The civilization of Babylonia and Assyria

Its remains, language, history, religion, commerce, law, art, and literature

by Morris Jastrow | 1915 | 168,585 words

This work attempts to present a study of the unprecedented civilizations that flourished in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley many thousands of years ago. Spreading northward into present-day Turkey and Iran, the land known by the Greeks as Mesopotamia flourished until just before the Christian era....

[1]Outside of this feature, however, there was little in the architecture of Babylonia and Assyria to arouse one's admiration. The use of clay as the building material led in the direction of hugeness, but a hugeness without beauty. The temples and palaces were large brick masses surrounded by equally massive walls. Some attempts at relieving the monotony were made by gateways that had the appearance of towers, and by turrets on the tops of the walls.

The softness of the soil made it necessary to exercise great care in order to secure strong foundations for these immense structures, and it became customary at an early period to erect a broad platform, often carried up to a considerable height, on which the temple or palace was reared. Regarded as the dwelling of the god in whose honor it was erected, the temple became literally the god's house, and, as a consequence, the names of the temples of Babylonia and Assyria invariably contain as one of their elements the word "house."

Thus Marduk's temple at Babylon was known as E-sagila, "the lofty house," which was also the designation of Ea's sanctuary at Eridu. Nabu's temple at Borsippa was called E-zida, "the faithful house," Shamash's temple at Sippar, E-barra, "the shining house," an appropriate designation for the dwelling of the sun god; the temple of the moon god Sin at Ur was called E-khul-khul, "house of joys," and so on through the almost endless list of temples in Babylonia and Assyria.

The prominent feature of the temple as the house of the gods was an outer court immediately back of the entrance, from which one entered into a long vestibule leading into a second court with a large hall at one end, at the back of which there was a recess or a lanall chamber to receive the image of the god.

Grouped around the outer court were rooms for the priests and for the temple administration. Similarly, corridors led to rooms around the inner court and adjoining the inner hall, all set aside for the various needs of the temple service. The number of such rooms varied of course with the size of the temples, just as the temples themselves varied in size from comparatively small dimensions more in the nature of chapels to large areas with a perfect labyrinth of rooms around the outer and inner court. [2]

PLATE XXXVIII

Fig. 1 (top), Restoration of the temple of the God Ninib in Babylon
Fig. 2 (left), Plan of the temple of the Goddess Ninmakh in Babylon

The temple of Ningirsu at Lagash and known as E-ninnu, "the house of fifty," must have been an extensive structure, as described by its builder Gudea, who tells us of the many rooms it contained for the accommodation of the priests, store rooms for grain, treasure rooms, stalls for the sacrificial animals, and various offices for the administration of the temple.

It will be recalled [3] that the temples became in the course of time commercial institutions, having large holdings of land, giving out contracts for work, hiring laborers, and engaging in the loan of money and other commercial enterprises. For all these purposes, offices and store rooms had to be provided, and since the temple officials were also the judges and administrators of justice, further accommodations were needed for this phase of the temple activity.

An interesting variation of the Assyrian temples from the Babylonian models which in other respects were closely adhered to, consisted in the proportions of the outer and inner court. While in the case of the Babylonian edifices the two courts were about the same shape, the inner court in the temples of Assyria was narrow and broader than the outer one, and led into a long and narrow hall, at the back of which was the "holy of holies," where the god had his seat.

The people assembled for worship in the large outer court where the altar stood on which the sacrifices were offered, while the inner court with the holy of holies in the rear was reserved for the priests and for the rulers who alone had access to it. The impression conveyed by these sacred edifices is well described in an inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglathpileser I. who reigned about 1125 to 1100 B.C. [4]

He describes how, after laying the foundation of the restored temple of Anu and Adad in his capital city on the solid rock and enclosing the whole with burnt bricks, he built the temple of Anu and Adad of large stones. He continues: "Its interior I made brilliant like the vault of heaven, decorated its walls like the brilliancy of the rising stars and made it superb with shining brilliancy."

There were thus chiefly two features in the temple architecture of Babylonia and Assyria upon which the effect produced depended the erection of the structure on an elevated platform, and the elaborate decoration by means of glazed tiling and through direct painting of the stucco-coated interior walls. The fondness for brilliant coloring so characteristic of Oriental art at all times may thus be traced back to the civilization of the Euphrates Valley, and in this respect, at least, the temples of Babylonia and Assyria must have surpassed the decoration" of the sacred edifices of Egypt which, constructed of hard granite, lent themselves less to gaudy decoration.

The use of various kinds of stone, chiefly a soft limestone and a harder alabaster, was an innovation introduced by Assyrian builders, but the stone was limited to the outer casings and to the sculptured figures that were placed at the entrances to temples and palaces and to the sculptured bas-reliefs with which the Assyrian kings from a certain period on were wont to cover the interior walls of the great palace halls the throne rooms and reception halls.

The great mass of the Assyrian temples continued to be built of kiln-dried and sun-dried bricks down to the latest period, in slavish imitation of Babylonian prototypes. The main effect, therefore, of these structures was at all times that of huge square masses, usually with the corners orientated to the four directions, and merely interrupted by massive gateways and smaller entrances and the turreted tops of the enclosing walls to relieve the monotony.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Seven was not the customary number of the stages. Indeed there was no fixed number, and four stages are more common than seven. The ambition of the royal builders was solely directed to raising the towers to as great a height as possible in imitation, as has been suggested, of a mountain peak. It does not appear that any symbol- ism was associated with the number seven, even when this number became a more common limit to the series of stages heaped on one another.

[2]:

See Koldewey, Die Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa (Leipzig, 1911).

[3]:

Above, p. 274 and 316 seq.

[4]:

Rawlinson I. PI. 15, 98-101. Quoted also by Handcock, Mesopotamian Archeology (New York, 1912), p. 142.

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