Chapter II Assyrian Architecture
Assyria, because she lies nearer to the mountains than Chaldæa, and because the use of stone, without ever being exclusive, was more frequent in northern than in southern Mesopotamia, has left us important ruins which have already been partly explored, and which allow us to reconstruct the forms of her architecture, without material gaps, from the ninth to the seventh century before our era. In temples, palaces, staged towers, and fortresses, the art of building is revealed to our eyes by means of the excavations of which Nineveh and its environs have been the object. But nothing is left of private architecture, and the same must be said of sepulchral architecture, or rather this latter did not exist in Assyria, which has only yielded to our explorers a few jars filled with bones. The corpses were generally carried away into Lower Chaldæa, which continued to be for long ages a sort of Campo Santo, or vast cemetery at the service of the inhabitants of all Mesopotamia. Down to the present day, the Persians, even of the most distant provinces, make a point of having their dead buried at Nejef and Kerbela, near the mosque of Ali, the great saint of the Shiite Mussulmans. This traditional superstition is turned to profit by a company of carriers, who annually transport more than ten thousand corpses. The necropolis of Mugheir and the surrounding tells belongs therefore both to Chaldæa and to Assyria; corpses are piled up there by hundreds of thousands, but beyond the system of drainage, organised in order to catch the rain-water, it offers nothing of great interest. There were no sepulchral monuments; and as for the tombs themselves, they are generally little brick structures with nothing remarkable about them; the furniture consisting of terra-cotta vases and figurines, amulets and cylinders, is of the most wretched description.
The principal buildings of Assyria, which have been methodically and almost completely explored, are those of Khorsabad, some leagues to the north of Nineveh, and those of Kouyunjik and Nimroud. Several hillocks in which a collection of important structures would with equal certainty be found, such as the hill of Nebi Yunus, where Arab tradition fixes the tomb of the prophet Jonah, and Arvil on the site of Arbela, have not yet been tested by the explorer’s pick; others, such as the artificial mounds of Kalah Shergat, Balawat, and Karamles, have only been incompletely explored, and though epigraphic material, extremely valuable for history, and bas-reliefs of the highest artistic interest, have been extracted from them, from the architectural point of view at least their imperfect excavation teaches us nothing new.
The Babylonian buildings of the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus must have resembled the Ninevite palaces and temples in form and architectural arrangement; but up to the present time we can only speak of them by conjecture, or according to the inexact descriptions of Greek travellers, and we cannot regret too much that the enormous Babylonian tells, such as those called the Kasr or Palace, Tell Amran, Babil and Birs Nimroud have yielded hardly anything yet of their archæological treasures. We must, then, for the present, confine ourselves to the description of the ruins of Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyunjik, in order to reconstruct the principal forms of Mesopotamian architecture at the most splendid period of the Ninevite empire.