Fig. 13. Balkuwârâ. (From Erster vorläufiger Bericht über die Ausgrabungen von Sâmarrâ, by kind permission of Dr. Herzfeld.)
wing of the palace, besides a number of baits of a more or less normal character, there are a bazaar and barracks. The huge building here displayed covers only a quarter of the whole area of Balkuwârâ. It is interesting to note that the chief mosque lies to the right hand of the main entrance, just as at Ukhaiḍir it lies to the right of the gate. The smaller palace of al-’Âshiq is again composed of a central block between two wings.[154] The audience chambers appear to consist of a large lîwân with a rectangular room behind it, this room being flanked by two similar rooms (compare Firûzâbâd). The general features of the main gateway, a closed lîwân flanked by two chambers on either side, each with an antechamber, were already known, as well as the details of the wall decoration on either side of the gate.[155] M. Viollet, who did some work in 1910 on the great palace known as the Bait al-Khalîfah, has published a sketch-plan of it,[156] and Dr. Herzfeld is now engaged on further excavations there. Both he and M. Viollet have published exceedingly instructive photographs of stucco decoration from the palaces, and I gave a few in Amurath to Amurath. Dr. Herzfeld’s series is naturally far the most interesting, as his work has been the most thorough.
If the palace of Khusrau is unmistakably the culminating point of a long oriental tradition, and the model for future generations of oriental potentates, it serves also to illuminate the little known period during which it arose; it throws light upon the ḥîrahs of the Lakhmid phylarchs, concerning which we have practically no contemporary information. Mas’ûdi tells us that the khalif Mutawakkil copied in one of his palaces a scheme which had been adopted by a king of Ḥîrah. It consisted of a central block, wherein was situated the audience chamber, and two wings containing storerooms and lodgings for courtiers. In front lay an open court common to all three parts of the palace; the way to the audience chamber passed through three gates. Dr. Herzfeld, when he had laid bare the plan of Balkuwârâ, realized that it corresponded with Mas’ûdi’s description.[157] That Mas’ûdi believed the type of the Ḥîri with two sleeves to have been created by a Nu’mânid prince in imitation of the battle array of his army, we, who are acquainted with older monuments, know to be incorrect;[158] it is the latest descendant of a long ancestral line of oriental palaces which runs back through the Achaemenid and the Assyrian to the Hittite. The palace of Khusrau is as perfect an instance of the scheme as is the palace of Balkuwârâ; the differences between them are differences of dimension, not of kind. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn old oriental traits, such as the artificial platform and the double stairways, are peculiarly well marked. The three gates of Balkuwârâ are not present at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, or rather they are not laid out in the same relation to one another, but it is very possible that Mas’ûdi’s account of the Nu’mânid palace was coloured by a lively recollection of the glories of Balkuwârâ, which in his day was beginning to fall into ruin. Sâmarrâ was finally abandoned by the khalifs in 892, and Mas’ûdi wrote in 943. But if Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn fulfils the requirements of the tenth-century writer, so does Ukhaiḍir, and Ukhaiḍir, standing within two days’ journey of Ḥîrah, may well be taken to be the closest representation of the Lakhmid ḥîrahs until Khawarnaq itself is excavated.
Fig. 14. Scheme of Pompeiian house.
(From Mau’s Pompeii, by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan.)
The genesis of the lîwân house as it appears in the palace of Khusrau, at Ukhaiḍir and at Balkuwârâ has emerged from the analysis of a long series of more ancient buildings. The baits adhere severely, I might almost say implacably, to a type which was derived ultimately from the khilâni. It is, however, possible that in their later form another influence may have been at work. We know that, to a certain extent at any rate, the Parthians adopted the Hellenistic house. The Greek peristyle is found in Parthian houses at Babylon and at Niffer ([Fig. 9]); but, on the other hand, in the Parthian palace at Tellôh, ‘in spite of the penetration into the heart of Asia of the elements of Greek civilization, the constructors, contemporaries of the Seleucids, have remained in all points faithful to the traditions of ancient Asiatic civilization,’[159] and at Hatra no Hellenistic house has yet been recorded. The plan of the Hellenistic house is well known from excavation, principally at Delos and at Priene. As early as the second century B.C. it is found in combination with the Roman atrium house at Pompeii ([Fig. 14]). In the ordinary private house, which was too small to admit of a complete peristyle, the oecus gives into the courtyard through a prostas with an open colonnaded façade, while other less important rooms are set round the remaining sides of the court (Fig. 15). This has already something of the appearance of a lîwân group with a ṭarmah, and the resemblance is increased if oecus and prostas are reduplicated and two rooms placed in the centre ([Fig. 16]). The genesis of this house is totally different from that of the lîwân-ṭarmah house; the house of Priene is an abridgement of the peristyle house, the lîwân-ṭarmah house is a development of the khilâni, but it is nevertheless possible that the Hellenistic peristyle house, in its abridged form, may have given the initial impulse which led to the adding of the ṭarmah to the lîwân. We may be sure that no columned façade could have come into existence in Mesopotamia before the close of the second Babylonian empire, and indeed at Ukhaiḍir the columned façade is not applied to the ṭarmah house, though it is found in arcaded galleries—for instance in No. 20. Moreover, the rooms in courts B and H are structurally more closely related to the simple lîwân of Hatra than to the oecus-prostas house, while the modern ṭarmah house is structurally, as well as in plan, one with the latter.