The palace of Ukhaiḍir is not an isolated phenomenon. It belongs to a
group of buildings which exhibit in varying proportions the
characteristic features of the fortress and of the pleasure-house of
princes. These buildings are scattered over the western frontiers of the
Syrian desert; Ukhaiḍir is as yet the sole example of the type which has
been discovered upon the eastern side. They are a logical outcome of the
period of cultural transition during which they arose, the difficult and
distasteful passage from nomadic to settled life; they attest the
abiding call of the open wilderness, to which the poets and chroniclers
of the first century after the Hidjrah are faithful witnesses. To the
Arab the desert is more than a habitation; it is the guardian of
traditions older and more deeply rooted than those of Islâm; of
traditions which are sacred to his race; of his purest speech, and of
his finest chivalry. It is for him the natural theatre of his actions,
and there is no other stage on which he can play out his part. To this
day I have heard the Beduin speak of themselves as the Ahl al-Ba’îr, the
People of the Camel, just as they spoke of themselves in the early
centuries as Ahl al-Ḍar’, People of the Udder.[49] The authority of the
Prophet was powerless to stay the current of his race. ‘Periodically the
Arabs succumbed to the allurement of the camel, to the need to drink of
its milk. The Prophet himself was not exempt, since he prayed God to
preserve him from it. For his nation, said he, he dreaded the diet of
milk. When his companions expressed their astonishment at his fears, he
replied: “The passion for milk will lead you to abandon the centres of
reunion and to return to nomad existence.”‘[50] His immediate successors
followed the example set by him, but the national inclination was not to
be restrained, and the Umayyad khalifs returned to the habits of their
forefathers. Their capital was Damascus, but their residence was the
Syrian desert. They escaped to the bâdiyah, the spring pasturage in the
rolling steppes, where the tents of the Ṣukhûr still cover the plain
when the winter rains are past; they transported their courts to the
ḥîrah, the palace camp.
The word ‘ḥair’ denotes a camp, a castle, or a villa.[51] The original
signification does not seem to have implied solid constructions, but
rather the headquarters of a desert princeling and his retainers. Such
an assemblage must necessarily have been mobile. The exigencies of
pasturage and the uncertainties inherent in tribal predominance, where
the limits of authority cannot be expressed in terms of geographic
definition, were alike unfavourable to stable residence. Joshua the
Stylite[52] talks of the ḥertâ of Nu’mân ibn Mundhir as having withdrawn
into the inner desert before the attack of the Tha’labites—it must
therefore have been a movable camp; on the western borders there is no
certain evidence that the Ghassânid princes possessed either fenced
cities or garrisoned fortresses.[53] But before the dawn of the
Mohammadan era the ḥîrah had begun to change its character, and the
nomad encampment to develop into the standing camp and even into the
city. The Ghassânids must have had a fixed establishment in the
Djaulân,[54] and some of the existing ruins on the eastern frontiers of
the Ḥaurân may date from their time. At Khirbet al-Baiḍâ, for example, I
could find no certain trace of Roman handiwork. The plan might date from
the age of Diocletian, but the decorations betray a different
origin.[55] Yet I cannot place them as late as the Umayyad period.
Djebel Sais I have not seen.[56] The plan of the bath recalls the
arrangement of the chambers at Qṣair ‘Amrah, and it may therefore be
Mohammadan. At Qaṣr al-Azraq, Dussaud found a dedication to the emperors
Diocletian and Maximian, but the fortress would seem to have been
rebuilt in the thirteenth century A.D.[57]
Similarly upon the eastern side of the desert, the Lakhmid camp had
grown into an important town, which absorbed the generic title and was
known as al-Ḥîrah, the standing camp par excellence, the capital of
Persian Arabia. But no sooner did the Lakhmid princes find themselves
enclosed within the walls of a city than they threw out fresh ḥîrahs
into the desert: palaces, the magnificence of which haunted the
imagination of Beduin poets of the Days of Ignorance and gave birth to
legendary tales and to moral aphorisms which were recorded with pious,
if uncritical, exactitude by the historians of Islâm. We know the site
of the most famous of these pleasaunces, Khawarnaq.[58] Ibn Baṭûṭah, in
the fourteenth century A.D., saw the remains of its immense domes on the
edge of a canal which was fed by the Hindiyyeh branch of the Euphrates.
In his day it was still inhabited. The existing ruin mounds, standing
upon the brink of the Sea of Nedjef, are covered with the sherds of
mediaeval pottery. The canal has now silted up and the Sea of Nedjef is
dry. I was told at Nedjef that thirty or forty years ago the lake was
full of water, and that the climate of the town, never very much to
boast of, had been considerably affected for the worse by the change.
Below the town, the bed of the lake is occupied by palm-gardens and
cornfields, watered by a canal recently constructed. What was its
condition in Sasanian times I do not know. The lake was dry in the
Middle Ages,[59] but ‘Adi ibn Zaid speaks of the Nu’mânid lord of
Khawarnaq as having looked from his palace walls and rejoiced at the
sight of the sea.[60] It is difficult to imagine that any one could have
rejoiced in the Baḥr Nedjef if it had worn its present aspect. The
extent of the mounds of Khawarnaq is not large, though my impression is
that part of the steep earth cliff overhanging the Baḥr Nedjef has
fallen away and carried the castle walls with it. The ancient canal from
the Hindiyyeh lies about a quarter of a mile to the north of the mounds.
Legend has been busy in accounting for the origin of the castle. It is
said to have been built by Nu’mân ibn Imra’ al-Qais, by order of the
Sasanian king Yazdegerd I, who desired that his son, Bahrâm V Gûr,
should be brought up in the salubrious air of the desert above Ḥîrah.
This would place its foundation in the early part of the fifth century
A.D.[61] The architect was a certain Sinimmâr, a Byzantine (Rûmi)
according to some authorities,[62] nor need this assertion excite
surprise. A century later Justinian lent workmen to Khusrau I, when the
latter was engaged in building the new Antioch near Ctesiphon. Other
Lakhmid ḥîrahs are mentioned besides Khawarnaq, but they are to us
nothing but a name. Al-Sadîr stood in the desert ‘that lies between
al-Ḥîrah and Syria’,[63] presumably not far from Khawarnaq, since the
two castles are frequently mentioned together. We hear also of
al-Ṣinnîn, where ‘Adi ibn Zaid was imprisoned.[64] Of greater importance
was al-Anbâr on the Euphrates, which was rebuilt by Shapûr II in the
early part of the fourth century.[65] None of the Lakhmid ḥîrahs in the
desert, except Khawarnaq, have been identified. In 1911 I rode out
across the Baḥr Nedjef from Khan Muṣallâ to see a ruin called al-Ruḥbân,
which was reputed to be ancient, but found nothing except a mud-built
wall erected by the Bani Ḥasan. A few palm-trees had been planted near
it. My guide, a sheikh of the tribe, was much distressed when I denied
to Ruḥbân the antiquity which had been claimed for it. ‘Mistress,’ he
expostulated, ‘before my beard was grown, I saw it here.’ His age I
should judge to have been no greater than my own, and Ruḥbân may have
had the advantage of us by a decade. After this disappointment I
declined to visit other quṣûr of the Bani Ḥasan (qaṣr = fort, is the
name which is applied to any walled village or palm-garden) though he
mentioned a considerable number. Subsequently a mullah of the Nedjef
mosque told me that there were ancient remains at Ḥiyyadhiyyeh, which
lies somewhere between the Baḥr Nedjef and Ukhaiḍir, to the south of the
line across the desert which I had followed. Ḥiyyadhiyyeh is mentioned
by Niebuhr in his itinerary from Baṣrah to Aleppo by the desert
road—Meshed ‘Ali, el Tukteqâne or el Heiadîe, el Hossian, el Chader
(Ukhaiḍir) Ras el ‘Ain.[66] I doubt whether there is much to be found on
the surface at Ḥiyyadhiyyeh, for the Bani Ḥasan have planted palm-groves
there, and in so doing, they have probably destroyed most of what was
old, but the mullah asserted that a Lakhmid castle had stood at that
spot and another at Ruḥbeh, which he said was identical with
Qâdisiyyeh.[67] I give his opinion for what it is worth, which is very
little. There are, however, no doubt old ruins at Ruḥbeh, whether
Lakhmid or of a later time, if it occupies the site of Qâdisiyyeh—a
very possible hypothesis. It was a large village in A.D. 635, when the
Mohammadan invaders defeated the Persians close to its walls. Muqaddasi
knew it as a walled town on the pilgrimage road. Mustaufi (fourteenth
century) describes it as mostly in ruins, while Ibn Baṭûṭah speaks of it
as a large village.[68] The Sâl Nâmeh of the Vilâyet of Baghdâd mentions
a ruined qaṣr at Ruḥbeh.[69] The sheikh of the Bani Ḥasan gave me the
names of ‘Izziyyeh,[70] and ‘Atiyyah as quṣûr of his tribe, but he did
not think that there were ruins at either place.
To our scanty information concerning the pre-Mohammadan ḥîrahs one other
item is to be added. Mas’ûdi gives an account in the following terms of
a palace built at Sâmarrâ by the khalif Mutawakkil (A.D. 847-861) in
imitation of a Lakhmid ḥî ah: ‘Mutawakkil in his days raised a building
such as no man knew, it is that which is called the ḥîri and the two
wings (literally sleeves) and the porticoes (arûqah). And that was
because a companion of his vigils related to him upon a certain night
that one of the kings of Ḥîrah, a Nu’mânid of the Bani Naṣr, erected an
edifice in his capital, which was al-Ḥîrah, after the model of an army
in battle. (The word I have translated by army in battle is ḥarb =
war or campaign; Dr. Herzfeld suggests that it must be taken here to
mean military camp—a somewhat hypothetical emendation)[71]. For such
was his infatuation for war and his love of it; so that the memory of it
might never vanish from him under any condition. In this edifice the
portico was the audience chamber of the king, and this was the centre
(literally the breast); and the two wings (sleeves) lay to right and
left. In the two dwellings which formed the wings lodged those who stood
nearest to him among his courtiers. In the right wing was the wardrobe,
and in the left wing was kept such wine as was needed. The open court of
the portico was common to the centre and to the two wings. The doors,
three in number, led to the portico. To this day this building (i.e.
Mutawakkil’s copy) is called the ḥîri and the two wings in allusion to
al-Ḥîrah. And the people followed Mutawakkil, imitating his creation,
which is famous to the present time.’[72] The word riwâq, which I have
translated ‘portico’, does not necessarily imply the existence of
columns, though it is used for the porticoes which surround the court of
a mosque. Its primary signification is a roof in front of a tent,
supported by a single pole in the middle.[73] I shall have occasion to
return later to this important passage (see below, p. 86).
