We find another example of this pre-existence of modern arrangements in the vast extent of the palace offices. These consist of a series of chambers to the south-west of the court marked A, and of a whole quarter, larger than the harem, which lies in the south-eastern corner of the mound, and includes several wide quadrangles (B, C´, C, D, D´, F, G, &c.).[28] We could not describe this part of the plan in detail without giving it more space than we can spare. We must be content with telling our readers that by careful study, of their dispositions and of the objects found in them during the excavations, M. Place has succeeded in determining, sometimes with absolute certainty, sometimes with very great probability, the destination of nearly every group of chambers in this part of the palace. The south-west side of the great court was occupied by stores; the rooms were filled with jars, with enamelled bricks, with things made of iron and copper, with provisions and various utensils for the use of the palace, and with the plunder taken from conquered countries; it was, in tact, what would now be called the khazneh or treasury. The warehouses did not communicate with each other; they had but one door, that leading into the great court. But opening out of each there was a small inner room, which served perhaps as the residence of a store-keeper.
At the opposite side of the court lay what Place calls the active section of the offices (la partie active des dépendances), the rooms where all those domestic labours were carried on without which the luxurious life of the royal dwelling would have come to a standstill. Kitchens and bakehouses were easily recognized by the contents of the clay vases found in them; bronze rings let into the wall betrayed the stables—in the East of our own day, horses and camels are picketed to similar rings. Close to the stables a long gallery, in which a large number of chariots and sets of harness could be conveniently arranged, has been recognized as a coach-house. There are but few rooms in which some glimpse of their probable destination has not been caught. In two small chambers between courts A and B, the flooring stones are pierced with round holes leading to square sewers, which, in their turn, join a large brick-vaulted drain. The use of such a contrivance is obvious.[29]
We may fairly suppose that the rooms in which no special indication of their purpose was found, were mostly servants’ lodgings. They are, as a rule, of very small size.
On the other hand, courts were ample and passages wide. Plenty of space was required for the circulation of the domestics who supplied the tables of the seraglio and harem, for exercising horses, and for washing chariots. If, after the explorations of Place, any doubts could remain as to the purpose of this quarter of the palace, they would be removed by the Assyrian texts. Upon the terra-cotta prism on which Sennacherib, after narrating his campaigns, describes the restoration of his palace, he says, “the kings, my predecessors, constructed the office court for baggage, for exercising horses, for the storing of utensils.” Esarhaddon speaks, in another inscription, of “the part built by the kings, his predecessors, for holding baggage, for lodging horses, camels, dromedaries and chariots.”[30]
We have now made the tour of the palace, and we find ourselves again before the propylæum whence we set out. This propylæum must have been one of the finest creations of Assyrian architecture. It had no fewer than ten winged bulls of different sizes, some parallel, others perpendicular, to the direction of the wall. There were six in the central doorway, which was, in all probability, reserved for the king and his suite. A pair of smaller colossi flanked each of the two side doors, through which passed, no doubt between files of guards, the ceaseless crowd of visitors, soldiers, and domestics. The conception of this façade, with its high substructure, and the ascending: lines of a double flight of steps connecting it with the town below, is really grand, and the size of the court into which it led, not much less than two acres and a half, was worthy of such an approach.
The huge dimensions of this court are to be explained, not only by the desire for imposing size, but also by the important part it played in the economy of the palace. By its means the three main divisions, the seraglio, the harem, and the khan, were put into communication with each other. When there were no particular reasons for making a détour, it was crossed by any one desiring to go from one part to another. It was a kind of general rendezvous and common passage, and its great size was no more than necessary for the convenient circulation of servants with provisions for the royal tables, of military detachments, of workmen going to their work, of the harem ladies taking the air in palanquins escorted by eunuchs, and of royal processions, in which the king himself took part.
As to whether or no any part of the platform was laid out in gardens, or the courts planted with trees and flowers, we do not know. Of course the excavations would tell us nothing on that point, but evidence is not wanting that the masters for whom all this architectural splendour was created were not without a love for shady groves, and that they were fond of having trees in the neighbourhood of their dwellings. The hanging gardens of Babylon have been famous for more than twenty centuries. The bas-reliefs tell us that the Assyrians had an inclination towards the same kind of luxury. On a sculptured fragment from Kouyundjik we find a range of trees crowning a terrace supported by a row of pointed arches (Vol. I., Fig. 42); another slab, from the same palace of Sennacherib, shows us trees upheld by a colonnade (Fig. 8). If Sargon established in any part of his palace a garden like that hinted at in the sculptured scene in which Assurbanipal is shown at table with his wife (Vol. I., Fig. 27), it must have been in the north-western angle of the platform, near the temple and staged tower. In this corner of the mound there is plenty of open space, and being farther from the principal entrances of the palace, it is more quiet and retired than any other part of the royal dwelling. Here then, if anywhere, we may imagine terraces covered with vegetable earth, in which the vine, the fig, the pomegranate and the tall pyramid of the cypress, could flourish and cast their grateful shadows. The existence of such gardens is, however, so uncertain, that we have given them no place in our attempts at restoration.
Fig. 8.—A hanging garden; from Layard.
For the service of such a building a liberal supply of water was necessary. Whence did it come? and how was it stored? I have been amazed to find that most of those who have studied the Assyrian palaces have never asked themselves these questions.[31] One might have expected to find the building provided, as is usual in hot countries, with spacious cisterns that could be easily filled during the rainy season; but neither at Khorsabad, Kouyundjik, nor Nimroud, have the slightest traces of any such tanks been found. With the materials at their disposal it would, perhaps, have been too difficult for the Assyrian builders to make them water-tight. Neither have any wells been discovered. Their depth must have been too great for common use. We must remember that the height of the mound has to be added to the distance below the ordinary surface of the country at which watery strata would be tapped. It is, on the whole, probable that the supply for the palace inmates was carried up in earthenware jars, and that the service occupied a string of women, horses, and donkeys, passing and repassing between the river, or rather the canal, that carried the waters of the Khausser to the very foot of the mound, and the palace, from morning until night.[32]