We need say no more. We have studied the palace in detail, and the palace was only an enlarged, a more richly illustrated edition of the house. It supplied the same wants, but on a wider scale than was necessary in the dwelling of a private individual. To complete our study of civil architecture it is only necessary to give some idea of the fashion in which palaces and houses were grouped into cities, and of the means chosen for securing those cities against hostile assault.
§ 4. Towns and their Defences.
Of all barbarian cities, as the Greeks would say, Babylon has been the most famous, both in the ancient and the modern world; her name has stirred the imaginations of mankind more strongly than any other city of Asia. For the Greeks she was the Asiatic city par excellence, the eternal capital of those great oriental empires that were admired and feared by the Hellenic population even after their political weakness had been proved more than once. In the centuries that have passed since the fall of the Greek civilization the name and fame of Babylon have been kept alive by the passionate words of those Hebrew prophets who filled some of the most eloquent and poetic books of the Old Testament with their hatred of the Mesopotamian city, an ardent hate that has found an echo across the ages in the religion which is the heir of Judaism.
Fig. 22.—Town besieged by Sennacherib. Height 86 inches. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
There is, then, no city of the ancient world in which both our Christian instincts and our classic education would lead us to take a deeper interest, or to make more patient endeavours towards the recovery of some knowledge of its passed magnificence by the interrogation of its site and ruins, than this town of Babylon. At the same time it happens, by a strange series of chances, that of all the great cities of the past Babylon is the least known and the most closely wrapped in mystery. The descriptive passages of ancient writers are full of gaps and exaggerations, while as for the monuments themselves, although the size of their remains and the vast extent of ground they cover allow us to guess at the power and energy of the people to whom they owed their existence, there are no ruins in the world from which so little of the real thoughts and ideas of their constructors is to be learnt. Not only has the ornamentation of palace and temple disappeared, the ruling lines and arrangements of their plans are no longer to be traced. It is this no doubt that has discouraged the explorers. While the sites of Calah, Nineveh, and Dour-Saryoukin have been freed of millions of cubic yards of earth, and their concealed buildings explored and laid bare in every direction, no serious excavations have ever been made at Babylon. At long intervals of time a few shafts have been sunk in the flanks of the Kasr, of Babil and the Birs-Nimroud, but they have never been pushed to any great depth; a few trenches have been run from them, but on no connected system, and only to be soon abandoned. The plain is broken by many virgin mounds into which no pick-axe has been driven, and yet they each represent a structure dating from some period of Babylonian greatness. It would be a noble undertaking to thoroughly explore the three or four great ruins that rise on the site itself, and to examine carefully all the region about them. Such an exploration would require no slight expenditure of time and money, but it could not fail to add considerably to our present knowledge of ancient Chaldæa; it would do honour to any government that should support it, and still more to the archæologist who should conduct the inquiry to completion, laying down on his plan the smallest vestige remaining of any ancient detail, and allowing himself to be discouraged by none of the numerous disappointments and deceptions that he would be sure to encounter.
Meanwhile it would be profitless to carry our readers into any discussion upon the topography of Babylon. In the absence of ascertained facts nothing could be more arbitrary and conjectural than the various theories that have been put forward as to the direction of the city walls and their extent. According to George Smith the only line of wall that can now be followed would give a town about eight English miles round. Now Diodorus says that what he calls the Royal City was sixty stades, or within a few yards of seven miles, in circumference.[60] The difference between the two figures is very slight. “In shape the city appears to have been a square with one corner cut off, and the corners of the walls of the city may be said roughly to front the cardinal points. At the north of the city stood the temple of Belus, now represented by the mound of Babil; about the middle of the temple stood the royal palace and hanging-gardens.”[61]
The Royal City was the city properly speaking, the old city whose buildings were set closely about the great temple and the palace, the latter forming, like the Old Seraglio at Constantinople, a fortified town in itself with a wall some twenty stades (4043 yards) in circumference. A second wall, measuring forty stades in total length, turned the palace and the part of the city in its immediate neighbourhood into a sort of acropolis. Perhaps the nobles and priests may have inhabited this part of the town, the common people being relegated to the third circle. In the towns of Asia Minor at the present day the Turks alone live in the fortified inclosures, which are called kaleh, or citadels, the rest of the town being occupied by the rayahs of every kind, whether Greek or Armenian.