But if we have little knowledge of the Lakhmid ḥîrahs which were the
precursors of Ukhaiḍir on the eastern frontiers of the desert, we have
another and a richer source of information in the Sasanian palaces. The
Lakhmid princes stood in close relations with the Sasanian empire. Among
the officials of the Persian court there was an Arab secretary whose
special duty it was to conduct the correspondence with ‘the land of the
Arabs’. Moreover, it is related that the Arab phylarch paid a yearly
visit to the court of the Chosroës.[74] To a Lakhmid the education of a
Persian prince was entrusted, and Lakhmid armies placed Bahrâm V upon a
contested throne. The Christians of Ḥîrah belonged to the Nestorian
church, the church of Assyria; we hear of one, the poet ‘Adi ibn Zaid,
who was Arab secretary and enjoyed great influence with Khusrau Parwêz.
Half allies, half vassals, the Lakhmid phylarchs fought side by side
with the Persians against Rome;[75] they were sufficiently independent
to receive an embassy from the Byzantine emperor, and sufficiently
important to warrant an attempt on his part to buy them over from the
Sasanians. Finally, at the beginning of the seventh century, Khusrau
Parwêz set the Lakhmid dynasty aside and established in place of Nu’mân
III an Arab of the Ṭayy, who lived and held his court at ‘Ain al-Tamr
near Ukhaiḍir. Possibly the huge walls of Qaṣr Sham’ûn, on the outskirts
of the oasis,[76] may date from the time when ‘Ain al-Tamr was the
residence of the phylarch. But he was no longer an independent ruler; a
Persian adviser was appointed to assist him, and a few years later the
state was converted into a province of the Sasanian empire under a
Persian regent. Independent or subject, the civilization of Ḥîrah must
have been modelled upon that of Ctesiphon; Persian influence must have
been predominant in its arts and its architecture, and the Lakhmid
ḥîrahs must have reflected the glories of Sasanian palaces. It is to
these palaces that we should look first for an explanation of the
architectural scheme of Ukhaiḍir. One reservation must, however, be
made. It is true that Ukhaiḍir cannot be regarded as primarily a
fortress. The absence of any sufficient provision of water would have
been a fatal weakness in time of siege. No cistern exists within the
palace; no ancient well has been found, and if the conditions were the
same of old as they are now (which is, however, by no means a safe
assumption), any water within the palace would have been too brackish to
drink, as is the case in the modern well in the palace yard. Moreover,
the outer ring of walls, which encloses the northern annex, was
obviously too weak for defence; it is more like the garden wall of a
pleasure-ground. Nevertheless, considerable care has been lavished upon
the defences of the main building. They were, and they are to this day,
adequate for the spasmodic warfare of the Arab tribes. In the very act
of construction the architect seems to have bethought him that such
protection was necessary and to have added a strong girdle to his palace
plan. On the other hand, the Sasanian palaces, so far as they are known
to us, are either unfortified, or they stand within a fortified park,
the walls and towers of which are not in direct structural relation with
the residential buildings. At the same time Sasanian military works,
where they have been examined, do not differ materially from those of
Ukhaiḍir; the fortress of Qala’-i-Khusrau at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn is an
excellent case in point (Plate 73, Fig. 1). It is a rectangular
enclosure, about the size of Ukhaiḍir (roughly 180 metres square),
surrounded by a wall which is strengthened by rounded towers. The towers
are somewhat differently disposed from those of Ukhaiḍir; they are
larger and they are set twice as far apart, but the scheme is the same
in both places. The interior buildings are much ruined. A row of
chambers, or more probably, from the width of the ruin heaps, a row of
small courts with chambers grouped round them, adjoined the inner side
of the walls, leaving a central court which was partly filled by a large
building, rectangular in plan. The town wall of Dastadjird was also
furnished with rounded towers.[77]
Almost without exception the plan of the Sasanian palaces is a
development of the lîwân type, the origin of which is to be sought in
the southern Hittite sphere, northern Syria and the mountain lands north
of the Mesopotamian plain. The architecture of this region is known to
us best through the excavations at Zindjirli, where the evolution of the
southern Hittite palace can be traced over a period of close upon a
thousand years.[78] It is an evolution which is dominated
Fig. 5. Zindjirli. (From Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli,
by kind permission of the D. Orient-Gesellschaft.)
from the first to last by the monumental gateway. At Zindjirli the type
appears in its earliest and simplest form in the gateways of the inner
city wall, which Professor Koldewey places approximately in the
thirteenth century before our era.[79] A doorway set back between a pair
of solid towers leads into a narrow
Fig. 6. Pasargadae. (From Iranische Felsreliefs, by
kind permission of the authors.)
court, placed latitudinally, with a second doorway opposite to the first
(Fig. 5, D). Three hundred years later this structure is adapted, in the
earliest khilâni palace, to residential purposes (Fig. 5, G).[80] The
solid towers remain, but the space between them has been converted into
a covered portico, or lîwân, and the inner latitudinal court has become
a latitudinal hall with a small chamber at either end. The further
development is characterized by the multiplication of chambers and the
disappearance of features proper to the fortress. In the khilâni palace
erected after Asarhaddon’s destruction of the city in the first half of
the seventh century (it appears in Fig. 5 to the north-west of G), the
arrangement of the subsidiary chambers is conceived on freer lines, the
walls are thinner, the flanking towers of the lîwân have disappeared,
and in their stead are set tower chambers; in short the fortress towers
have given place to a purely decorative motive, the towered façade,
which was destined to have a long and honourable history in Christian
architecture.[81] That the Hittite khilâni was imitated by the Assyrians
during the eighth and the seventh centuries we know both from
inscriptions and from excavations.[82] To it the Assyrian builders owed
the introduction of the column, which was foreign to their architecture.
At Pasargadae the khilâni reappears in a form which bears testimony to
its Hittite parentage.[83] The façade towers, the columned lîwân, the
orthostatic construction, and more significant still, the latitudinal
disposition of the chambers, are all to be found in the Pasargadae
palaces, but the greater depth which was given to the principal room
necessitated the introduction of a double line of columns to support the
roof (Fig. 6). At Persepolis and at Susa the same scheme is carried out
in colossal dimensions. It is found alike in the gigantic apadanas and
in the palaces, in the one case adapted to the ceremonial magnificence
of the Persian king of kings, in the other to the requirements of the
dwelling-house. In the apadana, the lîwân was deepened and a second row
of columns was added to the first; the hall of audience was magnified
into a huge quadrangular chamber, the roof of which was supported by a
forest of columns; solid towers of unburnt brick flanked the lîwân, and
subsidiary lîwâns occupied the space behind them on either side of the
audience hall (Fig. 7). In the palaces the towers were hollowed out into
rooms correspondingly in depth with the lîwân, and the audience hall was
flanked by side chambers. Where space permitted, as in the palace of
Darius at Persepolis, additional rooms were disposed round a courtyard
at the back of the edifice. So constituted, the Achaemenid palace
reproduced the traits of the later khilânis at Zindjirli in a form
adapted to new requirements (Fig. 8).
Fig. 7. Persepolis, Apadana of Xerxes. (From Iranische
Felsreliefs, by kind permission of the authors.)
Before the khilâni palace was taken up again by Persian hands, an
immense revolution had swept over western Asia. Alexander’s invasion is
a turning-point
Fig. 8. Persepolis, Palace of Darius.
(From L’Art antique de la Perse, by kind permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
in history. The Mesopotamian arts emerged from the period of Greek rule
profoundly modified by direct intercourse with the West; for the
Seleucid kingdom, with one capital on the Tigris and another on the
Orontes, had bridged the gulf between Babylonia and the Mediterranean
coast-lands. Greek culture, Greek artistic conceptions were carried
across Asia by the invaders; but the further they penetrated, the less
they overmastered local tradition. Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were
never Hellenized in the sense in which Syria was Hellenized. The ancient
East, with 3,000 years and more of a highly elaborated civilization
behind her, assimilated what was brought to her, but she used it after
her own fashion. She turned the Greek kings into oriental despots, and
translated Greek ideas into her own forms of expression. The
architectural remains of this period are as yet scanty. Seleucia and
Antioch are unexplored, and except for the Greek theatre at Babylon, the
excavation of Mesopotamian sites has yielded little but fragments.[84]
But if the Seleucid era is comparatively unknown, the new elements which
the Greek conquest had introduced into oriental architecture stand out
with an amazing vividness in Parthian buildings. Loftus, whose
excavations at Warka were the first to reveal a great Parthian
settlement on a Babylonian mound, was not slow to appreciate the
significance of his discoveries.[85] Together with capitals which bore
an obvious relationship to the Ionic, and walls enriched with Ionic
half-fluted engaged columns, he found plaster ornaments and fragments of
wall-surface decoration covered with continuous geometric patterns in
which he recognized an art that was essentially oriental. The Chaldaean
monuments at Warka were covered with mosaics set in geometric designs
which are the prototypes of the Parthian coloured reliefs.[86]
Hellenistic houses of the Parthian period have been unearthed in the
Amrân mound at Babylon. The small Parthian palace at Niffer, with its
columned hall of audience, opening through an anteroom, which is in the
nature of a closed lîwân, into a square peristyle, resembles a Greek
dwelling-house seen through a Babylonian medium[87] (Fig. 9). At Assur,
together with a temple (if temple it were) which is almost
peripteral,[88] and a stoa,[89] we have a palace on a lîwân plan, with
ionicizing capitals and a façade of stucco mock-architecture
Fig. 9. Parthian palace at Niffer. (By kind permission of
Messrs. Holman.)
which indicates the road that led from the Hellenistic façade in two
orders[90] to the stucco façades of Ctesiphon and Ukhaiḍir.[91] At Hatra
a building which looks like the Parthian conception of a temple in antis
stands in the court of a monumental lîwân palace,[92] but so far as can
be judged without excavation the Hellenistic house is conspicuous by its
absence. Not only the royal palace (Fig. 10) but also such of the
smaller palaces as are known to us through the admirable publication of
the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, show a strongly characterized lîwân
plan. To the Parthian interpretation of the venerable khilâni scheme the
Moslem East has remained unswervingly true. The lîwân, as it is to be
seen at Hatra, dominated the fancy of the Sasanian and of the early
Mohammadan architects, and it continues to be an indispensable part of
the modern house of Damascus or Baghdâd—except indeed the post-modern,
which are wretched imitations of the worst European styles, but these
are found more often in ultra-civilized Syria than in Mesopotamia. The
huge Parthian lîwân was possibly a result of the introduction of the
vault. The great hall, in which, no matter what its size, the interior
space was unbroken by pier or column, was a setting for princely state
which could not be enhanced by any
Fig. 10. Hatra palace. (From Hatra, by kind permission
of the D. Orient-Gesellschaft.)
architectural device. Portico and audience chamber were blended
together, and the columns of the one served to enrich the walls which
flanked the monumental archway of the other.
