** The above is perfectly true of the later Assyrian and
Chalæan periods: it is scarcely needful to recall to the
reader the murders of Sargon II. and Sennacherib, or the
revolt of Assurdaînpal against his father Shalmaneser III.
With regard to the earliest period we have merely
indications of what took place; the succession of King
Urnina of Lagash appears to have been accompanied by
troubles of this kind, and it is certain that his successor
Akurgal was not the eldest of his sons, but we do not at
present know to what events Akurgal owed his elevation.
The palaces of the Chaldæan kings, like those of the Egyptians, presented the appearance of an actual citadel: the walls had to be sufficiently thick to withstand an army for an indefinite period, and to protect the garrison from every emergency, except that of treason or famine. One of the statues found at Telloh holds in its lap the plan of one of these residences: the external outline alone is given, but by means of it we can easily picture to ourselves a fortified place, with its towers, its forts, and its gateways placed between two bastions. It represents the ancient palace of Lagash, subsequently enlarged and altered by Oudea or one of the vicegerents who succeeded him, in which many a great lord of the place must have resided down to the time of the Christian era. The site on which it was built in the Girsu quarter of. the city was not entirely unoccupied at the time of its foundation. Urbau had raised a ziggurat on that very spot some centuries previously, and the walls which he had constructed were falling into ruin.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Heuzey-Sarzec. The plan is
traced upon the tablet held in the lap of Statue E in the
Louvre. Below the plan can be seen the ruler marked with the
divisions used by the architect for drawing his designs to
the desired scale; the scribe’s stylus is represented lying
on the left of the plan. [Prof. Pétrie has shown that the
unit of measurement represented on this ruler is the cubit
of the Pyramid-builders of Egypt.—Te.]
Gudea did not destroy the work of his remote predecessor, he merely incorporated it into the substructures of the new building, thus showing an indifference similar to that evinced by the Pharaohs for the monuments of a former dynasty. The palaces, like the temples, never rose directly from the soil, but were invariably built on the top of an artificial mound of crude brick. At Lagash, this solid platform rises to the height of 40 feet above the plain, and the only means of access to the top is by a single narrow steep staircase, easily cut off or defended.
The palace which surmounts this artificial eminence describes a sort of irregular rectangle, 174 feet long by 69 feet wide, and had, contrary to the custom in Egypt, the four angles orientated to the four cardinal points. The two principal sides are not parallel, but swell out slightly towards the middle, and the flexion of the lines almost follows the contour of one of those little clay cones upon which the kings were wont to inscribe their annals or dedications. This flexure was probably not intentional on the part of the architect, but was owing to the difficulty of keeping a wall of such considerable extent in a straight line from one end to another; and all Eastern nations, whether Chaldæans or Egyptians, troubled themselves but little about correctness of alignment, since defects of this kind were scarcely ever perceptible in the actual edifice, and are only clearly revealed in the plan drawn out to scale with modern precision.*
* Mons. Heuzey thinks that the outward deflection of the
lines is owing “merely to a primitive method of obtaining
greater solidity of construction, and of giving a better
foundation to these long façades, which are placed upon
artificial terraces of crude brick always subject to cracks
and settlements.” I think that the explanation of the facts
which I have given in the text is simpler than that
ingeniously proposed by Mons. Heuzey: the masons, having
begun to build the wall at one end, were unable to carry it
on in a straight line until it reached the spot denoted on
the architect’s plan, and therefore altered the direction of
the wall when they detected their error; or, having begun to
build the wall from both ends simultaneously, were not
successful in making the two lines meet correctly, and they
have frankly patched up the junction by a mass of projecting
brickwork which conceals their unskilfulness.
