BIRD’S-EYE VIEW BY CH. CHIPIEZ FROM
The restoration by F Thomas
Fig. 2.—The mound and village of Khorsabad before the commencement of the excavations; from Botta.
§ 2.—The Palace of Sargon.
The mound in which the remains of Sargon’s palace had lain concealed for so many centuries bore on its summit, before the excavations began, a small village called Khorsabad (Fig. 2). It rises about nine miles north-north-east of Mossoul on the eastern bank of the Khausser, an affluent of the Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of the mountains which begin to draw in towards the left bank of that river not far above the site of Nineveh. Botta was induced to begin his excavations at this point on account of the numerous fragments of cuneiform inscriptions which were found there by the peasants of the village. He sent a number of workmen to Khorsabad under the superintendence of his confidential servant, Charles Michel, who, twenty years afterwards, was my dragoman in Asia Minor.[9] How often during our long marches through forests and across barren steppes he entertained me with the story of how he discovered Nineveh, as, like his master Botta, he always called it, my readers may guess. “We arrived at Khorsabad towards evening, and after exploring the village I was rather puzzled as to what I should find for my men to do—we had already been so often deceived. At Kouyundjik we had raised no end of dust and found hardly anything. While turning over this question in my mind I had my supper before the door of one of the houses, and after the meal was over, I was idly scratching the ground by the side of the mat on which I was lying, with my knife. Suddenly I felt the blade strike against something very hard; I withdrew it, and thrusting my finger into the hole, I felt a stone. Working away with the knife I soon enlarged the hole, and then saw that the stone was worked and chiselled with great care. Next morning I brought my workmen to the spot, and watched them closely to see that they advanced with sufficient precaution. A few strokes of the pick-axe brought to light the head of one of the bulls. Off I went at full gallop to Mossoul, and came back next day with M. Botta.”
Whether this be a truthful narrative or not I cannot say. Michel was born in the Levant, of French parents, and I always forgot to ask whether, by any chance, his father was a Gascon. In any case, it was to Botta’s honour that he understood the value and significance of a discovery due, in the first place, to the idle scratchings of a subaltern, and that he pushed on his explorations in the face of Turkish ill-will and pecuniary difficulties, and that before he had received any encouragement from Paris.
Botta soon recognized the true character of the building, even although he clung to the erroneous notion that he had disinterred the historical capital of Assyria, the Nineveh of classic writers and Hebrew prophets.[10] The excavations of his successor and the decipherment of the cuneiform texts have clearly proved his mistake. The monument found and partly excavated by Botta, was never included in Nineveh, vast though that city may have been. It was part of what may be called a caprice of Sargon’s put into execution between the years 722 and 705 B.C. That prince was not content with founding a new dynasty; he determined to pass the intervals between his campaigns in a palace and city which should be entirely his own creation, and should bear his name. That town and palace, with its situation a few miles from the great political and commercial capital, was the Versailles of an Assyrian grand monarque.
The connection between town and palace was very close. The fortified walls of the former inclosed a large rectangular parallelogram (Vol. I. Fig. 144), while the lofty platform on which the structures composing the king’s dwelling were reared, was placed, as it were, astride of the wall on its north-western face. Its pavement was on a level with the summit of the wall.[11] Thus attached to the enceinte the palace esplanade shared the protection of its parapet and flanking towers, while it stood boldly out, like an enormous bastion, from the stretch of wall of which it formed a part. From three of its faces it commanded a view of the plain, the river, and the neighbouring mountains, so that the requirements of health and pleasure were remembered at the same time as those of safety. As for placing the king’s dwelling, as it might have been placed by a modern architect, at some distance from the town, and upon the summit of some gentle height, such a notion was quite outside Assyrian ideas. A country site would have been too easily accessible to the numerous enemies of the Assyrian kings—those eastern Attilas, who could only feel themselves safe when sheltered by the impenetrable walls of dwellings perched upon an artificial hill, from which the whole surrounding country could be watched.
