This use of gates has not been abandoned in the East. At Mossoul, for instance, the entrances to the city are buildings with several rooms in them, and in the gate opening upon the Tigris M. Place often saw the governor of the province seated among his officers in an upper chamber and dispensing justice.[96] In the same town the doorways of a few great private houses are frequented in the same fashion by the inhabitants of the quarter. This was the case with the French Consulate, which was established in a large house that had been the ancestral home of a family of independent beys, now extinct. At the entrance there was a chamber covered with a depressed cupola and surrounded by stone benches. Right and left were four lodges for porters, and on one side a staircase leading to four upper rooms built over the vault. One of these served as a divan. All this was separated by a large courtyard from the dwelling place proper, and even after the building had become a part of France, the neighbours kept up their habit of coming to sit and gossip under its dome.[97]
The word porte has thus acquired a significance in every European language that could hardly be understood but for the light thrown upon it by such customs as those illustrated by the remains of Assyrian architecture, and alluded to so often in the sacred writings. Every one who has visited Stamboul, has seen in the first court of the Old Seraglio, that arched doorway (Bab-i-Houmaioun) in whose niches the heads of great criminals and rebellious vassals used once to be placed; it formerly led to the saloons in which the Ottoman sultans presided at the great council, listened to the reports of their officers, and received foreign ambassadors. The doorway through which the august presence was reached ended by representing in the imagination of those who passed through it; first, the whole of the building to which it belonged, and secondly, the sovereign enthroned behind it. The decrees in which the successors of Mohammed II. made known their will ended with these words: “Given at our Sublime Gate, at our Gate of Happiness.” In later years the Old Seraglio was abandoned. The different public departments were removed into a huge edifice more like a barracks than an eastern palace, but the established formula was retained. In the Constantinople of to-day “to go to the Porte” means to go to the government offices, and even the government itself, the sultan, that is, and his ministers, are known in all the chancelleries of Europe as the Porte, the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman Porte.
It was, no doubt, by a metonomy of the same kind that the capital of ancient Chaldæa, the town into which the principal sanctuaries of the national gods were gathered, was called Bab-ilou, the Gate of God, which was turned by the Greeks into Βαβυλών, or Babylon.
After our careful description of the remains left by the city of Sargon we need enter into few details as to the other fortified enceintes that have been explored in Mesopotamia. The same rectangular plan, the same thick walls and carefully arranged gateways are to be found in them all. With the Assyrians as with their neighbours, every town was fortified. The square form seems to have been universally employed for the flanking towers. It is quite by exception that we find in one of the pictures of a siege on the Balawat gates, tall and slender towers that appear to be round on plan and to be much higher than the curtain they defend (Fig. 28). Besides these town walls there were, no doubt, at the mouths of the valleys opening into the basin of the Tigris, strong forts and isolated towers, perched upon some abrupt rock or ridge: the siege of such a fortress seems to be going on in the relief figured on the next page (Fig. 29). The platform at the top of the tower seems to be raised and strengthened by a structure of wood, which stands out beyond the crenellations and is protected by a row of shields, like the bulwarks of a Roman galley. This contrivance resembles those ourdeys of which the military engineers of the middle ages made such constant use. The garrison still show a bold front from behind their defences, but the women and old men, foreseeing the fall of their stronghold, are decamping while there is yet time.
Fig. 28.—Fortified wall; from the Balawat gates. British Museum.
The military successes of the Assyrians are partly to be explained by their engineering skill. In all that concerned the attack and defence of places they seem to have left the Egyptians far behind. In addition to mines and battering rams they employed movable towers which they pushed forward against such walls as they wished to attack point blank, and thought either too high or too well lined with defenders to be open to escalade (Vol. I., Fig. 26). In the relief partly reproduced on page 75, the defenders have not ceased their resistance, but in the lower section, in what we may call the predella of the picture, we see a long band of prisoners of both sexes being led off by soldiers. These we may suppose to be captives taken in the suburbs of the beleaguered city, or in battles already won.[98]
Fig. 29.—Siege of a fort; from Layard.
The Assyrians not only understood how to defend their own cities, and to destroy those of their foes, they were fully alive to the necessity for good carriage roads, if their armies and military machines were to be transported rapidly from place to place. How far these roads extended we do not know, but Place ascertained the existence of paved causeways debouching from the gates of Dour-Saryoukin,[99] and unless they stretched at least to the frontiers, it is difficult to see how the Assyrians could have made such great use as they did of war chariots. Not one of their series of military pictures can be named in which they do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid disks of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage with its tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of to-day can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number (Figs. 21 and 31).