History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 3 — 14 - Ch. 2: The Temples and the Gods of Chaldaea, pt. 1

_The construction and revenues of the temples--Popular gods and theological triads--The dead and Hades_.

The cities of the Euphrates attract no attention, like those of the Nile, by the magnificence of their ruins, which are witnesses, even after centuries of neglect, to the activity of a powerful and industrious people: on the contrary, they are merely heaps of rubbish in which no architectural outline can be distinguished--mounds of stiff and greyish clay, cracked by the sun, washed into deep crevasses by the rain, and bearing no apparent traces of the handiwork of man.

[Illustration: 126. jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF WAKKA] In the estimation of the Chaldaean architects, stone was a material of secondary consideration: as it was necessary to bring it from a great distance and at considerable expense, they used it very sparingly, and then merely for lintels, uprights, thresholds, for hinges on which to hang their doors, for dressings in some of their state apartments, in cornices or sculptured friezes on the external walls of their buildings;

and even then its employment suggested rather that of a band of embroidery carefully disposed on some garment to relieve the plainness of the material.

Crude brick, burnt brick, enamelled brick, but always and everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction.

The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot, furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity.

This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across, and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger: they were stamped on the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of the reigning sovereign, and were then dried in the sun.

* A layer of fine mortar or of bitumen was sometimes spread between the courses, or handfuls of reeds would be strewn at intervals between the brickwork to increase the cohesion: more frequently the crude bricks were piled one upon another, and their natural softness and moisture brought about their rapid agglutination.

** As the building proceeded, the weight of the courses served to increase still further the adherence of the layers: the walls soon became consolidated into a compact mass, in which the horizontal strata were distinguishable only by the varied tints of the clay used to make the different relays of bricks.

* The making of bricks for the Assyrian monuments of the time of the Sargonids has been minutely described by Place, _Ninive et l’Assyrie_, vol. i.

pp. 211-214. The methods of procedure were exactly the same as those used under the earliest king known, as has been proved by the examination of the bricks taken from the monuments of Uru and Lagash.

** This method of building was noticed by classical writers.

The word “Bowarieh,” borne by several ancient mounds in Chaldoa, signifies, properly speaking, a mat of reeds; it is applied only to such buildings as are apparently constructed with alternate layers of brick and dried reeds.

The proportion of these layers differs in certain localities: in the ruins of the ancient temple of Belos at Babylon, now called the “Mujelibeh,” the lines of straw and reeds run uninterruptedly between each course of bricks; in the ruins of Akkerkuf, they only occur at wider intervals--according to Niebuhr and Ives, every seventh or eighth course;

according to Raymond, every seventh course, or sometimes every fifth or sixth course, but in these cases the layer of reeds becomes 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 inches wide.

H.

Rawlin-son thinks, on the other hand, that all the monuments in which we find layers of straw and reeds between the brick courses belong to the Parthian period.

[Illustration: 128. jpg A CHALDAEAN STAMPED BRICK.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a brick preserved in the Louvre.

The bricks bearing historical inscriptions, which are sometimes met with, appear to have been mostly ex-voto offerings placed somewhere prominently, and not building materials hidden in the masonry.

Monuments constructed of such a plastic material required constant attention and frequent repairs, to keep them in good condition: after a few years of neglect they became quite disfigured, the houses suffered a partial dissolution in every storm, the streets were covered with a coating of fine mud, and the general outline of the buildings and habitations grew blurred and defaced.

Whilst in Egypt the main features of the towns are still traceable above ground, and are so well preserved in places that, while excavating them, we are carried away from the present into the world of the past, the Chaldaean cities, on the contrary, are so overthrown and seem to have returned so thoroughly to the dust from which their founders raised them, that the most patient research and the most enlightened imagination can only imperfectly reconstitute their arrangement.

The towns were not enclosed within those square or rectangular enclosures with which the engineers of the Pharaohs fortified their strongholds.

The ground-plan of Uru was an oval, that of Larsam formed almost a circle upon the soil, while Uruk and Eridu resembled in shape a sort of irregular trapezium.

