I must pass from what went before to what came after and draw a comparison between the palace of Khusrau and the desert palace of Ukhaiḍir. A characteristic feature of the latter, the girdle of walls, must be left out of account. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn the walls were placed round the large pleasure-grounds with which the Sasanian king surrounded his dwelling. It is the wall-less Ukhaiḍir, the Ukhaiḍir as it was originally conceived by its builders, which must be taken into consideration, though even in that first design the desert ḥîrah was not left entirely defenceless, since it was compressed into the rectangle of its own enclosing walls, strengthened by towers. The space within those walls had to be utilized to the full. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn the guards could be lodged in the lower rooms about the stairways, at Ukhaiḍir they were gathered together within the main entrance. The great hall is, in fact, a monumental gateway. It belongs to the system of defences which is absent from the Sasanian palaces. The Mohammadan builders reverted to an older type, to the fortified palace of the ancient East. At Khorsâbâd the principal entrance to the palace lay within the walls of the acropolis, and it was not, therefore, strongly fortified, but such gates as those in the acropolis walls are the true progenitors of the Ukhaiḍir scheme ([Plate 78], Fig. 1). In Sargon’s palace the long entrance passage, some 10 metres wide, represents the great hall of Ukhaiḍir; the lateral chambers on either side are divided at Ukhaiḍir into groups of smaller lateral rooms which, both at Khorsâbâd and at Ukhaiḍir, were very insufficiently lighted. In either case some additional light is obtained from a court into which the chambers open. The symmetrical arrangement of the Ukhaiḍir gate with the central court and audience rooms behind it would not have appealed to ancient authorities on fortification. Chaldaean and Assyrian gateways are seldom if ever situated opposite to one another, an asymmetrical disposition being accounted better for purposes of defence.[150] The long passage room of Khorsâbâd and Ukhaiḍir, but without the lateral chambers, exists in some of the excavated gateways at Susa,[151] and at Susa above the gateway stands a hypostyle pavilion offering a high and airy abode to the great folk who inhabited the palaces within, just as at Ukhaiḍir an open court with lîwâns on all sides occupies the high summit of the gate-house. At Ukhaiḍir there is no direct communication between the ground floor of the gate-house block and the rest of the palace, except one door out of the great hall. The gate tower and hall, with the adjoining rooms for dependants, and the mosque, which had of necessity to be accessible to all, formed the public part of the building, and the upper stories, since they too could only be reached by passing through the public rooms, cannot be regarded as containing private apartments. The better rooms may have been intended for guests; the chambers in the gate-tower, and those which were in direct connexion with the chemin de ronde, for guards.
The great open platform of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn is represented at Ukhaiḍir by the central court. The ceremonial rooms at Ukhaiḍir recall with singular fidelity the disposition at Firûzâbâd, but the flanking chambers of the lîwân (the old tower chambers of the khilâni palace) have doors of their own, as at Hatra and Sarvistân, and the three halls are barrel vaulted instead of domed. Special care has been taken with these vaults. In the audience chamber (No. 30), as in the lîwân (No. 29), they are finely built of brick, while in rooms 33 and 40 they are set upon columns. The unequal intercolumniations in these rooms (the columns stand ·90 metre from the walls and 2·50 metres from each other) is no doubt due to a desire to secure as much space as possible in the centre of the room, but it produces a singular resemblance to Sasanian methods, where the short columns are set close to the walls that they may be the more easily bound in with them by arches. The rooms round the small court F are probably not intended for dwelling-rooms, but stand in some definite relation to the ceremonial chambers; as Dr. Reuther has suggested, the little room 37, with chimney-pipes in the vault, may have been used for the preparation of light refreshments for the prince and his guests. For what special purpose the elaborately decorated rooms 31 and 32 were intended it is of course impossible to say, but as I shall point out (p. 115) they accord with a similar arrangement at Kharâneh. The rooms of ceremony were provided with a serdâb under No. 42. Almost exactly the same grouping of chambers is found in the block which was set at a later date into the eastern part of the palace yard. The north-east angle of the yard forms the court; the façade of the annex is adorned with engaged columns and niches; even the serdâb and the stair to the roof are reproduced. It is clear that we have here a second set of reception-rooms similar to the first, but why a second set was needed it is impossible to tell. The fact that an outer stair was added to the older part of the palace, so as to place the new reception-rooms in direct connexion with the first floor of the gate-house block, the floor which I have tentatively assigned to guests, leads me to suggest that the second ceremonial lîwân, with its dependences, was intended for any visitor who was of such distinction as to need a separate audience room.