The vault itself was not a new feature. It was well known to Babylonian
and to Assyrian builders, by whom it was used to cover spaces of narrow
span.[93] Vaulted drains and tombs are of frequent occurrence, and Place
found a barrel vault with a span of 4 metres in the gateways of Sargon’s
palace at Khorsâbâd.[94] But though the principles of vault construction
were familiar, the vault does not seem to have been developed to any
notable extent before the second Babylonian empire at the earliest.
Félix Thomas claims to have found the remains of monumental vaults in
Sargon’s palace, but the proofs which he adduces are not convincing.
There is no direct evidence for the domes which Place reconstructs over
the rectangular chambers adjoining the temples, the area of the palace
which was known in his days as the Harâm.[95] Layard found no trace of
monumental vaults in his excavations of Assyrian palaces,[96] nor have
any been discovered by the German excavators at Assur. Professor
Koldewey is of opinion that the great hall at Babylon was vaulted,
since, in the absence of all trace of columns, no other way of covering
it is conceivable; and though direct evidence is not forthcoming, there
is a strong likelihood that the proportions of the vault may have been
greatly increased, and its structural value much more fully realized
towards the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century
before Christ.[97] There are no data for its employment in Mesopotamia
during the Hellenistic period, but it may safely be assumed that the
absence of vaulted buildings in the eastern parts of the Seleucid
kingdom is fortuitous. From the fourth century B.C. onwards western Asia
shows a continuous series of cut stone vaults of small span,[98] many of
which exhibit traits which point to their derivation from the sun-dried
brick vaults of Assyria or from the cut stone vaults of the Saitic
period in Egypt, themselves a derivation from sun-dried brick
construction. In the second half of the third century, vaults with
similar characteristics appear under Hellenistic influence in central
Italy, where, after the middle of the second century, they underwent a
development to which the Hellenistic East can offer no parallel.[99] At
the end of the second century, while Latin builders threw their stone
vaults securely over a span of 14·50 metres, as in the Ponte di Cecco in
the Via Salaria, and even of 18·50 metres, as in the Pons Mulvius,[100]
the Greeks of Asia Minor did not venture upon a span wider than 7·10
metres,[101] and confined themselves as a rule to vaults under 4 metres
in span. It was now the part of the East to learn from Imperial Rome.
Western Asia took back its own creation from the hands of Roman builders
in the vast proportions which the proficiency of the latter had given to
it, and over the whole of the Roman Empire the monumental vault sprang
into being. The earliest extant examples on Mesopotamian soil are the
great vaults of the palace at Hatra.[102] Throughout the city, so far as
our knowledge goes, the vault is systematically used, and for the first
time it is constructed of dressed stone, not of brick. For it must be
borne in mind that the expansion in Asia of the Roman Imperial stone and
mortar vaulted architecture encountered a similar expansion of brick
vaulted architecture in which both material and structure point to an
ancient oriental tradition and an independent Asiatic origin.[103] If
Hatra is the oldest example of the systematic use of the vault in a
monumental building, the very presence there of a method so fully
developed postulates a long evolution. That this evolution was oriental
is suggested by the fact that the forms which the vault assumes at Hatra
can be traced back, almost without exception, to Asiatic brickwork,
while the systematic employment of the vault is foreshadowed in hollow
substructures which date from the Hellenistic era, and even from earlier
times.[104] In Babylon such substructures, several stories high, roofed
with stone slabs, would seem to have been devised before Alexander’s
conquest, while Strabo’s description, which probably applies to a
Hellenistic reconstruction, mentions terraces in which the vaults rested
on cube-shaped piers, vaults and piers being built of burnt brick with a
mortar of asphalt. Moreover, Strabo notes that in Seleucia, the capital
of the Hellenistic kingdom on the Tigris, all the houses were vaulted on
account of the want of timber.[105] That these vaults were of brick goes
without saying; stone was even more difficult to obtain at Seleucia
than wood. In this connexion the possibility that Nebuchadnezzar’s great
hall at Babylon may have been covered with a vault should not be
overlooked.
The vaults of Hatra fall into five groups.
1. A primitive vault, composed of oversailing horizontal courses of
stone is found in the small chambers of tombs (Hatra, ii, Figs. 93,
111, 155). Sometimes the walls incline smoothly inwards from base to
summit until the space between them is narrowed sufficiently to admit of
the imposition of a covering slab (Hatra, ii, Figs. 99, 118, 120, 155.
In Fig. 155 the slope begins in the fourth course above the base). The
vault built of oversailing horizontal courses was an obvious expedient
for the roofing of narrow spaces, and it is, as might have been
expected, widely distributed.[106] There is one instance at Hatra of a
dome constructed in the same manner. It covers a rectangular chamber,
1·50 × 1·70 metres, and it is the solitary known example of an attempt
on the part of Parthian builders to solve the problem of a circular
vault over a rectangular substructure (Hatra, ii, Fig. 93).
2. The true vault oversailing the wall occurs in numerous tomb chambers
(Hatra, ii, Figs. 100, 105, 125, 130, 144, 145, 149, 152, 163), as
well as in most of the smaller rooms of the inner palace (Hatra, ii,
Figs. 225, 226, 237, and Plate 8) (Plate 74, Fig. 2). It is a form which
originated in brick building. It is found in Assyrian brick tombs,[107]
but never, so far as my knowledge goes, in any dressed stone vaults save
in those of Hatra. It appears at Ctesiphon in the side vaults,[108] and
in the rough stonework of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn (Plate 52, Fig. 2, and Plate 68,
Fig. 1). It is constant at Ukhaiḍir and in early Mohammadan
architecture,[109] and it is used invariably in the brick vaulted
constructions of Mesopotamia at the present day. It is perhaps the
triumphant survival of the old brick vault of horizontal oversailing
courses, represented by Mughair, and it bears, at Hatra and elsewhere,
another indubitable mark of its brick origin in the horizontal or almost
horizontal joints of its lower courses.[110]
3. The vault springing flush with the walls is used in tombs (Hatra,
ii, Figs. 103, 118, 128, 139, 159), in the southern and in the northern
lîwâns of the main palace and in the two lîwâns which were added at the
northern end (Hatra, ii, Plate 8), in the western annex, the so-called
temple (Hatra, ii, Plate 9), and in building B (Hatra, ii, Fig.
183). The moulded cornice, which usually divides this vault from the
walls below, is absent in most of the tombs. The high stilt formed by
the horizontal lower courses, which is especially remarkable in the
larger of these vaults, differentiates them from western Hellenistic
vaulting and connects them more closely with brick forms. In one of the
smaller palaces there is a striking example of the survival of brick
building methods (Hatra, ii, Fig. 74). The stone vault is composed,
almost to its whole height, of horizontal courses, and only the very top
of the arch is filled in with radiating voussoirs. Nor is the elliptical
vault, which is the form naturally assumed by oriental uncentered
brickwork[111] wanting at Hatra (Hatra, ii, Figs. 108 and 162, Fig.
162 being a primitive example, where the vault is carried down to the
floor of the chamber).
4. One room on the upper floor of the palace shows a fuller
comprehension of the thrust and buttressing of the vault (room No. 12,
Hatra, ii, Plate 10 and Fig. 226). The space to be covered is
diminished by placing two arched niches on either side, a system which
points the way to the breaking up of the wall into buttressing piers.
This principle was carried out yet further by Sasanian builders. In the
palace of Sarvistân the lower portion of the piers was detached from the
body of the wall and further lightened by being divided into two small
columns,[112] while angle piers terminating in a single detached column
bore the dome of a chamber situated at the back of the palace (Plate 74,
Fig. 1). The advance in structural knowledge thus gained was carried
little further in these regions; indeed it is curious to observe that
Ukhaiḍir exhibits a movement in the opposite direction. Although in
rooms 33 and 40 the vaults are set upon columns which stand absolutely
free, the vault of the great hall rests upon arched niches whereof the
piers are connected with the wall, and the principle of the detached
column is recalled only by the engaged columns which form part of the
pier. The arcade on free standing columns with a vaulted corridor behind
it is of frequent occurrence, but the fact that in all the palace only
one, and that one the shortest, of these arcades remains standing (No.
20) shows that the skill of the builders was at fault. Again, in the
church of Mâr Ṭahmâsgerd at Kerkûk the engaged columns are present, as
in the great hall of Ukhaiḍir, but in the same manner they are
structurally one with the piers behind them[113] (Plate 75, Fig. 1); and
in the churches of northern Mesopotamia, where deep niches under the
vault are a constant feature, the engaged pier of Hatra returns in all
its primitive simplicity.[114] Whether the data afforded by extant
monuments in Mesopotamia and Persia are conclusive would be hard to
determine. The setting of arch, vault, and dome on free standing
supports would seem to have been a conception deeply rooted in
Hellenistic art, but for actual examples we can adduce only the evidence
of relief architecture or the disposition of rock-cut tombs and
temples. The blind order under the vault of the men’s caldarium near the
forum at Pompeii,[115] the rock-cut dome on engaged columns of the
Hellenistic tomb of Akeldama at Jerusalem[116] exhibit a motive to which
the architecture of a later age was to give fully developed plastic
execution. Yet more explicit are the indications afforded by the
rock-cut monuments of Egypt and of India. At Memphis one of the graves
of the Persian period shows a vaulted nave resting on piers,[117] and
the rock-cut temples of Hellenistic India, with their long vaulted naves
resting on columns,[118] point to similar achievements in the Seleucid
architecture of Mesopotamia from which they are derived. The existence
of an underlying desire to solve statical problems which were of the
highest importance to the spatial interior is attested by the sporadic
survival of such buildings as the Praetorium at Musmiyyeh and a room in
the Golden House of Nero,[119] where the four-sided and the round dome
were placed respectively on piers and on columns; but the final mastery
was reserved for early Christian builders of the Hellenistic
coast-lands, or developed in the same age in Rome out of methods which
were specifically Roman, such as the intersecting barrel vault and
construction in concrete. In Rome also the original impulse may have
come from the East.[120]
5. In three of the upper rooms in the palace (Nos. 13, 15, and 16,
Hatra, ii, Figs. 227 and 228, and Plate 10) the roof is formed by
means of transverse arches (respectively five, three, and one in number)
carrying stone slabs which cover the space between them. This type of
roof was universally employed in Syria from Nabataean times until the
Mohammadan invasion.[121] It was a simple and a satisfactory method of
roofing in stone in a country where centering beams, sufficiently
massive to sustain a stone vault, were difficult to obtain. I know no
other Mesopotamian example of it in stone, but it was copied in Sasanian
brickwork, where the stone slab was replaced by a brick vault running at
right angles to the main axis.[122] In this form it finds a place at
Ukhaiḍir in room 32, and it continued to be used by Mohammadan builders
in the Middle Ages, the most renowned example being that of Khân Orthma,
at Baghdâd.[123]
The absence of the dome at Hatra is significant. The small square
chambers of the palace were well suited to dome construction, yet
nothing but the barrel vault is present. Moreover, it is the barrel
vault in its simplest expression; not even an intersection is
attempted. In the vaulted passage surrounding the central chamber of the
western annex, the ‘temple’, one end of the vault terminates on each of
the four sides against a transverse arch, whereby the insuperable
difficulty of intersection was avoided[124] (Plate 75, Fig. 2).
