IN

CHALDÆA AND ASSYRIA

CHAPTER I.
CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE.

§ I. General Character of the Mesopotamian Palace and History of the Excavations.

As every student of Assyro-Chaldæan art has remarked, the best preserved of its monuments are the palaces. They alone are represented by ruins in such a condition that restorations may be successfully attempted, not only so far as their general arrangements are concerned but even in minor details. The preponderant part played by the ruins of palaces in the history of Assyrian architecture is thus acknowledged by all, but it has sometimes been explained by reasons that will not bear examination. “Less religious or more servile than the Egyptians and the Greeks, they made their temples insignificant in comparison with the dwellings of their kings, to which indeed the temple is most commonly a sort of appendage. In the palace their art culminates—-there every effort is made, every ornament lavished. If the architecture of the Assyrian palaces be fully considered, very little need be said on the subject of their other buildings.”[1]

History contradicts any such theory. The asserted inequality did not exist. The piety of Chaldæans and Assyrians was no less lively and profound than that of the Egyptians. A Seti or a Rameses, the cherished son and visible image of Amen, the prince who became a god after his life was done, was no less powerful and venerable at Memphis and Thebes than were Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar at Nineveh and Babylon.

The differences to which we have pointed are to be explained by other and more simple reasons. In Egypt the temple has survived the palace because it was a dwelling built for an immortal occupant, and therefore the most durable materials, stone and granite, were used; while the palace, being no more than the resting-place of a day, a shelter raised among waving palms and flowing streams for the passenger through this life to the next, had to be content with brick and timber. In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the same materials were used for the dwellings both of gods and kings; and the same system of construction, a system dictated by the climate, was applied to both classes of buildings. It is not true that one group was neglected for the other, that Mesopotamian civilization took less trouble for Marduk, for Istar and Assur, than for its conquering princes; it is inaccurate to say that her palace architecture was all that Assyria had to show. The tomb was larger and more important in Egypt than in Mesopotamia, but in the latter country the temple was the object of as much care, both in construction and decoration, as the palace. Its arrangement was more interesting and far more original, and its outward decoration no less rich. In Babylon, at least, the inscriptions in which the kings recount their exploits for the admiration of posterity, speak oftener and with more pride of temples than of palaces. The remains of the latter are more complete simply because their chief development was over the surface of the ground, while that of the temples was toward the sky. With materials such as those of which both the one and the other were built it was inevitable that tall buildings should come to ruin before low ones. Moreover, their most interesting parts were on the exterior and more especially about their summits. Ramps and sanctuaries with their surface decorations must have begun to disappear as soon as daily care ceased to be lavished upon them. The solid interior alone would be preserved, and, before many years were over, the degradation of its substance would make it a shapeless heap of clay. The palace, of course, burnt-in the first place and then abandoned to the slow action of time, can have met the forces of destruction with no better effect than buildings of marble and granite did elsewhere; but it inclosed great empty spaces, wide quadrangles, long galleries, and spacious chambers. In their fall ceilings and the heads of walls filled up these voids and buried their inclosing walls to a considerable height in a deep bed of protecting rubbish. This had only to be taken away to lay bare the whole plan of the building and much of its ornamentation. We can thus become much more intimately acquainted with the palace than with the temple, but we have no right thence to conclude that the former was the favourite work of the Chaldæan architects, or that it contained the last word of their talent and taste.

In any case it was the Assyrian palace that, about forty years ago, began to reveal to us an early civilization to which modern research is now awarding its proper place in the history of the ancient world. About the commencement of the present century criticism had succeeded in fixing approximate dates for the few kings of Assyria and Chaldæa mentioned in the Bible and by classic authors. It was suspected that the tales of Ctesias included many a fable, and painful efforts were made to disentangle what was true from what was false, but the language, the literature, and the arts of those peoples were as yet entirely unknown. The sites of Babylon and Nineveh had been ascertained with some degree of certainty; it was known that ruins existed in the plains of Mesopotamia which had been used by the natives as open quarries for century after century, and that the towns and villages that now stud the country were built from the materials thus obtained; but nothing had been learnt as to the form and arrangement of the buildings hidden under those heaps of débris. Travellers spoke of seeing statues and bas-reliefs among the ruins, but they could not bring them away, and they made no drawings which could be depended on for accuracy. European museums could boast of nothing beyond small objects, fragments of pottery, stones and terra-cotta slabs covered with strange symbols and undecipherable inscriptions. Most of these were cones and cylinders which proved that the Mesopotamians understood how to cut and engrave the hardest stones. Such objects excited a kind of hopeless curiosity. They were sometimes pointed out to the attention of scholars, as by Millin in his paper on the Caillou Michaux, a sort of Babylonian landmark that has belonged to the Cabinet des Antiques[2] in Paris ever since 1801.

But no attempt was made to define the style of the school of art by which such things were produced, and not the faintest suspicion was felt of the influence exercised by Chaldæan productions over distant races whose genius for the plastic arts was universally acknowledged. A single writer, the historian Niebuhr, seems by a kind of intuition to have divined the discoveries at which a new generation was to assist, and to have anticipated their consequences. As early as the year 1829 he wrote, “When at Rome I heard from a Chaldæan priest who lives near the ruins of Nineveh, that colossi are there found buried under huge masses of building rubbish. When he was a child one of these statues was discovered by a mere accident, but the Turks at once broke it up. Nineveh is destined to be a Pompeii for Western Asia. It will be an inexhaustible mine for those that come after us, perhaps even for our own children. The Assyrian language will also have its Champollions. You who can do so should prepare the way by the study of Zend for the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions.”[3]

Here Niebuhr showed himself a true prophet, but he was denied the joy of seeing his prophecy fulfilled. He died in 1831, and it was not till the 20th March, 1843, that the French consul at Mossoul sent his first batch of labourers to Khorsabad. The date better deserves to be remembered than that of many a battle or royal accession. His first reports to the Academic des Inscriptions were scientific events.[4] Funds were placed at his disposal, and a clever draughtsman, M. Flandin, was sent out to help in measuring plans and copying bas-reliefs. In June, 1845, the first Assyrian sculptures of any size that had ever left their native place for Europe were set afloat upon the Tigris, and in December, 1846, they arrived in France. In 1847 de Longperier was the first to read upon the Khorsabad remains that name of Sargon which is mentioned by none of the classic authors and only once by the Bible.[5] This discovery was of the greatest importance; it at once gave a date to remains whose age had been previously a mere matter of guess. The most divergent hypotheses had been started—some believed the sculptures to have belonged to the remote times of Ninus and Semiramis, others thought them no more ancient than the Sassanids;[6] it was a great point gained to make sure that their true date was the eighth century before our era.