Fig. 26.—State gateway at Khorsabad. Elevation; from Place.
That these monumental doorways with their rich decorations were reserved for pedestrians, is proved by the flight of steps. It was not thought desirable to subject their sculptures to the dangers of vehicular traffic. In the portes simples the marks of wheels can be distinctly traced on the pavements.[89]
Each of these gateways, whether for carriages or foot passengers, was a complicated edifice, and the arrangement of their 10,000 square yards of passage and chamber could scarcely have been explained without the use of plans. Military necessities are insufficient to explain such elaborate contrivances. The existence of barbican and flanking towers is justified by them, but hardly the size of the court and the two great transepts. We cease to be surprised at these, however, when we remember the part played by the city gates in the lives of the urban populations of the Levant.
Fig. 27.—Longitudinal section through the archway of one of the city gates, Khorsabad; from Place.
In the East the town gate is and always has been what the agora was to the cities of Greece and the forum to those of Italy. Doubtless it was ill-adapted to be used as a theatre of political or judicial debate, like the public places of the Græco-Roman world. But in the East the municipal life of the West has never obtained a footing. The monarchy and patriarchal régime have been her two forms of government; she had no need of wide spaces for crowds of voters or for popular tribunals. Nothing more was required than a place for gossip and the retailing of news, a place where the old men could find themselves surrounded by a circle of fellow townsmen crouched upon their heels, and, after hearing plaintiffs, defendants and their witnesses, could give those awards that were the first form of justice. Nothing could afford a better rendezvous for such purposes than the gate of a fortified city or village. Hollowed in the thickness of a wall of prodigious solidity it gave a shelter against the north wind in winter, while in summer its cool galleries must have been the greatest of luxuries. Husbandmen going to their fields, soldiers setting out on expeditions, merchants with their caravans, all passed through these resounding archways and had a moment in which to hear and tell the news. Those whom age or easy circumstances relieved from toil or war passed much of their time in the gates talking with all comers or sunk in the sleepy reverie in which orientals pass so much of their lives.
All this is painted for us with the most simple fidelity in the Bible. “And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot seeing them, rose up to meet them.”[90] When Abraham buys a burying place in Hebron he addresses himself to Ephron, the owner of the ground, “and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city.”[91] So too Boaz, when he wishes to marry Ruth and to get all those who had rights over the young Moabitess to resign them in his favour, “went up to the gate, and sat him down there ... and he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, sit ye down here. And they sat down.”[92] And these old men were called upon to witness the acts of resignation performed by Ruth’s nearest relatives.[93]
So too, in later ages, when the progress of political life led kings to inhabit great separate buildings of their own, the palace gates became for the courtiers what the city gates were for the population at large. At Khorsabad they were constructed on exactly the same plan as those of the town; they are even more richly decorated and the chambers they inclose are no less spacious. In them servants, guards, military officers, foreign ambassadors and wire-pullers of every kind could meet, lounge about, and await their audiences. Read the book of Esther carefully and you will find continual allusions to this custom. “In those days, while Mordecai sat in the king’s gate, two of the king’s chamberlains, Bigthan and Teresh, of those which kept the door, were wroth, and sought to lay hands on the king Ahasuerus.”[94] The gates of the palace must have been open to all comers for a man of despised race and a butt for the insults of Haman, like Mordecai, to have been enabled to overhear the secret whispers of the king’s chamberlains. In the sequel we find Mordecai hardly ever moving from this spot.
Assis le plus souvent aux portes du palais,
as Racine says, he thence addresses to Esther the advice by which she is governed. He did not stand up, as he must have done in a mere passage, for Haman complains that he did not rise and do him reverence.[95]