Hellenistic builders had attacked the problem as early as the second
century B.C. in Asia Minor,[125] and yet more boldly in Rome.[126] I
know no single example of the intersection of barrel vaults in Sasanian
buildings; even at Ukhaiḍir the system is sparingly used, and never
without careful abutment. Where two barrel vaults meet at right angles,
they are either joined together diagonally, without intersection, as in
the chemin de ronde, or they terminate against transverse arches, and
not infrequently in the rectangular space thus formed, a semi-dome takes
the place of the intersecting vault, as in the mosque and in the upper
gallery No. 134. The rock-cut temples of India exhibit a similar
termination of the barrel vault in a semi-dome.[127] The dome, though it
is at Ukhaiḍir of frequent occurrence, the chambers of the chemin de
ronde in all the round towers being domed as well as the two chambers
north and south of the great hall, Nos. 4 and 27, is never placed over a
span wider than 3·10 metres. The square rooms, Nos. 30 and 141, behind
the two lîwâns 29 and 140, where, on the analogy of the Sasanian palaces
(see below, pp. 74, 76 and 78) a dome might be expected, are covered in
one case by a barrel vault, and in the other case by a groined vault.
There was no question here of a dome on free standing columns; where the
opportunity occurred, in rooms 33 and 40, it was set aside in favour of
parallel barrel vaults. The domed chambers in the towers have a circular
ground-plan, and when the problem presented by the rectangular
substructure arose, it was met in a fashion which is applicable only to
very small edifices. The dome in No. 4, and all the calottes over
rectangular niches, are set over the angles upon horizontal brackets of
masonry. On the octagon, or half-octagon, thus formed, a circle or
segment of a circle of small diameter could be placed without any
difficulty. It was an expedient which had been adopted by early dome
builders both in Syria and Asia Minor,[128] but it was inadequate when
the space to be covered assumed larger dimensions and, before the date
of Ukhaiḍir, Byzantine and Sasanian architects had elaborated solutions
of the problem. In the West the great dome of Santa Sofia had already
been placed securely upon stone pendentives; in Persia the use of the
arched angle niche, or squinch, had enabled Sasanian builders to throw
their domes over a span of 16 metres. The three domes of Firûzâbâd, the
earliest of the Sasanian palaces, have a diameter of 13·30 metres; the
larger of the two domes at Sarvistân is about 12 metres across, the
dome in the smaller palace at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn covered a chamber 16·15
metres square.[129] If the audience chamber in the larger palace at
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn was domed, as I suspect, it covered an area about 16
metres square. Under this dome, at each angle, at a distance of 2·90
metres from the walls stands a corner pier 1·40 metres square,
terminating on the two inner sides in an engaged column 1 metre in
length. The distance between the piers is thus about 16 metres, that is
to say that the dome would have been no larger in diameter than that
which covered the principal chamber in the neighbouring palace. The
walls there are 3·90 metres thick, whereas the side walls of the chamber
in the palace of Khusrau are never more than 2 metres thick, but in the
one case the wall was the only support, whereas in the other the thrust
would have been taken first by the angle supports and by them
transferred to the outer wall. Moreover, the walls themselves were
buttressed by vaulted rooms. The piers are buried about 1 metre in the
ruins with which the hall is filled (the ruin heaps lie deepest along
the walls and reach almost to the height of a doorway arch which remains
in place on the south side); the best preserved of the four piers
projects less than 1 metre out of the present surface; that is to say
that its whole height is at present under 2 metres. It is conceivable
that the piers may at no time have been carried very much higher. Like
the columns under the small dome at Sarvistân, they may have been bound
into the wall at that level by arches carrying a barrel vault, which
would in this instance have had a span of 5·20 metres, and the dome
placed upon the square substructure thus formed would reproduce the
Sarvistân dome in magnified proportions.[130] It is clear that Ukhaiḍir
shows a retrogression in the art of dome building, both in point of span
and in point of distribution of thrusts, nor is the fact surprising. The
desert ḥîrah of an early Mohammadan prince need not be expected to rival
in architectural achievement the summer palace of the Sasanian king of
kings, situated upon one of the high roads of his empire.
Firûzâbâd affords the earliest extant example of the dome in Persia. In
Babylonia and Assyria no dome is standing which can be dated earlier
than Ukhaiḍir. Possibly the Lakhmid ḥîrahs would have provided us with
other instances, but the tentative nature of dome building at Ukhaiḍir
throws doubt upon the proficiency of Lakhmid construction in this
respect.[131] In the Babylonian cultural sphere the dome does not seem
to have played an important part in monumental building until a late
period, and in my opinion too much significance has been attached to the
celebrated relief exhibiting domed buildings which Layard found at
Quyundjik.[132] We have here a representation of village architecture,
and it is natural to suppose that the domes were of small dimensions.
They are to be found to this day in the village architecture of northern
Syria and northern Mesopotamia, indeed no other form of roof exists; and
they take the shapes depicted upon the relief. They are built of
sun-dried brick held together by a mortar of clay. The high ovoid domes
which appear upon the relief and in modern villages are built of
oversailing rings, like the solitary dome at Hatra. I imagine that the
summit of the round domes is constructed over a light centering, but I
have not actually seen them in process of being built. The difficulties
presented by these methods are practically nil, owing to the light and
malleable material and the smallness of the span. The translation of
this primitive dome into larger diameters was a very different matter,
and there is no evidence for the belief that this step was taken in
Mesopotamia in an early age.
The Sasanian conquerors came out of lands on which Hellenism had made an
impression less deep than on Mesopotamia, lands where Rome had never
penetrated; and they came of a stock more tenacious of its own
traditions and less eclectic than the Parthians. To a large extent they
re-orientalized the territories which they occupied. No doubt there was
less for them to copy, for in the interval of some 300 years during
which the Parthians were predominant, Seleucid monuments must have
disappeared, and the blurred Arsacid copy of Greek or Roman models had
taken their place. The Sasanians created an art of their own, less
dependent than that of Parthia on Western forms, and more potent to
influence those who came into contact with it, not excluding the
Byzantines. In the earliest of their palaces, so strongly marked is the
reversion to Achaemenid types that Dieulafoy relegated it unhesitatingly
to the earlier Persian period. In its general characteristics the plan
of Firûzâbâd differs little from that of an Achaemenid khilâni palace
(Plate 73, Fig. 2). The lîwân has deepened, and the employment of the
vault has enabled the builder to dispense, as at Hatra, with the columns
that sustained its roof. The greater depth of the lîwân, combined with a
desire to keep the vaulting span within moderate bounds, have led to the
breaking up of the tower room on either side into two narrow chambers.
In order to counteract more effectually the thrust of the main vault
(13·30 metres wide) the side chambers are placed at right angles to the
lîwân, a principle which was not adopted at Hatra, but which rules at
Ctesiphon, and at Ukhaiḍir. The towers themselves have disappeared, and
though their place remains in the plan, in the elevation it is probable
that the façade presented an unbroken line. The audience hall of the
khilâni palace is reduced to a domed chamber, and the clumsy
construction of the dome makes it evident that the builder would not
have ventured to stretch its diameter further. Finally, round the
posterior courtyard are grouped, besides the living-rooms, two smaller
lîwâns, placed, like those in the Ukhaiḍir courts, so that they may
serve respectively for winter and for summer.
The resemblances in detail between the Achaemenid palaces and Firûzâbâd
are no less striking. The high fluted gorge and narrow torus of stone
which cover the doorways and niches of the one are repeated in the
plaster-work of the other. The plain fillets which surround the openings
at Persepolis reappear at Firûzâbâd, but in the latter case all the
openings are arched, and the moulded archivolt is set within the
rectangle formed by the fillets. The ṭâqchah niches, which, so far as my
knowledge goes, are found for the first time in the palace of Darius,
are present also at Firûzâbâd,[133] and henceforth assume a permanent
place in Persian architecture, from which they were borrowed by
Mohammadan builders.
The building material at Firûzâbâd is undressed stone, very roughly
coursed and set in a bed of mortar. In the domes the stones are cut
thinner, more carefully coursed and provided at intervals with a bonding
course; in the vaults the thin slabs are laid vertically, parallel with
the main axis of the chamber. Exactly the same principles are observed
at Ukhaiḍir. Nor do the resemblances end here. Tubes are not absent from
the vaulting system,[134] and most of the archways are set back from the
jambs to facilitate the placing of centering.[135] The arches are
semicircular as at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn. In the vault of the big lîwân
centering would seem to have been used, for it is set back from the face
of the walls, doubtless in order to leave a convenient ledge for the
centering beams. The vaults and domes here and in all other Sasanian
buildings have the ovoid shape common to Ukhaiḍir and to subsequent
Mohammadan work in Mesopotamia. It is the old Mesopotamian vault
contour. The exterior walls of Firûzâbâd are broken into a continuous
series of recessed and arched blind niches divided by engaged columns
carrying an entablature of modest proportions.[136] The appearance of
this decoration is to my eyes so entirely un-Hellenistic that I have
difficulty in connecting it with any classical influence, and in point
of fact an arched niche from one of the reliefs from Quyundjik, in the
British Museum (Fig. 11), is nearer akin to it than such
Fig. 11. Relief from Quyundjik.
