Chaldæan temple of Ur; and, as at Ur, inscribed cylinders were here walled in at the angles. These relate that Nebuchadnezzar had magnificently completed the structure—“the temple-pyramid of the seven spheres, the wonder of Borsippa,” begun by a former king. Rawlinson and Oppert have concluded, from the remains of glazed bricks of different colors, that each of the seven terraces was dedicated to one of the seven planets of the ancients, and was characterized by its color—the upper, gold; the second, silver; the next, red, blue, yellow, white; and the lowest, black—according to the hues assigned to the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. The lowest terrace has a panelled architectural treatment similar to that noticed in the ruins at Warka and the palace temple at Kisr-Sargon. It is probable that these high terraces in the flat plains of Mesopotamia were elevations which served the Chaldæan astronomers for their celebrated observatories, as the pylons of temples upon the banks of the Nile were similarly used by the Egyptian priests. As Strabo speaks especially of an astronomical school at Borsippa, there can be little doubt that it was in some way connected with the terraced pyramid of the seven spheres.

The ruins of Hillah, Casr, Mudjelibeh, and Jumjuma give even less information concerning the palace buildings than the hill of Bors-Nimrud does concerning the form of the Chaldæan temple. These masses of masonry have for centuries served as quarries, and, as far distant as Bagdad, bricks, bearing the stamp of Nebuchadnezzar, betray that the material has been transported from the ruins of Babylon. Though the supply is by no means exhausted, this excavation has rendered much unrecognizable, and has so greatly increased the destruction that Layard held it impossible to discover a clew to the plan of the palace structure in the confusion of its overthrown and rifled rubbish. Oppert assumes the hill of Jumjuma, or Amran-ibn-Ali, as it is called from the Mohammedan chapel now standing upon it, to be the remains of the celebrated Hanging Gardens known as those of Semiramis, the wonder of the ancient world. But, plausible as his supposition is, it will hardly be possible to prove by existing remains the correctness of the description given by Diodoros of the Hanging Gardens, in itself more probable than the report followed by Strabo. Diodoros speaks of the Gardens as a terraced structure, the side of the square plan being about 120 m. in length, with separate steps which ascended from the land side, while upon the banks of the river a steep wall formed the back of the highest terrace, measuring 15 m. vertically, and closing the gardens towards the water. The steps were constructed by the help of thirteen thick parallel walls, each being higher than the one next below it. They left between them twelve narrow corridors, the ceilings of which, like those over Assyrian canals, were probably vaulted, and were then covered with rushes and bitumen, burnt brick pavements and lead sheathing, so as to bear the stairways which connected the different terraces, the reservoirs for cascades and fountains, and the imposed garden—earth with large trees, etc. Pumping works in the highest of these covered corridors supplied the garden with the necessary water from the Euphrates.

The ruined terraces of Mudjelibeh (Babil), avoided by the Arabs as the scene of the punishment of the fallen angels, are so completely overthrown that it is not possible to determine whether the remains are those of a temple or of a palace. It is probable that they had some connection with the great pyramidal tomb of Belus, a structure which may be assumed to have been much like the stepped pyramid of Nimrud to be described below. The monument of Mudjelibeh was destroyed as early as the time of Xerxes II. It has since served as a quarry for the neighboring cities Seleucia and Ctesiphon, and has been demolished to the lowest terrace.

The enormous river embankments and dikes which protected Lower Mesopotamia from flood and drought, though now only to be traced by inconsiderable remains, are of the greatest importance and interest. The neglect of these invaluable works, and of the sluices and irrigating canals in connection with them, has reduced to a deserted and pestilential swamp that most fertile land known to Herodotos—where once a harvest of two and three hundredfold was returned to the tiller of the soil. Though there are vestiges of some ancient bridges in the land, it is not possible to decide whether the account given by Diodoros of the great tunnel constructed by Semiramis be true or fabulous.

There seems to have been no reason for the erection of such tall edifices in the vastly extended Babylon as the three and four storied houses described by Herodotos, and no analogy to such a peculiarity exists in the great modern cities of the Orient. It must be remembered in this connection that the crumbling bricks to which the Mesopotamians were restricted would, in such high buildings, have demanded clumsily massive substructures and lower-story walls.

Though the ruins of Babylon have only recently been thoroughly examined, their existence has long been known. Benjamin of Tudela speaks of Bors-Nimrud as the Biblical Tower of Babel, and this local tradition has been handed down to the present day. The palace ruins of the great city have always been readily recognizable, and the one has been called Babel, the other Casr (palace), from time immemorial.

It is otherwise with the second great centre of Mesopotamia—Nineveh, the famed capital of the kingdom of Assyria, in the upper land of the great streams. As early as the beginning of this century, Carsten Niebuhr expressed the conviction that the remains of the overthrown city were to be sought among the hills of rubbish which lie opposite the present Mosul, beyond the Tigris; but the energetic Rich, who devoted so much time and labor to the barren ruins of Babylon, paid no attention to the site. Nineveh had entirely disappeared, and was only traditionally known from the Book of Jonah and from the legend of Sardanapalos. It was during two visits to Mosul, in the years 1840 and 1842, that the eminent English traveller and statesman Sir A. H. Layard conceived the plan of undertaking investigations in the vicinity. He expressed his convictions at the time to the French consul, M. P. E. Botta, and in 1843 that gentleman commenced the excavation of the hill Coyundjic, which lay next to Mosul. The natives, becoming aware of the nature of the search, directed his attention to the hill of Corsabad, situated at a distance of about twenty-five kilometers from Mosul; the excavations were removed thither, and carried on with most gratifying results. A few days’ digging laid bare a number of walls reveted with huge slabs of alabaster. The wonderful sculptures in relief upon these excited redoubled activity, and soon entire chambers of the palace structure were freed from the overthrown rubbish which had covered it for well-nigh three thousand years. The French government purchased the entire village of Corsabad: in M. V. Place was provided a worthy successor to M. Botta. The inscriptions discovered have proved the ruins to be those of a palace founded by Sargon about 710 B.C. in the city Kisr-Sargon or Dur-Sargina.