§ IV Towns and Their Fortifications
In his description of Babylon, as Nebuchadnezzar and the kings of his dynasty made it, Herodotus expresses himself as follows: “This city, situated in a vast plain, forms a perfect square of which each side is 120 stadia long, so that the circumference is 480 stadia.” Pausanias says that Babylon was the greatest city that the sun had ever seen in his course; Aristotle seems to compare it to the Peloponnese in size.33 Classical authors also assign to the walls of the Chaldæan capital a height of 200 royal cubits (342 ft.) and a thickness of 85 ft. They are said to be pierced by a hundred gates, flanked by two hundred and fifty towers and protected by a large moat, into which the waters of the Euphrates were turned. The exactness of these descriptions, which at first might seem hyperbolical, has been confirmed, as far as the thickness of the walls is concerned, by the excavations at Khorsabad, the ramparts of which are 78 ft. and even 90 ft. thick where they are furnished with bastions. The extent of the city itself was verified on the spot between 1852 and 1854 by the French expedition to Mesopotamia. The great enclosure of Babylon, that is to say, the enlarged Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, according to M. Oppert, is 199 square miles in area—that is to say, seven times the extent of the fortified enclosure of Paris. A raised road, 196 ft. broad, ran along the interior of this rampart, and separated it from the interior wall, itself four times as long as the circumference of Paris; the two concentric walls bear in the cuneiform texts the names of Imgur Bel and Nimitti Bel. A view of the walls of Babylon seems to be given in one of the bas-reliefs from Kouyunjik, which represent the campaign of Assurbanipal against his brother Samas-sum-ukin, king of Babylon (B.C. 651-648). Nebuchadnezzar says that his own father Nabopolassar began to build the walls, and that he himself finished them; but this does not mean that the earlier city, called by Herodotus the Royal City, was not surrounded, as in the bas-relief, by a double wall like the later. Diodorus says that Semiramis surrounded the western part of the city with three walls, and two of these are identified by M. Oppert.34 Fifty principal streets, twenty-five of which were parallel to the Euphrates, and twenty-five at right angles to it, leading to the hundred gates, divided the city into regular squares; a single bridge, formed of wooden planks resting on stone piles, was thrown across the Euphrates, which cut the city in two diagonally. The limits of the wall of Nineveh are not yet exactly known; but the testimony of the Bible gives us reason to believe that this city scarcely yielded in point of size to Babylon. The best mode of reconciling the statements of modern explorers with those of the Book of Jonah and the historian Ctesias, is, perhaps, to adopt the suggestion of Schrader,35 and to suppose that “the Great City” of Genesis x. 12 was a group composed of the four towns there enumerated, of which Nineveh proper was the chief, and gave its name to the whole group.
In the absence of textual evidence, the very sculptures of the Assyrians place before our eyes numerous fortresses in plan or in a bird’s-eye view. One of the statues from Tello represents the patesi Gudea as an architect, holding on his knees a tablet on which is carved in outline the plan of a stronghold (fig. 56). There are six gates flanked by towers, and the walls are surmounted by battlements. In all the bas-reliefs in which sieges are represented, the fortress is seen to be composed of several concentric walls supported by towers of greater elevation than the rampart from which they project, and surmounted by denticulated battlements (figs. 58 and 74), which stand out on corbels beyond the perpendicular surface of the wall.
Might we not imagine ourselves in presence of a naïve miniature of the middle ages, representing the siege of a feudal castle, when we examine in the galleries of our museums these Assyrian bas-reliefs, on which are carved the sieges of fortresses, which to defend themselves against battering-rams, arrows, and projectiles of all sorts, are provided with redans and round towers, battlemented pierced with loopholes, and furnished with a system of defence which looks like ourdeys and machicolations? As in the middle ages, a gate is never opened in the wall of a fortified enclosure without being provided with a drawbridge, sheltered by two strong towers, and defended by a projecting structure composed of another rampart and two new bastions. The gate is the weak point; it is the flaw in the cuirass, the natural breach by which the enemy might enter: every system of defence is there ingeniously accumulated, and the walls are thicker at that point. These tall towers, these thick walls were guarded by bodies of soldiers always on the look-out, who found here a pleasant shade to protect them from a scorching sun, to which even the inhabitants of the city found their way when they met to discuss their affairs or to converse upon the news of the day. On each side of these long passages recesses were made, and even actual halls for the guards. Several of the dramas related in the Biblical books are developed in such places, under such vaults. The present state of one of the entrances of Khorsabad enables us to ascertain that the custom of assembling at the city gate goes back to the time of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. This gate was still surmounted by its semicircular arch decorated with an archivolt in enamelled bricks. The structure formed a projection of 82 feet from the wall; built on a rectangular plan, it was itself pierced by an opening defended by two projecting bastions. After passing through this first structure, a court was reached which gave access to the opening in the rampart proper flanked by two square towers. Through this gate a second court was reached, separated again from a third court by a new opening; lastly, the wall at the bottom of this third court had again an aperture which gave access to the town. Thus it was necessary to pass successively through four doors to penetrate into Dur-Sarrukin, and a structure, symmetrical with that on the outside, projected from the wall into the interior of the fortress. These massive structures formed by themselves a real stronghold, 22,965 feet square, with vaulted passages and galleries, the chief of which is not less than 278 ft. long. It is clear that such buildings, which would invariably serve as meeting-places, form fresh and cool retreats in countries where the heat is such that it was impossible to gather in the Forum or in the Agora, as at Rome or Athens.