(From L’Art antique de la Perse, by kind permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
façades as those of Ctesiphon or Ukhaiḍir. But it must be admitted that
while the recessing of Babylonian and Assyrian wall surfaces is in no
sense an imitation of architectural forms, least of all an imitation of
the column, which was an element unknown to the designers of these
recessed buildings,[137] and that while on the Quyundjik relief the
architrave is placed directly upon the piers without the intermission of
impost or capital, the engaged columns of Firûzâbâd are true columns
carrying an impost, and the whole scheme is no longer a pattern, but a
copy in relief of a colonnade in the round. In the courtyard the
rectangular niching is retained, but without the engaged columns.[138]
On the façade of the palace a series of seven arched niches is set high
up in the wall, on either side of the arched opening of the lîwân.[139]
It is a motive which recalls the open loggias in the façade of an
Assyrian palace.[140]
The palace of Sarvistân bears an obvious relationship to that of
Firûzâbâd, but the strict symmetry which regulates the latter is not so
closely adhered to, and the construction is handled with greater freedom
and skill (Plate 76). The principal lîwân happens, it is true, to have
resumed the old latitudinal disposition, but the longitudinal lîwân is
present in a subsidiary position. The lateral chambers are provided with
wide arched openings which, together with the arch of the lîwân, form a
façade not unlike those of the Ukhaiḍir courts.[141] The breaking of the
façade by doors leading into the lateral chambers of the lîwân occurs
first at Hatra, and characterizes all lîwân buildings later than that of
Sarvistân. Instead, however, of the piers and engaged columns of
Ukhaiḍir, the three arches of Sarvistân are separated by groups of
triple flutes. These flutes are far more clearly connected with ancient
oriental tradition than the engaged columns of Firûzâbâd. They are
derived from the reed-like flutings of Babylonia and Assyria, which are
to be found as late as the Parthian counterfeit at Tellôh.[142] The
motive does not disappear after the Mohammadan invasion. It occurs at
Kharâneh, a ḥîrah on the western borders of the Syrian desert (see
below, Plate 80, Fig. 2), and I found it upon the façade of Sultan Khân,
a Seldjuk building in the heart of Asia Minor.[143] Here, as at
Sarvistân, it flanks a central doorway. At Sarvistân it gives way at the
angles of the palace to a single engaged column. As at Firûzâbâd, the
audience hall at Sarvistân is a square domed chamber, but it opens
immediately into the posterior courtyard and a single lîwân faces it on
the further side. Besides the partial detachment from the wall of the
supports of some of the vaults and of the columns bearing the smaller
dome, there are other evidences of advance in structural knowledge. In
the central lîwân, in the tower chambers, and in the central domed
chamber the walls are partially hollowed out by blind niches, which add
to the security of the vaults while they increase the interior space of
the chambers. These blind niches lend to the supports of the dome
something of the appearance of free standing angle piers, and they show
a dawning apprehension of the fact that the thrust of the dome is
concentrated mainly upon the corners of the substructure. In the
isolated dome of Ferâshâbâd[144] the hollowing out of the walls is
carried yet further.
The building material used in walls and vaults is undressed stone and
mortar, but at Sarvistân the stones are more carefully coursed than at
Firûzâbâd. As far as can be judged from photographs, the vaults must
have been built over a centering. They oversailed the walls as at
Ukhaiḍir, while the semicircular door and window arches were set back
from the jambs according to Dieulafoy’s restoration, and oversailed the
walls according to the restoration of Flandin.[145] The side walls of
the palace are broken by frequent doorways, and in the smaller dome
windows were pierced through the drum.[146] The domes are built far more
skilfully than those of Firûzâbâd. The zone which contains the squinch
oversails the wall, standing flush with the outer edge of a small
cornice adorned with a dog-tooth. The squinches are built with a
proficiency which is in marked contrast with their rude prototypes at
Firûzâbâd. They are divided from the dome by a second dog-tooth cornice,
and the dome itself is constructed of light brick tiles.[147] This
combination of the two materials is resorted to again at Ukhaiḍir. The
niches in the columned chambers are covered with semi-domes which are
set clumsily over the angles on very small squinches.[148] The
Achaemenidizing plaster-work of Firûzâbâd is not repeated, but the
dog-tooth is copied from the cornice under the dome in the older palace.
It is significant that the cornices of Sarvistân have but one fillet
instead of the two fillets of Firûzâbâd. A tendency to reduce the
importance of horizontal decorations is characteristic of Sasanian and
of Mohammadan work in Mesopotamia (see below, p. 130).
Both for Firûzâbâd and for Sarvistân a minute re-examination is urgently
needed, but the political conditions of the province of Fars are not
favourable to archaeological research. Nor was the state of affairs
ideal at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn when I was there in April 1911, and I measured
the palace of Khusrau to the tune of the whizzing of stray bullets. That
they were not intended to hit me was due principally to the fortunate
circumstance of my having been accredited by a powerful Kurdish ally on
the Turkish side of the frontier to the leading Kurdish brigand, Kerîm
Khân, on the Persian side. This fact rendered the situation more
reassuring, but I was not tempted to prolong my stay beyond the five
days which I devoted to the palaces, neither did I loiter over my work.
It would have been difficult to push on further into the interior, or
perhaps I should say that it would have been too expensive; for though
Kerîm Khân would have provided me with an escort, he would have expected
a small fortune in return for his protection, and perhaps it might
fairly be urged that he would have deserved it. According to the
information which has reached me from Baghdâd, matters have gone from
bad to worse since the date of my visit, and the high road of the
Sasanian kings has been definitely closed to traffic.
Like the Achaemenid palaces, Firûzâbâd and Sarvistân were not intended
for the lodging of vast hordes of retainers. These may have been
accommodated in tents or in mud-built houses of an unpretending nature.
But with the close of the sixth century we come to a group of royal
dwelling-places wherein provision was made for an indefinite number of
women, courtiers, servants, and guards, and the type of building thus
created was taken over by the khalifs of Islâm and extended to
proportions vaster still. Of this type the palace of Khusrau at
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn is the best example we possess.[149] In general terms
Ukhaiḍir is its fortified counterpart.
The palace of Khusrau is built upon an artificial platform like
Persepolis and the Assyrian palaces, while additional lodgings for the
king’s family and suite are placed on the level of the plain. The double
ramps or stairways by which the platform is approached are exactly
similar to those employed in the older prototypes. The eastern end of
the platform is occupied by an immense open space lying before the
entrance to the state apartments. A deep porch, possibly with columns on
either side, leads into a latitudinal chamber, the details of which
cannot be determined without excavation. From this antechamber a doorway
communicates with the square hall of audience, which corresponds
precisely with the audience halls of Firûzâbâd and Sarvistân. In the
posterior wall there is a deep lîwân in which, perhaps, the throne of
the Chosroës may have been placed. Behind the reception-rooms there is
an open court round which the living-rooms are grouped, not singly, but
in a series of subsidiary courts, some of which are placed on a lower
level. The whole scheme is thus exactly parallel to the scheme of the
palaces in Fars, though the reduplication and enlargement of the various
parts somewhat obscures the resemblance at first sight. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn
a porch is added to the lîwân palace and the entrance lîwân has become a
closed chamber, the porch having superseded the columned entrance of the
Achaemenids and the archways of the earlier Sasanians. The rectangular
audience hall of the normal Sasanian khilâni palace follows. The small
lîwân to the rear, with its flanking rooms, have their parallel at
Firûzâbâd, but the small lîwân at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn forms part of the hall
of audience and three of the flanking rooms can be entered from that
hall, as well as from the open court behind it.
I must pass from what went before to what came after and draw a
comparison between the palace of Khusrau and the desert palace of
Ukhaiḍir. A characteristic feature of the latter, the girdle of walls,
must be left out of account. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn the walls were placed
round the large pleasure-grounds with which the Sasanian king surrounded
his dwelling. It is the wall-less Ukhaiḍir, the Ukhaiḍir as it was
originally conceived by its builders, which must be taken into
consideration, though even in that first design the desert ḥîrah was not
left entirely defenceless, since it was compressed into the rectangle of
its own enclosing walls, strengthened by towers. The space within those
walls had to be utilized to the full. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn the guards could
be lodged in the lower rooms about the stairways, at Ukhaiḍir they were
gathered together within the main entrance. The great hall is, in fact,
a monumental gateway. It belongs to the system of defences which is
absent from the Sasanian palaces. The Mohammadan builders reverted to an
older type, to the fortified palace of the ancient East. At Khorsâbâd
the principal entrance to the palace lay within the walls of the
acropolis, and it was not, therefore, strongly fortified, but such gates
as those in the acropolis walls are the true progenitors of the Ukhaiḍir
scheme (Plate 78, Fig. 1). In Sargon’s palace the long entrance passage,
some 10 metres wide, represents the great hall of Ukhaiḍir; the lateral
chambers on either side are divided at Ukhaiḍir into groups of smaller
lateral rooms which, both at Khorsâbâd and at Ukhaiḍir, were very
insufficiently lighted. In either case some additional light is obtained
from a court into which the chambers open. The symmetrical arrangement
of the Ukhaiḍir gate with the central court and audience rooms behind it
would not have appealed to ancient authorities on fortification.
Chaldaean and Assyrian gateways are seldom if ever situated opposite to
one another, an asymmetrical disposition being accounted better for
purposes of defence.[150] The long passage room of Khorsâbâd and
Ukhaiḍir, but without the lateral chambers, exists in some of the
excavated gateways at Susa,[151] and at Susa above the gateway stands a
hypostyle pavilion offering a high and airy abode to the great folk who
inhabited the palaces within, just as at Ukhaiḍir an open court with
lîwâns on all sides occupies the high summit of the gate-house. At
Ukhaiḍir there is no direct communication between the ground floor of
the gate-house block and the rest of the palace, except one door out of
the great hall. The gate tower and hall, with the adjoining rooms for
dependants, and the mosque, which had of necessity to be accessible to
all, formed the public part of the building, and the upper stories,
since they too could only be reached by passing through the public
rooms, cannot be regarded as containing private apartments. The better
rooms may have been intended for guests; the chambers in the
gate-tower, and those which were in direct connexion with the chemin de
ronde, for guards.
The great open platform of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn is represented at Ukhaiḍir by
the central court. The ceremonial rooms at Ukhaiḍir recall with singular
fidelity the disposition at Firûzâbâd, but the flanking chambers of the
lîwân (the old tower chambers of the khilâni palace) have doors of their
own, as at Hatra and Sarvistân, and the three halls are barrel vaulted
instead of domed. Special care has been taken with these vaults. In the
audience chamber (No. 30), as in the lîwân (No. 29), they are finely
built of brick, while in rooms 33 and 40 they are set upon columns. The
unequal intercolumniations in these rooms (the columns stand ·90 metre
from the walls and 2·50 metres from each other) is no doubt due to a
desire to secure as much space as possible in the centre of the room,
but it produces a singular resemblance to Sasanian methods, where the
short columns are set close to the walls that they may be the more
easily bound in with them by arches. The rooms round the small court F
are probably not intended for dwelling-rooms, but stand in some definite
relation to the ceremonial chambers; as Dr. Reuther has suggested, the
little room 37, with chimney-pipes in the vault, may have been used for
the preparation of light refreshments for the prince and his guests. For
what special purpose the elaborately decorated rooms 31 and 32 were
intended it is of course impossible to say, but as I shall point out (p.
115) they accord with a similar arrangement at Kharâneh. The rooms of
ceremony were provided with a serdâb under No. 42. Almost exactly the
same grouping of chambers is found in the block which was set at a later
date into the eastern part of the palace yard. The north-east angle of
the yard forms the court; the façade of the annex is adorned with
engaged columns and niches; even the serdâb and the stair to the roof
are reproduced. It is clear that we have here a second set of
reception-rooms similar to the first, but why a second set was needed it
is impossible to tell. The fact that an outer stair was added to the
older part of the palace, so as to place the new reception-rooms in
direct connexion with the first floor of the gate-house block, the floor
which I have tentatively assigned to guests, leads me to suggest that
the second ceremonial lîwân, with its dependences, was intended for any
visitor who was of such distinction as to need a separate audience room.