The courts B, C, H, and G can have served no other purpose than that of the ḥaram, the dwelling-places for the wives and children. Each court is a habitation complete in itself, a bait as it is called in Arabic, a house. Each is provided with a winter and a summer lîwân, with living-rooms adjoining it, and behind each lîwân lies a long narrow room partly open, with chimney-pipes in the vault—the kitchen.[152] Each bait has access to two of the chambers hollowed out of the towers, which, according to the suggestion of the authors of Ocheïdir, were probably closets. In two of the courts, B and H, the flanking chambers of the lîwân are provided with anterooms which open into the court through an archway resting on engaged columns. They are covered with barrel vaults running at right angles to the vaults of the chambers behind, and separated from the lîwân vault by transverse arches. The vault of the lîwân is carried straight through from the back wall to the wall of the court, but the side walls are not continued through to the court, as in C and G, but open through wide arches into the antechambers. These arches are the transverse arches against which the antechamber vaults abut. In the ground plan this group has the appearance of a short lîwân flanked by two short chambers, with an antechamber common to all three, though structurally this would not be a true description. The antechamber predicts the modern ṭarmah, which is, as a rule, either a short antechamber to the central room only, or a long antechamber common to all the three rooms ([Fig. 12]). In either case the modern ṭarmah is actually that which the ṭarmah of Ukhaiḍir only appears to be, an independent latitudinal antechamber cutting off part of the lîwân.
Fig. 12. Modern Ṭarmah houses.
(From Das Wohnhaus in Bagdad, by kind permission of Dr. Reuther.)
In court E the arrangement of the rooms is modified owing to the exiguous space which remained at the back of the ceremonial chambers. The elements are, however, the same, a court, a lîwân with side chambers, and a kitchen. To these are added a stair leading to the roof, which is absent from the ḥaram courts. It is reasonable to assume that court E was the private bait of the lord of Ukhaiḍir. These courts or baits are foreshadowed in the posterior courts of the Achaemenid and the early Sasanian palaces (again Firûzâbâd offers the closest parallel); in the palace of Khusrau they reach a development which was to be very little modified at Ukhaiḍir. The scheme can best be studied in the courts on the lower level O, Q, and S. Each of these courts is provided on the west side with a lîwân, flanking chambers, and a ṭarmah, while a fourth chamber to the north may be a kitchen. To the south a vaulted passage leads in each case to a posterior court P, R, and T. On the eastern side of the forecourts there is another lîwân group, much shallower than the first and without a ṭarmah or any subsidiary rooms. The flanking chambers of the eastern lîwâns have small doors into the court and into the vaulted passage behind them. As far as I could judge, the three forecourts communicated with each other, in which case the strict isolation of the baits of Ukhaiḍir is a new feature. In courts K and M the arrangement is a little different. The east end in one court only is occupied by a shallow lîwân group, the west end in both by a deep lîwân group with a ṭarmah, but the subsidiary chambers are to the rear, one small and one larger room, approached by a door through the lîwân and opening on to a posterior court. The four baits on the upper level are very similar. The subsidiary chambers are placed behind the main lîwân; in courts C and G there is a group of rooms to the side, and court G is without the shallow eastern lîwân group in its forecourt, but possesses it on the west side of its posterior court. Neither courts E nor I have the small lîwâns. All the courts communicate with one another (except perhaps courts I and H) and with the passage. These long vaulted passages are a feature of Ukhaiḍir also. The building materials at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn are those of Ukhaiḍir and Sarvistân, undressed stones, coursed with a certain amount of care, and burnt brick tiles for the finer work.
One further step in the long history of oriental palaces can now be taken, thanks to the excavations of Professor Sarre and Dr. Herzfeld at Sâmarrâ. Part of the plan of the great complex of Balkuwârâ lies before us ([Fig. 13]). Just as the palace of Khusrau reproduced the khilâni palaces on a gigantic scale, so Balkuwârâ is a gigantic reproduction of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn. The approach to the palace, through two courts, covers an area some 300 metres long (the measurements are only my approximate estimates made from the scale of Dr. Herzfeld’s outline plan) and passes under three ornamental gateways. A third courtyard, lying before the halls of audience, is over 100 metres long and is set round on two sides by a free standing colonnade (instead of the blind arcade of Ukhaiḍir), a corridor, and a long line of rooms, these last carried round the third side also. An immense lîwân, 30 metres long by 15 metres wide, with two rows of flanking chambers, occupies the centre of the fourth side. Beyond a small latitudinal room there is a group of four great chambers arranged crosswise. Meeting in a central chamber, between the arms of the cross, lies a complex of nine smaller rooms, four groups in all, and beyond this we find another latitudinal room and a great lîwân opening into a garden court.[153] On the further side of this garden pavilions stand upon the banks of the Tigris. The area to the left of the ceremonial halls is occupied by twenty-four courts, each one a bait after the manner of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn and Ukhaiḍir. Besides the lîwân group at one end (Dr. Herzfeld speaks of the principal room as ⏊-shaped, but judging from his outline the form is produced by the combination of the lîwân group and the ṭarmah) and the group of three shallower rooms at the opposite end, there are three rooms down either side of each court, and rooms flanking the group at either end. Some of the courts are still bigger and more complex. In the right