The curtain of the citadel looked down on the plain from a great height, so that the defenders were almost out of reach of the arrows or slings of the besiegers: the remains of the ramparts at Uruk at the present day are still forty to fifty feet high, and twenty or more feet in thickness at the top.

Narrow turrets projected at intervals of every fifty feet along the face of the wall: the excavations have not been sufficiently pursued to permit of our seeing what system of defence was applied to the entrances.

The area described by these cities was often very large, but the population in them was distributed very unequally; the temples in the different quarters formed centres around which were clustered the dwellings of the inhabitants, sometimes densely packed, and elsewhere thinly scattered.

The largest and richest of these temples was usually reserved for the principal deity, whose edifices were being continually decorated by the ruling princes, and the extent of whose ruins still attracts the traveller.

The walls, constructed and repaired with bricks stamped with the names of lords of the locality, contain in themselves alone an almost complete history.

Did Urbau, we may ask, found the ziggurat of Nannar in Uru?

We meet with his bricks at the base of the most ancient portions of the building, and we moreover learn, from cylinders unearthed not far from it, that “for Nannar, the powerful bull of Anu, the son of Bel, his King, Urbau, the brave hero, King of Uru, had built E-Timila, his favourite temple.

” The bricks of his son Dungi are found mixed with his own, while here and there other bricks belonging to subsequent kings, with cylinders, cones, and minor objects, strewn between the courses, mark restorations at various later periods.

What is true of one Chaldaean city is equally true of all of them, and the dynasties of Uruk and of Lagash, like those of Uru, can be reconstructed from the revelations of their brickwork.

The lords of heaven promised to the lords of the earth, as a reward of their piety, both glory and wealth in this life, and an eternal fame after death: they have, indeed, kept their word.

The majority of the earliest Chaldaean heroes would be unknown to us, were it not for the witness of the ruined sanctuaries which they built, and that which they did in the service of their heavenly patrons has alone preserved their names from oblivion.

Their most extravagant devotion, however, cost them less money and effort than that of the Pharaohs their contemporaries.

While the latter had to bring from a distance, even from the remotest parts of the desert, the different kinds of stone which they considered worthy to form part of the decoration of the houses of their gods, the Chaldaean kings gathered up outside their very doors the principal material for their buildings: should they require any other accessories, they could obtain, at the worst, hard stone for their statues and thresholds in Magan and Milukhkha, and beams of cedar and cypress in the forests of the Amanus and the Upper Tigris.

Under these conditions a temple was soon erected, and its construction did not demand centuries of continuous labour, like the great limestone and granite sanctuaries of Egypt: the same ruler who laid the first brick, almost always placed the final one, and succeeding generations had only to keep the building in ordinary repair, without altering its original plan.

The work of construction was in almost every case carried out all at one time, designed and finished from the drawings of one architect, and bears traces but rarely of those deviations from the earlier plans which sometimes make the comprehension of the Theban temples so difficult a matter: if the state of decay of certain parts, or more often inadequate excavation, frequently prevent us from appreciating their details, we can at least reinstate their general outline with tolerable accuracy.

While the Egyptian temple was spread superficially over a large area, the Chalaean temple strove to attain as high an elevation as possible.

The “ziggurats,” whose angular profile is a special characteristic of the landscapes of the Euphrates, were composed of several immense cubes, piled up on one another, and diminishing in size up to the small shrine by which they were crowned and wherein the god himself was supposed to dwell.

There are two principal types of these ziggurats.

In the first, for which the builders of Lower Chaldaea showed a marked preference, the vertical axis, common to all the superimposed stories, did not pass through the centre of the rectangle which served as the base of the whole building; it was carried back and placed near to one of the narrow ends of the base, so that the back elevation of the temple rose abruptly in steep narrow ledges above the plain, while the terraces of the front broadened out into wide platforms.

The stories are composed of solid blocks of crude brick; up to the present, at least, no traces of internal chambers have been found.

* The chapel on the summit could not contain more than one apartment: an altar stood before the door, and access to it was obtained by a straight external staircase, interrupted at each terrace by a more or less spacious landing.

