The house 8 with 9 had two large rooms which opened on the great court (O), but had no direct communication with the other rooms. They thus possess the characteristics of offices open to the public from the great court, while the official could enter them by a small passage from the open court in front of his own rooms. As in all the great courts the largest buildings lay to the south, so in each of these houses the principal chamber lay on the south side of the court; and this must have been the pleasantest part of the whole house, as it lay in shadow almost all day. Owing to the peculiar climate of Babylon it is obvious that in laying out a house, only the summer and the heat would be taken into consideration. The summer lasts 8 months, from the middle of March to the middle of November, and during June, July, and August the temperature is at times abnormally high. We have observed a maximum of 49½ grades Celsius in the shade, and 66 in the sun, and the heat lasts for many hours of the day. It begins in the morning by 9 o’clock, and only at 9 o’clock in the evening does it begin to abate: the minimum heat is in the early hours of the morning after sunrise. The months of December and February correspond on the whole with our autumn and spring. The only cold weather is in January, if the sun does not shine, and sometimes there are night frosts. Frosty days can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the unaccustomed body feels these cold days very keenly. Rain is very scanty. I believe if all the hours in the whole year in which there were more than a few drops of rain were reckoned up, they would barely amount to 7 or 8 days. The annual downfall has been registered by Buddensieg at 7 centimetres, in North Germany Herr Hellmann informs me it is 64, and in places in India 1150 centimetres. Naturally there are exceptional years. The winter of 1898 was severe and long, the thorn bushes of the desert were thickly frosted over, and the breath of a rider froze as he rode. In 1906 hundreds of palms were frozen in the neighbourhood of Babylon, and in 1911 the snow lay ankle deep all over the plain between Babylon and Bagdad for a whole week. But these are exceptions, and then people usually pretend that such a thing has not happened for 100 years. The result of this fine climate is that for the greater part of the year all business is carried on in the open air, in the courts, or at any rate with open doors.
Windows do not appear to have existed. None have ever been found, and the evidence of the ground-plans bears out this presumption. The evenings and nights were spent on the flat roofs. Thus the chambers were used very much as refuges or store chambers, with the exception of the principal rooms, where in any case as a matter of business the official must have installed himself. He may, however, have often done his business in the court in front of his office.
In the south-east corner of the Kasr the earliest brick stamps of Nebuchadnezzar occur, and the king appears to have begun his new building here. These stamps have six lines of inscription, ending with the words “am I,” anaku (Figs. 48, 51). In general the legends on these different varieties of stamps are the same: “Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, fosterer of Esagila and Ezida, son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon.” There are 6–lined, 4–lined, 3–lined, and 7–lined stamps, and one single specimen is 5–lined. The 4–, 3–, and 7–lined stamps substitute for the old simple “son,” maru, the more detailed “first-born son,” aplu ašaridu, after which the name of the father that follows is introduced with ša, which does not occur on the 6–lined stamps.
Fig. 48.—Brick stamps of Nebuchadnezzar.
We can distinguish three methods by which the working stamps were produced. In the first the original inscription was produced in terra-cotta, in which the signs were most carefully and beautifully written, and the strokes show the regular three-cornered section. From this original inscription the working stamp could then be struck in clay and baked. These we call “pottery stamps.” In them the rows of cuneiform writing are separated from each other by ruled lines. In the second sort the signs were cut out separately in wood, joined together in one block, and then moulded in sand. From this mould the working stamp was apparently cast in bronze. The strokes of these are of roundish section. Of this “metal stamp” the impressions are fine and deep, but, on the other hand, the ground between the strokes easily becomes clogged during the stamping, and thus on the bricks the signs frequently appear only in outline, while the wedges are confused and flattened. Lines between the rows of writing in these metal stamps are rare, and it is possible there was some difficulty in producing them. With the third method the original inscription is produced in stone, undoubtedly by grinding. In this way the wedges acquire a scratched appearance, as is more especially the case with the stone objects bearing votive inscriptions of the time of the Kassite kings. The working stamp made from this may have been taken either in bronze or in pottery. We have found no actual working stamp, but this is not surprising, considering that in the course of our excavations we have not yet met with a brick-kiln, and it is of course possible that the method of production was very different from what I have suggested. In the meantime it is important to describe the technical characteristics of the different kinds of stamps as they exist, and to give a concise name to each of them. The 6– and 7–lined stamps occur both as pottery and metal stamps, never as “Kassite,” the 4–lined are almost exclusively pottery, and the 3–lined are never metal, but either pottery or “Kassite.”
Fig. 49.—Stamped brick of Nebuchadnezzar, omitting his father’s name.
The orthographical differences also arrange themselves with the same distinctness in clearly defined groups. On the 6–lined stamps Ba-bi-lu or Ba-bi-i-lu is written for Babylon, while on the 7–, 4–, and 3–lined stamps it is exclusively called Ka-dingir-ra. The term Tin-tir, which is by far the most usual on stone inscriptions, only occurs once on a 3–line and once on a 4–line stamp on bricks. Very rare is a 4–line stamp on which the father’s name is omitted (Fig. [49]), and as a curiosity 7–line metal stamps occur on which the order of the lines has been reversed. What elsewhere is the 7th line is here the 1st. We have no wish to decide whether this is mere carelessness. We must, however, remember in this connection that we have Assyriologists of repute who read the cuneiform writing from above downwards, with which its historical development certainly agrees. The literature of the tablets for the ordinary right-handed man was written from left to right, but were the scribe left-handed he would be forced to write from above downwards, and many of the archaic stone inscriptions indeed convey the impression that they should be read in this fashion. All will agree that the later writings must be read from left to right. It is quite possible that Nebuchadnezzar, who so greatly preferred the archaic characters which were so highly decorative, also made an attempt to employ the ancient method of arranging them vertically. The stamps are all inscribed with these monumental, early Babylonian characters.