The courts B, C, H, and G can have served no other purpose than that of
the ḥaram, the dwelling-places for the wives and children. Each court is
a habitation complete in itself, a bait as it is called in Arabic, a
house. Each is provided with a winter and a summer lîwân, with
living-rooms adjoining it, and behind each lîwân lies a long narrow room
partly open, with chimney-pipes in the vault—the kitchen.[152] Each
bait has access to two of the chambers hollowed out of the towers,
which, according to the suggestion of the authors of Ocheïdir, were
probably closets. In two of the courts, B and H, the flanking chambers
of the lîwân are provided with anterooms which open into the court
through an archway resting on engaged columns. They are covered with
barrel vaults running at right angles to the vaults of the chambers
behind, and separated from the lîwân vault by transverse arches. The
vault of the lîwân is carried straight through from the back wall to the
wall of the court, but the side walls are not continued through to the
court, as in C and G, but open through wide arches into the
antechambers. These arches are the transverse arches against which the
antechamber vaults abut. In the ground plan this group has the
appearance of a short lîwân flanked by two short chambers, with an
antechamber common to all three, though structurally this would not be a
true description. The antechamber predicts the modern ṭarmah, which is,
as a rule, either a short antechamber to the central room only, or a
long antechamber common to all the three rooms (Fig. 12). In either case
the modern ṭarmah is actually that which the ṭarmah of Ukhaiḍir only
appears to be, an independent latitudinal antechamber cutting off part
of the lîwân.
Fig. 12. Modern Ṭarmah houses.
(From Das Wohnhaus in Bagdad, by kind permission of Dr. Reuther.)
In court E the arrangement of the rooms is modified owing to the
exiguous space which remained at the back of the ceremonial chambers.
The elements are, however, the same, a court, a lîwân with side
chambers, and a kitchen. To these are added a stair leading to the roof,
which is absent from the ḥaram courts. It is reasonable to assume that
court E was the private bait of the lord of Ukhaiḍir. These courts or
baits are foreshadowed in the posterior courts of the Achaemenid and the
early Sasanian palaces (again Firûzâbâd offers the closest parallel); in
the palace of Khusrau they reach a development which was to be very
little modified at Ukhaiḍir. The scheme can best be studied in the
courts on the lower level O, Q, and S. Each of these courts is provided
on the west side with a lîwân, flanking chambers, and a ṭarmah, while a
fourth chamber to the north may be a kitchen. To the south a vaulted
passage leads in each case to a posterior court P, R, and T. On the
eastern side of the forecourts there is another lîwân group, much
shallower than the first and without a ṭarmah or any subsidiary rooms.
The flanking chambers of the eastern lîwâns have small doors into the
court and into the vaulted passage behind them. As far as I could judge,
the three forecourts communicated with each other, in which case the
strict isolation of the baits of Ukhaiḍir is a new feature. In courts K
and M the arrangement is a little different. The east end in one court
only is occupied by a shallow lîwân group, the west end in both by a
deep lîwân group with a ṭarmah, but the subsidiary chambers are to the
rear, one small and one larger room, approached by a door through the
lîwân and opening on to a posterior court. The four baits on the upper
level are very similar. The subsidiary chambers are placed behind the
main lîwân; in courts C and G there is a group of rooms to the side, and
court G is without the shallow eastern lîwân group in its forecourt, but
possesses it on the west side of its posterior court. Neither courts E
nor I have the small lîwâns. All the courts communicate with one another
(except perhaps courts I and H) and with the passage. These long vaulted
passages are a feature of Ukhaiḍir also. The building materials at
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn are those of Ukhaiḍir and Sarvistân, undressed stones,
coursed with a certain amount of care, and burnt brick tiles for the
finer work.
One further step in the long history of oriental palaces can now be
taken, thanks to the excavations of Professor Sarre and Dr. Herzfeld at
Sâmarrâ. Part of the plan of the great complex of Balkuwârâ lies before
us (Fig. 13). Just as the palace of Khusrau reproduced the khilâni
palaces on a gigantic scale, so Balkuwârâ is a gigantic reproduction of
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn. The approach to the palace, through two courts, covers an
area some 300 metres long (the measurements are only my approximate
estimates made from the scale of Dr. Herzfeld’s outline plan) and passes
under three ornamental gateways. A third courtyard, lying before the
halls of audience, is over 100 metres long and is set round on two sides
by a free standing colonnade (instead of the blind arcade of Ukhaiḍir),
a corridor, and a long line of rooms, these last carried round the third
side also. An immense lîwân, 30 metres long by 15 metres wide, with two
rows of flanking chambers, occupies the centre of the fourth side.
Beyond a small latitudinal room there is a group of four great chambers
arranged crosswise. Meeting in a central chamber, between the arms of
the cross, lies a complex of nine smaller rooms, four groups in all, and
beyond this we find another latitudinal room and a great lîwân opening
into a garden court.[153] On the further side of this garden pavilions
stand upon the banks of the Tigris. The area to the left of the
ceremonial halls is occupied by twenty-four courts, each one a bait
after the manner of Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn and Ukhaiḍir. Besides the lîwân group
at one end (Dr. Herzfeld speaks of the principal room as ⏊-shaped, but
judging from his outline the form is produced by the combination of the
lîwân group and the ṭarmah) and the group of three shallower rooms at
the opposite end, there are three rooms down either side of each court,
and rooms flanking the group at either end. Some of the courts are still
bigger and more complex. In the right
Fig. 13. Balkuwârâ. (From Erster vorläufiger Bericht
über die Ausgrabungen von Sâmarrâ, by kind permission of Dr.
Herzfeld.)
wing of the palace, besides a number of baits of a more or less normal
character, there are a bazaar and barracks. The huge building here
displayed covers only a quarter of the whole area of Balkuwârâ. It is
interesting to note that the chief mosque lies to the right hand of the
main entrance, just as at Ukhaiḍir it lies to the right of the gate. The
smaller palace of al-’Âshiq is again composed of a central block between
two wings.[154] The audience chambers appear to consist of a large lîwân
with a rectangular room behind it, this room being flanked by two
similar rooms (compare Firûzâbâd). The general features of the main
gateway, a closed lîwân flanked by two chambers on either side, each
with an antechamber, were already known, as well as the details of the
wall decoration on either side of the gate.[155] M. Viollet, who did
some work in 1910 on the great palace known as the Bait al-Khalîfah, has
published a sketch-plan of it,[156] and Dr. Herzfeld is now engaged on
further excavations there. Both he and M. Viollet have published
exceedingly instructive photographs of stucco decoration from the
palaces, and I gave a few in Amurath to Amurath. Dr. Herzfeld’s series
is naturally far the most interesting, as his work has been the most
thorough.
If the palace of Khusrau is unmistakably the culminating point of a long
oriental tradition, and the model for future generations of oriental
potentates, it serves also to illuminate the little known period during
which it arose; it throws light upon the ḥîrahs of the Lakhmid
phylarchs, concerning which we have practically no contemporary
information. Mas’ûdi tells us that the khalif Mutawakkil copied in one
of his palaces a scheme which had been adopted by a king of Ḥîrah. It
consisted of a central block, wherein was situated the audience chamber,
and two wings containing storerooms and lodgings for courtiers. In front
lay an open court common to all three parts of the palace; the way to
the audience chamber passed through three gates. Dr. Herzfeld, when he
had laid bare the plan of Balkuwârâ, realized that it corresponded with
Mas’ûdi’s description.[157] That Mas’ûdi believed the type of the Ḥîri
with two sleeves to have been created by a Nu’mânid prince in imitation
of the battle array of his army, we, who are acquainted with older
monuments, know to be incorrect;[158] it is the latest descendant of a
long ancestral line of oriental palaces which runs back through the
Achaemenid and the Assyrian to the Hittite. The palace of Khusrau is as
perfect an instance of the scheme as is the palace of Balkuwârâ; the
differences between them are differences of dimension, not of kind. At
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn old oriental traits, such as the artificial platform and
the double stairways, are peculiarly well marked. The three gates of
Balkuwârâ are not present at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, or rather they are not laid
out in the same relation to one another, but it is very possible that
Mas’ûdi’s account of the Nu’mânid palace was coloured by a lively
recollection of the glories of Balkuwârâ, which in his day was beginning
to fall into ruin. Sâmarrâ was finally abandoned by the khalifs in 892,
and Mas’ûdi wrote in 943. But if Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn fulfils the requirements
of the tenth-century writer, so does Ukhaiḍir, and Ukhaiḍir, standing
within two days’ journey of Ḥîrah, may well be taken to be the closest
representation of the Lakhmid ḥîrahs until Khawarnaq itself is
excavated.
Fig. 14. Scheme of Pompeiian house.
(From Mau’s Pompeii, by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan.)
The genesis of the lîwân house as it appears in the palace of Khusrau,
at Ukhaiḍir and at Balkuwârâ has emerged from the analysis of a long
series of more ancient buildings. The baits adhere severely, I might
almost say implacably, to a type which was derived ultimately from the
khilâni. It is, however, possible that in their later form another
influence may have been at work. We know that, to a certain extent at
any rate, the Parthians adopted the Hellenistic house. The Greek
peristyle is found in Parthian houses at Babylon and at Niffer (Fig. 9);
but, on the other hand, in the Parthian palace at Tellôh, ‘in spite of
the penetration into the heart of Asia of the elements of Greek
civilization, the constructors, contemporaries of the Seleucids, have
remained in all points faithful to the traditions of ancient Asiatic
civilization,’[159] and at Hatra no Hellenistic house has yet been
recorded. The plan of the Hellenistic house is well known from
excavation, principally at Delos and at Priene. As early as the second
century B.C. it is found in combination with the Roman atrium house at
Pompeii (Fig. 14). In the ordinary private house, which was too small to
admit of a complete peristyle, the oecus gives into the courtyard
through a prostas with an open colonnaded façade, while other less
important rooms are set round the remaining sides of the court (Fig.
15). This has already something of the appearance of a lîwân group with
a ṭarmah, and the resemblance is increased if oecus and prostas are
reduplicated and two rooms placed in the centre (Fig. 16). The genesis
of this house is totally different from that of the lîwân-ṭarmah house;
the house of Priene is an abridgement of the peristyle house, the
lîwân-ṭarmah house is a development of the khilâni, but it is
nevertheless possible that the Hellenistic peristyle house, in its
abridged form, may have given the initial impulse which led to the
adding of the ṭarmah to the lîwân. We may be sure that no columned
façade could have come into existence in Mesopotamia before the close of
the second Babylonian empire, and indeed at Ukhaiḍir the columned façade
is not applied to the ṭarmah house, though it is found in arcaded
galleries—for instance in No. 20. Moreover, the rooms in courts B and H
are structurally more closely related to the simple lîwân of Hatra than
to the oecus-prostas house, while the modern ṭarmah house is
structurally, as well as in plan, one with the latter.
|
Fig. 15. Priene, house 33. (From Priene, by kind
permission of the General Director of the K. Museen in Berlin.)
|
Fig. 16. Priene, house 24. (From Priene.) |
What is the principle which determined the arrangement of the rooms or
groups of rooms within the bait, and of the baits within the palace?
