§ II Palaces
The town of Dur-Sarrukin (the Fortress of Sargon) stood three leagues north of Nineveh, on the Khaswer, one of the branches of the Tigris, where the Kurdish village of Khorsabad has been built. Discovered in 1843 by E. Botta, French Consul at Mosoul, it was almost completely excavated by this illustrious explorer and his successor, Victor Place, and it is from Khorsabad that most of the Assyrian monuments in the Louvre come. It was the custom that each of the Ninevite monarchs should have a special palace built at some distance from the great Assyrian capital, and this became the royal residence round which stood the dwellings of the court-officers, the guards, the servants, and all persons who depended upon the prince or lived at his expense. Dur-Sarrukin was built by Sargon, the father of Sennacherib, about the year 710 before our era. The palace and the town which was annexed to it formed a group of structures contained within a fortified enclosure (fig. 49) the plan of which was a square of 5905 feet.
The wall of circumvallation, the angles of which pointed to the four quarters of the heavens, as in the Chaldæan buildings, was crowned with battlements and pierced by eight gates protected by towers.
The king’s palace (fig. 50) stood almost in the middle of the north-eastern façade, and a part of its structure which projected beyond the ramparts had the appearance of an enormous bastion. The structure of this palace was supported by a platform which formed an acropolis nearly twenty-five acres in area. The mass of clay which had to be brought to raise the terrace and the walls of the palace has been estimated at 48,233,000 cubic feet. The platform overlooked the town, and was reached by staircases, destroyed at the present day, but which must have been analogous to the monumental staircase which formed the ascent to the palace of Sennacherib, and the traces of which Sir A. H. Layard recognised. As at Tello, a gentle ascent on an inclined plane was formed for the passage of vehicles. The royal apartments built upon the terrace comprised no less than two hundred and nine more or less spacious rooms, the walls of which, laid bare by Botta and Place, are still sometimes twenty-six feet high and always reach at least ten feet in the parts most demolished. It was not easy to determine the destination of these different halls. However, by comparison with the present Turkish and Persian palaces, in which an analogous arrangement has been perpetuated, with the same usages, the following parts have been distinguished at Dur-Sarrukin as in the palace of Tello: the seraglio, that is to say, the reception-rooms and the dwelling-rooms of the prince and the men attached to his person; the hareem, or apartments of the women and their children; the khan, or the residence of the slaves, the kitchens, the stables, and the offices. The seraglio, the most luxurious and most highly decorated part, included ten courts and more than sixty rooms, adorned with those bas-reliefs in stone which are now the glory of the Louvre. They were paved with square bricks fixed in bitumen. Where the ground was not to be covered with carpet, as before the door, there was a stone pavement in which the designs, skilfully carved in relief, imitated those of the carpets themselves. To the buildings of the seraglio, situated on the north-east, is attached the staged tower of which we shall speak farther on. The principal court of the seraglio had an area of 3,202 square feet, and eight doors formed a means of communication between it and the rooms of this part of the palace; most of these openings are flanked with colossal lions or bulls supporting the feet of semicircular arches. The hareem, which occupied, on the south, a surface of more than 94,726 square feet, formed a group of structures communicating with the rest of the palace by two doors only. It was, with its lofty blind walls, a sort of prison in the very bosom of the fortress. Within, there were several courts and isolated suites of rooms, in which the apartments of the women were separately arranged. The walls of the principal court must have been decorated with true Asiatic luxury, for the foot of these walls, when they were laid bare about fifty years ago, was still covered with a lining of enamelled bricks representing animals and mythological scenes. It was here that the shaft of a column was found, of wood covered with a bronze sheath, so that it is not rash to affirm that this court was furnished with a portico all round, and perhaps even with an upper story with open sides. The khan, situated towards the eastern angle of the structure, occupied an even larger space than the hareem; the treasury or bit kutalli, the cellars, granaries, and storehouse of domestic utensils, have been distinctly recognized, as well as magazines of objects of all sorts, carried off as plunder by Sargon in his expeditions, and weapons of the chase and of war: in the very stables, the presence of iron rings fixed in the wall has been ascertained, to which horses and camels were attached: lastly, the small but numerous rooms of the servants and slaves have been excavated. Ctesias brings the number of persons attached to the service of the palace of the kings of Persia up to fifteen thousand: it may easily be supposed that an equal number of hands was employed at the court of the haughty king of Nineveh.
The palace of Sargon, the best-preserved of Assyrian edifices, and that of which the excavation was directed with the greatest consistency and method, deserved to be taken as the most perfect type of the Ninevite palaces. The researches of the English explorers, Sir A. H. Layard, Sir H. Rawlinson, G. Smith, and H. Rassam, have procured, it is true, for the British Museum the incomparable galleries of Assyrian monuments known as those of Nimroud and Kouyunjik from the name of the principal tells explored; they have made known the site of the royal residences of Assur-nasir-pal, Shalmaneser, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Assur-bani-pal, and exhumed the fine sculptures which decorated their halls; but from the architectural point of view these excavations teach us nothing remarkable and original, or rather they only confirm what we know of the art of building among the Assyrians from the study of Khorsabad; the elements and principles of building show themselves to be identical throughout, and, save for secondary modifications and variable proportions, it may be said that the arrangement and adornment of Assyrian palaces were everywhere the same, and issued from an uniform type created in Chaldæa, which was never remarkably modified.