Fig. 20.—Part plan of the palace of Sennacherib; from Layard.
The mound of Kouyundjik in its present state is an irregular pentagon. Its circumference is rather more than a mile and a half. The palace of Sennacherib occupies the south-western corner, and forms a rectangle about 600 feet long by 330 wide. The two chief entrances were turned one towards the river, or south-west, the other towards the town, or north-east. The latter entrance was flanked by ten winged bulls. The four central ones stood out beyond the line of the façade, and were separated from each other by colossal genii.[49] About sixteen halls and chambers have been counted round the three courtyards. As at Khorsabad, some of these are long galleries, others rooms almost square. The fragmentary plan shown in our Fig. 20 brings out the resemblance very strongly. It represents a part of the building explored in Layard’s first campaign. In the rooms marked 2, 3, and 4, small niches cut in the thickness of the walls may be noticed. They are not unlike the spaces left for cupboards in the modern Turkish houses of Asia Minor. The hall marked 1 in the plan is about 124 feet long and 30 wide. In another part of the palace a saloon larger than any of those at Khorsabad has been cleared. It measures 176 feet long by 40 wide. The average size of the rooms here is about one-third more than in the palace of Sargon, suggesting that the art of building vaults and timber ceilings made sensible progress during the reign of that king. As in the case of the Khorsabad palace, the explorers believed they could distinguish between the seraglio and the harem; but the plan given by Layard has too many blanks and leaves too many points uncertain for the various quarters to be distinguished with such ease and certainty as at Khorsabad.[50] The walls were everywhere covered with rich series of reliefs, from which we have already taken some of our illustrations (Vol. I., Figs. 151 and 152), and shall have to take more. The military promenade figured upon page 49 will give a good idea of their general character (Fig. 21).
Assurbanipal, the grandson of Sennacherib, built his palace towards the north of the mound. The excavations of Mr. Rassam have been the means of recovering many precious bas-reliefs from it, but we may see from the plan (Fig. 19) that a very small part of the building has been cleared. Much more must remain of a palace so richly decorated and with rooms so large as some of those explored in the quarter we have called the sélamlik. One of these saloons is 145 feet long and 29 wide. The plan of its walls suggests a very large building, with spacious courts and a great number of rooms.[51]
Fig. 21.—Sennacherib at the head of his army. Height 38 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
In many other mounds of Assyria, such as those of Arvil,[52] of Balawat,[53] of Kaleh-Shergat,[54] of Karamles,[55] and in the valley of the Khabour,[56] the explorers have encountered the remains of buildings and of ornamental figures that must have formed parts of royal palaces, or at least of the dwellings of great nobles. We shall not stop to notice all these discoveries. None of the mounds in question have been explored with sufficient care and completeness to add anything of importance to what we have learnt by our study of Khorsabad. The chief thing to be gathered from these widely scattered excavations is that during the great years of Assyria there was no town of any importance in which the king did not possess a habitation, arranged and decorated in the same spirit as the great palaces at Calah and Nineveh, and differing from these chiefly in the size of their courts and chambers.
No doubt the pavilions sprinkled about the park, or paradise, as the Greek writers called it, in which the king sought amusement by exercising his skill as an archer upon the beasts that roamed among its trees, were ornamented in the same fashion, although in all probability, wood and metal played a more important part in their construction. As for the dwellings of the great officers of the crown and of vassal princes, they must have reproduced on a smaller scale the plan and ornamentation of the royal palace.
Of the house properly speaking, the dwelling of the artizan or peasant, whether in Assyria or Chaldæa, we know very little. We are unable to turn for its restoration to paintings such as those in the Egyptian tombs, which portray the life of the poor with the same detail as that of the rich or even of the monarch himself. The Assyrian bas-reliefs, in which the sieges of towns are often represented, always show them from the outside (Fig. 22), nothing is to be seen but the ramparts and the towers that flank them. The only bas-relief in which we can venture to recognize one of the ordinary houses of the country belongs to the series of pictures in which Sennacherib has caused the transport of the materials and colossal bulls for his own palace to be figured. We there see two very different types of edifice, one covered with hemispherical or elliptical domes, the other with flat roofs supporting a kind of belvedere[57] (Vol. I., Fig. 43).
This latter type may be found several times repeated in a relief representing a city of Susiana (Vol. I., Fig. 157). Here nearly every house has a tower at one end of its flat roof. Was this a defence, like the towers in the old Italian towns and in the Greek villages of Crete and Magnesia? We do not think so. The social conditions were very different from those of the turbulent republics of Italy, where the populace was divided into hostile factions, or of those mountainous districts whose Greek inhabitants live in constant fear of attack from the Turks who dwell in the plains. The all-powerful despots of Assyria would allow no intestine quarrels, and for the repulse of a foreign enemy, the cities relied upon their high and solid lines of circumvallation. We think that the towers upon the roofs were true belvederes, contrivances to get more air and a wider view; also, perhaps, to allow the inhabitants to escape the mosquitoes by rising well above the highest level reached by the flight of those tiny pests.
It was, then, between these two types, as Strabo tells us, that the civil buildings of Mesopotamia were divided. They all had thick terraced roofs but some were domical and others flat.[58] At Mugheir Mr. Taylor cleared the remains of a small house planned on the lines of an irregular cross; it was built of burnt brick and paved with the same material. In the interior the faces of the bricks were covered with a thin and not very adhesive glaze. Two of the doors were round-headed; the arches being composed of bricks specially moulded in the shape of voussoirs; but the numerous fragments of carbonized palm-wood beams which were found upon the floors of each room, showed that the building had been covered with a flat timber roof and a thick bed of earth. Strabo justly observes that the earth was necessary to protect the inmates of the house against the heats of summer. As a rule houses must have been very low. It was only in large towns such as Babylon, that they had three or four stories.[59]