Professor Koldewey, in one of those generalizations, as profound as they
are brilliant, which we owe to his learning and acumen, has laid down a
law touching architectural grouping which will be of service in
considering this question. Speaking of the intentional separation of the
main chamber of a Babylonian temple from the encompassing wall, he says:
‘This intentional separation is perhaps connected historically with the
origin of the Babylonian house, which must be dealt with in another
place. In my view, a view which rests upon the study of Babylonian
ground-plans in historic and in prehistoric times, the grouping of
chambers in ground-plans throughout the Babylonian cultural sphere
proceeds from the interior. The embracing wall, Duru, is the primary,
the indispensable essential. Within the compass of the wall, the single
chambers are set in such fashion, and in such fashion are they linked
together, that ultimately a court remains over. In the Greek house, on
the other hand, the single chambers, Megara, are so placed, and joined
together in such manner, that ultimately a court results. The Italic
house creates for itself a kind of court by sundering a roof which was
originally continuous. It is therefore possible to distinguish between
the different types of houses with courtyards by defining the Babylonian
ground-plan as injunctive, the Greek as conjunctive, and the Italic as
disjunctive.’[160]
Fig. 17. Palace at Pergamon.
(From Durm’s Baukunst der Griechen, by kind permission of Messrs.
Gebhardt.)
With the disjunctive plan Mesopotamian archaeology is not concerned; nor
do I believe that the conjunctive plan was either widely or permanently
of importance, at any rate up to the period to which Ukhaiḍir belongs.
The Greek scheme cannot be brought into sharper contrast with the
Mesopotamian than by laying a plan such as that of the Pergamene palace
(Fig. 17) beside a plan such as that of the smaller palace at Niffer
(Fig. 9). I select with intention a building wherein Hellenism has
influenced the details, but left the fundamental principle unchanged. At
Pergamon the court results from the manner in which the isolated
chambers are placed and linked together; at Niffer a court remains over
from the manner in which the chambers or groups of chambers are placed
within, and linked to, the encompassing wall. In the baits of Ukhaiḍir
it is no less the encompassing wall which is the indispensable
essential, and it may even be surmised that the latitudinal chamber
which lies behind the lîwân is a survival of the intentional separation
of the principal room from the wall. But it is not only the bait, the
unit, which must be considered, it is the grouping of units. Now these
units are so placed round the encompassing wall, and joined together in
such fashion, as to leave a court over. In detailed and in general
disposition Ukhaiḍir exhibits the injunctive plan.
Before considering the Umayyad ḥîrahs of the western desert three other
Sasanian buildings must be passed briefly under review. I will deal
first, though it is not first in date, with the second palace at
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, Chehâr Qapû.
Is it a palace? A glance at the plan is enough to prove that it does not
fall precisely within the four corners of the scheme to which Khusrau’s
palace belongs. This divergence of plan, and the peculiar character
imparted to the ruins by the isolated quadrangular chamber which
dominates the whole complex, have led to the suggestion that Chehâr Qapû
may have been a fire temple. In support of this view two buildings have
been cited, the rectangular western annex at Hatra, and a ruin excavated
by Dieulafoy at Susa. The last-named instance carries little
weight.[161] Its resemblance to Hatra depends upon the reconstruction
proposed by Dieulafoy upon data too slight to be convincing. Until a
further examination has been made, the ruin at Susa offers too frail a
substructure for the lightest of theories. As regards Hatra (Fig. 10),
the western annex blocks a window in one of the smaller rooms of the
south lîwân and is therefore certainly a later addition. But the learned
author of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft publication has given us two
plans of smaller palaces, found among the ruins in the city, of which
one certainly, and the other probably, is composed of a lîwân with its
flanking chambers, and a posterior rectangular room with, however, the
interposition of a narrow latitudinal room between them (Fig. 18). Dr.
Andrae has pointed out that while a lîwân group combined with a
rectangular chamber, but without a latitudinal chamber, exists in the
main palace (south lîwân), two lîwâns with a latitudinal chamber but
without the rectangular chamber are found in the northern annex, which,
like the western annex, is a later addition to the palace. The fact that
the dispositions observed in the main palace are not entirely isolated
examples is of the highest significance, but it does not solve the
problem connected with the so-called ‘temple’. In all these palaces the
posterior quadrangular chamber may have been a sanctuary, or it may
equally well have been a living-room. The theory that in the main palace
it is indeed a sanctuary rests mainly upon the symbolic representations
carved upon the lintel of one of its doorways.[162] The motives there
used are familiar elements of Parthian decoration. The dragon occurs
upon the façade of Hatra itself and was found by Loftus among the
Parthian fragments at Warka,[163] as well as upon a lintel excavated by
George Smith at Quyundjik,[164] but there is no saying whether the
lintel belonged to a sanctuary or to a private dwelling. Nor is there
much to be learnt, with regard to fire temples, from literary sources.
Herodotus declares that it was not the practice of the Persians
Fig. 18. Small palace at Hatra. (From Hatra, by kind
permission of the D. Orient-Gesellschaft.)
to erect statues, temples, or altars;[165] Strabo that they erect
neither statues nor altars, but, considering the heaven as Jupiter,
sacrifice on a high place. Strabo goes on, however, to state that they
have large shrines called Pyraetheia, in the middle of which the Magi,
entering daily into the shrine, maintain an inextinguished fire.[166]
Trustworthy architectural data for such buildings we do not possess, and
as Dr. Andrae has observed, the rectangular chamber at Hatra is unlike
any other temple known to us, either in the East or in the West.[167] In
the outer court of the palace he found a ruin which he calls tentatively
an âteshgâh (fire altar).[168] It is a block of masonry almost square
which stood 10 to 12 metres high and has traces of a stair that may
either have wound round three sides of the tower, or have zigzagged up
the face on one side only. He compares it with the tower some 28 metres
high at Djûr, near Firûzâbâd, which was published by M. Dieulafoy[169].
The Djûr tower may date from the time of Ardeshîr Bâbagân, A.D.
227-240. Here, too, there was a stair, which must have wound three times
round the tower in order to attain the platform at the summit. M.
Dieulafoy was struck by the resemblances that existed between the tower
at Djûr, the ziggurat at Khorsâbâd, and the minarets at Sâmarrâ and at
Cairo.[170] A ramp winding round the ziggurat to the summit of the
pyramid is described by Herodotus, but has not yet been assured by
excavation, and even the existence of pyramids with platforms at various
heights among the ruins hitherto examined is doubtful.[171] The whole
question of fire altar and fire temple is therefore very obscure. The
towers at Djûr and at Hatra may have been sacrificial altars, and Strabo
bears witness to the fact that the Persians sacrificed in a high place;
but I find it difficult to believe that they can have been intended for
an inextinguished fire. To keep a fire alight in so exposed a spot would
have taxed the ingenuity of the Magi beyond endurance. The shrines in
which the perpetual fire burnt must have afforded better shelter, but
what shape they assumed we do not know. No help can be expected from
this quarter, and the problem presented by Chehâr Qapû must be
considered on its merits. It is slightly cleared by a recognition of the
fact.
The quadrangular chamber of Chehâr Qapû, viewed impartially, does not
offer any serious difficulty. If the audience hall in the palace of
Khusrau were standing, its aspect would be much the same, for it too was
a large square chamber with a dome rising above and dominating the rest
of the palace. At Sarvistân a parallel structure exists to this day. But
it is the surrounding buildings which are different, and the question is
further complicated by the circumstance that the rooms in the immediate
vicinity of the domed hall are so much ruined that their exact
arrangement cannot be decided without some excavation—it is provoking
to think how little excavation would be needed. So far as can be
observed at present Chehâr Qapû is a rectangular complex with the main
entrance to the east; the gateway is flanked to the south by two courts,
to the north by one, each court being furnished with small rectangular
rooms. I conjecture that these were guard-rooms, and they may be
compared with the rooms under the ramps in the palace of Khusrau. The
main entrance opened into a long quadrangular court with a monumental
gate at the further end. To the north of this court, and communicating
with it by a door at the eastern end, there is an almost quadrangular
area, formed by rooms set round the courtyard numbered E on the plan.