** The second type of temple frequently found in Northern Chaldaea was represented by a building on a square base with seven stories, all of equal height, connected by one or two lateral staircases, having on the summit, the pavilion of the god; this is the “terraced tower” which excited the admiration of the Greeks at Babylon, and of which the temple of Bel was the most remarkable example.

The ruins of it still exist, but it has been so frequently and so completely restored in the course of ages, that it is impossible to say how much now remains of the original construction.

We know of several examples, however, of the other type of ziggurat--one at Uru, another at Bridu, a third at Uruk, without mentioning those which have not as yet been methodically explored.

None of them rises directly from the surface of the ground, but they are all built on a raised platform, which consequently places the foundations of the temple nearly on a level with the roofs of the surrounding houses.

The raised platform of the temple of Nannar at Uru still measures 20 feet in height, and its four angles are orientated exactly to the four cardinal points.

Its facade was approached by an inclined plane, or by a flight of low steps, and the summit, which was surrounded by a low balustrade, was paved with enormous burnt bricks.

On this terrace, processions at solemn festivals would have ample space to perform their evolutions.

The lower story of the temple occupies a parallelogram of 198 feet in length by 173 feet in width, and rises about 27 feet in height.

* Perrot-Ohipiez admit that between the first and second story there was a sort of plinth seven feet in height which corresponded to the foundation platform below the first story.

It appears to me, as it did to Loftus, that the slope which now separates the two vertical masses of brickwork “is accidental, and owes its existence to the destruction of the upper portion of the second story.

” Taylor mentions only two stories, and evidently considers the slope in question to be a bank of rubbish.

** Perrot-Chipiez place the staircase leading from the ground-level to the terrace inside the building--“an arrangement which would have the advantage of not interfering with the outline of this immense platform, and would not detract from the strength and solidity of its appearance;” Reber proposes a different combination.

At Uru, the whole staircase projects in front of the platform and “loads up to the edge of the basement of the second story,” then continues as an inclined plane from the edge of the first story to the terrace of the second, forming one single staircase, perhaps of the same width as this second story, leading from the base to the summit of the building.

[Illustration: 134. jpg THE TEMPLE OF NANNAR AT URU, APPROXIMATELY RESTORED.

] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

The restoration differs from that proposed by Perrot-Chipiez.

I have made it by working out the description taken down on the spot by Taylor.

The central mass of crude brick has preserved its casing of red tiles, cemented with bitumen, almost intact up to the top; it is strengthened by buttresses--nine on the longer and six on the shorter sides--projecting about a foot, which relieve its rather bare surface.

The second story rises to the height of only 20 feet above, the first, and when intact could not have been more than 26 to 30 feet high.

* Many bricks bearing the stamp of Dungi are found among the materials used in the latest restoration, which took place about the VIth century before our era; they have a smooth surface, are broken here and there by air-holes, and their very simplicity seems to bear witness to the fact that Nabonidos confined himself to the task of merely restoring things to the state in which the earlier kings of Uru had left them.

** [Illustration: 135. jpg THE TEMPLE OF URU IN ITS PRESENT STATE, ACCORDING TO TAYLOR]

Facsimile, by Faucher-Gudin, of the drawing published by Taylor.

* At the present time 14 feet high, plus 5 feet of rubbish, 119 feet long, 75 feet wide (Loftus, _Travels and Researches in Olialdsea and Susiana_, p. 129).

** The cylinders of Nabonidos describing the restoration of the temple were found at the four angles of the second story by Taylor.

Till within the last century, traces of a third story to this temple might have been distinguished; unlike the lower ones, it was not of solid brickwork, but contained at least one chamber: this was the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary of Nannar.

The external walls were covered with pale blue enamelled tiles, having a polished surface.

The interior was panelled with cedar or cypress--rare woods procured as articles of commerce from the peoples of the North and West; this woodwork was inlaid in parts with thin leaves of gold, alternating with panels of mosaics composed of small pieces of white marble, alabaster, onyx, and agate, cut and polished.

[Illustration: 136. jpg FURTHER VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF URU]