The Historians' History of the World 01

The tombs were constructed with great care, in order to guard against the rapid decay of the corpses, yet the inhabitants of Mesopotamia never reached the same degree of perfection in the embalming of bodies as the Egyptians: they were also fitted out with everything that, according to their faith, was necessary for the dead, but they were piled upon each other, and thus excluded from view. Art was not expended upon them; on the other hand, however, all known means of art were used to decorate the residences of the kings and the earthly habitations of the gods in the most splendid and sumptuous manner. Their size increased continually. The early Chaldaic palace discovered at Telloh, had an area of only 53 meters long by 31 broad; the so-called Wasevas at Warka (Erech) was 200 meters long by 150 broad; the palace of Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin covered an area of about 10 hectares, and contained 30 open courts and more than 200 apartments. Under the Sargonids the rooms also became larger. One in the palace of Sennacherib was almost as long as the entire palace at Telloh, i.e., 46 meters long by 12 wide. Another in the palace of Esarhaddon, which was intended to be 15 meters by 12 meters, remained unfinished, probably on account of the difficulty of construction. The palace of Asshurbanapal was of somewhat smaller, though still magnificent proportions. The great palace of Nebuchadrezzar II, consisting of the old palace of his father and a new one constructed by him and joined to the old, has not yet been sufficiently explored, but according to the descriptions, must have surpassed in splendour, if not in size, all those of his predecessors. All palaces were constructed on the same plan, and contained separate living apartments for the king and his court, for his wives, for the lower court officials, and, as it appears, also a temple with various sanctuaries and a tower.

Too little is as yet known of the Babylonian-Assyrian temples to judge with any certainty of their style of architecture. Here and there, remains of temples have been found, but it has not yet been proved that the buildings designated as temples were really devoted to religious purposes. Most of the temples seem to have been small, at any rate not intended for large assemblages. The altar stood outside and consequently the religious services must usually have taken place there.

Every large town had many temples but always only one Ziggurat. This constituted only one part of the principal temple, albeit the most prominent one. There were various kinds of such towers, of three or more, sometimes seven stories, which were attainable by a single inclined plane encircling the whole building, or a double one rising on two sides of it. The ground plan was a perfect square in some, in others a parallelogram; all rested, however, on a massive substructure, and seem to have been crowned with a small sanctuary.

Although these principal temples, including the Ziggurat, were not of equal extent with the royal palaces, they were nevertheless imposing buildings, and the towers in particular were erected with much care and at great expense. It would be wrong to conclude from this ratio of temples and palaces that the Assyrians were less religious and more servile than the Egyptians, who, entirely dominated as they were by the dogma of immortality, lavished more care on the tombs of the dead kings than on the habitations of the living ones. The valuable decorations and sculptures which the Assyrians and Babylonians gave to their gods prove their pious tendency. In reality the whole palace was a sacred edifice in which the representative of the deity lived on earth with and beside his god.

The aid which architecture received from other arts has already been briefly mentioned. There are still a few particulars to be noticed in regard to this point. The Assyrians as well as the Babylonians were skilful workers in bronze. Proofs of this are the bronze door-sill 1½ meters long, found at Borsippa, whose decorations of rosettes and squares are in very good taste, and particularly the bronze gates at Balawat, belonging to the 9th century B.C., which are masterpieces of their kind, and a great number of other remains.