The rooms are latitudinal, and they bear no resemblance to the lîwâns of
the palace of Khusrau. To the west lies another court, F, with
latitudinal rooms on two sides and an independent communication with the
entrance court; still further west are two smaller courts, G and H,
with rooms on two sides; and finally, to the north of the domed hall,
there seems to have been a fifth court or open space with rooms on two
sides. The south wing is not symmetrical with the north wing and it is
considerably wider. There are three large courts here. Court I has
chambers on three sides; those on the south side resembling a lîwân
group with a ṭarmah. Court J has on the south side a latitudinal
chamber, with a ṭarmah on the north side, and a passage communicating
with the entrance court, A. Court K has a lîwân group with a ṭarmah on
the south side; the north and west sides are ruined. Beyond this lies a
totally ruined area, to the west of which stand two rooms, apparently
with a ṭarmah, and at the south-west end of the palace there is a series
of four rooms. With the exception of the small courts on either side of
the main gate, all the courts seem to have had some direct
intercommunication; this was probably the case in the palace of Khusrau
also. The grouping of the rooms in the court is, however, almost
entirely unlike that which has been described in the larger palace at
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, at Ukhaiḍir, or at Sâmarrâ. Courts I and K alone, with
their lîwâns and ṭarmahs, offer shadowy resemblances to the others. The
arrangement of the rooms, the irregularity of the areas covered by the
courts, and the tendency towards an asymmetrical disposition, point to a
reversion to the methods of the ancient East. Symmetry plays no part in
the palace-planning of Babylonia and Assyria. From the earliest to the
latest, from the Chaldaean palaces[172] to the palace of Nebuchadnezzar
at Babylon,[173] through all the intervening palaces in Assyria, at
Nimrûd, at Quyundjik, at Khorsâbâd and at Assur, no principle of
symmetry is to be observed. Nor yet is it to be found, except quite
fortuitously, in the Hittite khilâni palaces (the late khilâni,
north-west of G in Fig. 5, is one of the few instances), although they
originated in the symmetrical gateway; and it is markedly absent in the
northern Hittite palaces and temples at Boghâz Keui, though in other
respects they have little in common with the southern Hittite
monuments.[174] Assyrian temples more nearly approach to a symmetrical
disposition, but only under influences foreign to Assyria, influences
which can be traced back to the end of the twelfth century before Christ
in the Anu-Adad temple at Assur. The old Assyrian scheme, of which we
have one example in the temple of Assur, at Assur, built by
Shamshi-Adad, was derived from the Babylonian temple plan and, like the
Babylonian, it was asymmetrical. The imported plan is characterized by
the substitution of longitudinal for latitudinal chambers.[175] But
these foreign, probably Western influences (for they were responsible
also for the creation of Solomon’s temple, apparently a symmetrical
building),[176] could not reduce Assyrian architecture to an ordered
plan, and the temples in Sargon’s palace at Khorsâbâd fall far short of
symmetry,[177] while in Babylonia the longitudinal chamber, i.e. the
imported plan, was never adopted, and until the latest period, the
temples, like the palaces, remained entirely unsymmetrical.[178] The
plan of Quyundjik, which is the most complete record of any Assyrian
palace which has yet been published, throws considerable light upon
Chehâr Qapû (Plate 77). Courts XXVII and XXX in the temple area, courts
XVIII, XIX, XX, and XXII in the domestic quarters, exhibit an
unsymmetrical grouping of latitudinal and longitudinal chambers very
much akin to that of the courts of Chehâr Qapû. In court XVI we have a
foreshadowing of the ṭarmah scheme. (Place believes the rooms in court
XVI to have been storehouses for wine, from the quantity of jars found
in them.)[179] It would be ridiculous to push a minute comparison too
far, seeing that a period of over 1,000 years separates the two
buildings, but a certain resemblance in details and, still more, a
general correspondence on the fundamental principle of asymmetry leads
me to suspect that a primaeval tradition survived through all the
innovations of Greece or Rome, Parthia or Persia, and that, at the end
of the sixth century, it had sufficient vitality to guide the craftsmen
to Khusrau Parwêz in the composition of a monumental building. Survivals
of this nature are not infrequently connected with hieratic tradition,
and if my conjecture is correct it might serve in some measure to
support the claim to a non-secular character which had been put forward
for Chehâr Qapû, although the domed hall, which we must assume to have
been the sanctuary, bears no resemblance to the cella and anteroom of
the Babylonian or of the Assyrian temple. It would be necessary to
postulate that while the Sasanian builder retained in the courts and
chambers of his temenos something of an ancient tradition which had come
to be regarded as sacred, he gave to the shrine wherein the holy element
burned with a perpetual flame the form which had been assumed by the
ceremonial dwelling of the divine Chosroës.
The two remaining Sasanian buildings which it will be necessary to
mention are Ctesiphon and Karkh. Ctesiphon is the most famous of all the
later Persian palaces (Fig. 19). It was erected by Shapûr I (A.D.
242-272)[180] and is therefore about 100 years later than Hatra, and
earlier than Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn by some 250 years. Not only chronologically,
but also in plan, it is closely related to the Parthian palace. It
reproduces in yet more striking dimensions the simple lîwân scheme, of
which Hatra offers the earliest monumental example. The lîwân at
Ctesiphon is covered by a vault spanning 25·80 metres, a dimension which
was not exceeded in Rome itself. On either side of the lîwân five
vaulted chambers were set at right angles; rising in stories their
vaults abutted the main vault, as at Firûzâbâd and Ukhaiḍir. The side
chambers had an independent entrance in the façade, a system which was
first employed at Hatra. The masonry is of brick, chained with wooden
beams as at Ukhaiḍir; but at Ctesiphon the beams are placed parallel
with the coursing of the masonry, whereas at Ukhaiḍir they are inserted
at right angles into the walls.
Fig. 19. Ctesiphon. (From L’Acropole de Suse, by kind
permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
Fig. 20. Karkh. (From L’Art antique de la Perse, by
kind permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
The second building is at Karkh, the town known in Syriac as Karkhâ de
Lâdan. It was founded by Shapûr II (309—379)[181] when he rebuilt Susa,
from which it is not far removed. Of this palace we have nothing but a
fragment, possibly a monumental entrance (Fig. 20). The central chamber
is covered by a dome which was set over squinches upon four wide
archways.[182] The cutting away of the walls under a dome is thus very
highly developed at Karkh. Four transverse arches span each of the
wings, and the space between the arches is covered by a vault. In
connexion with Ukhaiḍir this scheme of the wings at Karkh is of special
interest because it is repeated in room 32, where even the windows under
the vaults are reproduced by blind niches. The material used at Karkh is
brick, and it may here be noticed that at Susa and in Babylonia, where
brick was the only available local material, it is invariably used by
Sasanian architects; in Fars and in the Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn district, where
stone was more easy to obtain than brick, they constructed in unsquared
stones, roughly coursed, using brick only for the larger vaults and
domes and for those portions of the walls which were finely finished.
The latter system was employed at Ukhaiḍir. Vault construction in stone
was facilitated there by the fact that the stone broke naturally into
thin slabs and could be made to assume more or less the proportions of
brick tiles. For this reason stone vaults could be built without the use
of centering. At Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn this was not the case. The stones are
smooth rounded blocks like large pebbles; it would have been impossible
to use them for vaults unless the cement in which they were laid had
been peculiarly strong, and the vaults thus formed are of the rudest
kind. Coursed and undressed stone held together by a clay mortar was
used for vaulting purposes as early as Lydian times; a vault of that
character covers the tomb chamber of the tumulus of Alyattes near
Sardis. The same masonry is found in the terrace of the
Takht-i-Mâder-i-Suleimân at Pasargadae (fifth century B.C.), and is
still in common use in Asia Minor.[183] Masonry of dressed and undressed
stones set in a mortar of clay or pitch has been found in Assyrian
buildings,[184] but gypsum mortar was not known in Mesopotamia till the
seventh century. Its earliest appearance was in the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon. In Egypt it is of much earlier occurrence,
and the use of mortar in the Aegean region during the second millennium
B.C. (Mycenae, Argos) was probably due to Egyptian influence.[185] Hatra
is the earliest Mesopotamian monumental building in dressed stone and
mortar; it was an example which was not followed by Sasanian architects.
The method was foreign to local tradition; native workmen returned to
their own systems and continued to construct wall, vault, and dome of
brick or of undressed stone.
A survey of Sasanian buildings leads to the conclusion that a singular
want of technical skill was displayed in their vaulting system. The
vault and the dome may have been born in Mesopotamia, but they lingered
there in a state of immaturity. The barrel vault, the vault on
transverse arches, the dome on Persian squinches, or in smaller
dimensions on the horizontal bracket, these were the only forms which
were employed. If an inclined plane was to be covered, the barrel vault
was split up into sections and raised in steps; if the barrel vaults met
at right angles, they were carefully separated from one another. At
Ukhaiḍir the groined vault is added to this slender stock of forms, but
it is not used in many places where it might be expected to appear, and
when it is employed, it is only with the utmost precaution. As far as
the invention shown in the Mesopotamian regions is concerned, we might
to-day be obliged to content ourselves with the barrel vault and the
dome poised carefully upon four walls (or little better); but the Greek
builders of the Mediterranean coast-lands stepped into the breach, and
it is primarily to them that we owe the development of the elementary
principles of oriental vaulting.
I have already alluded to a series of early Mohammadan buildings which
are of the utmost importance to the study of Ukhaiḍir, the Umayyad
ḥîrahs which stand upon the frontiers of Syria. On the western side of
the desert the authority of the khalifs had been preceded by the
authority of Imperial Rome. Lands which were occupied by Roman armies
were endowed with a solid heritage, more enduring than any political
domination has proved to be. To this day the traveller to Petra has the
paved Roman road under his feet for many a mile; he can reckon his
journey by Roman milestones, and daily he will pass by shattered wall
and piles of ruin which mark the site of Roman watch-tower and Roman
fortified camp. After the lapse of eighteen hundred years these massive
structures still offer a meagre shelter to the Beduin shepherds and
their flocks, and in the seventh century, when the Umayyad khalifs fled
from their cities to the beautiful solitudes of the Syrian desert, most
of the castles of the Roman limes, which had been re-occupied by the
Ghassânid allies of Byzantium, were standing in all their towered
strength. Here indeed was an inheritance for those who loved the
wilderness; where the Roman legionaries had languished in interminable
exile, the children of the desert held their court.
The Arabian limes did not differ in its system of military defence from
the limites of Europe, but whereas the European camps were originally
laid down as stockaded earthworks and were not systematically clothed in
stone till the time of Hadrian,[186] on the Syrian frontier the camps
and forts were from the first built of solid stone masonry. The
comparatively late date of the oriental defences was no doubt partially
responsible for this peculiarity, but it must also be borne in mind that
fortification by means of earthworks was foreign to the regions through
which the Arabian limes ran. As early as the time of Vespasian, the
camps of Flavius Silva at Masada, near the Dead Sea, were surrounded by
walls of rudely piled stones,[187] while in the Flavian period the
European camps were still fortified by earthworks and stockades. The
Roman province of Arabia Petraea was created in A.D. 105, and the
fortification of the first limes dates therefore from the time of
Trajan. On this inner limes one great camp stands in ruins, the camp of
Odhruḥ.
Archaeological research on the Roman frontiers in Germany, Austria, and
Britain, as well as in North Africa, has made us familiar with the
general disposition of the legionary camps; moreover, we have two
literary sources of information. Polybius, writing in 150 B.C., has left
a description of the camp in his day, and Hyginus, writing not earlier
than a period shortly before the time of Hadrian, has given an accurate
account of the camp as he knew it.[188] Architecturally there is no
fundamental difference between the two. The camp of Hyginus was a
rectangular enclosure, with a length one-third greater than its width.
It had four gateways, the Porta Praetoria and the Porta Decumana in the
centre of each of the short sides, the Porta Principalis Sinistra in one
of the long sides, but not in the centre, and the Porta Principalis
Dextra opposite to it in the other. Round the interior of the walls lay
an open space, the Intervallum. The interior area was divided by
thoroughfares placed in a regular order. Between the Porta Principalis
Dextra and the Porta Principalis Sinistra ran a cross street, the Via
Principalis. At right angles to it, the Via Praetoria ran up to the
Porta Praetoria. These two were the most important of the roads; they
were wider than the others, and in the later stone-built camps they were
sometimes flanked by colonnades, while at their point of junction was
set a tetrapylon. The colonnades and the tetrapylon are common in cities
which were laid out on the Roman camp plan.[189] Opposite the point of
junction of the two streets, the centre of the camp was occupied by
official and public buildings. Here lay the Forum and the Praetorium,
with the Sacellum wherein the eagles of legion and cohort were
deposited. Behind the Praetorium, the Via Quintana crossed the camp from
side to side, while numerous small roads at right angles to it gave
access to the lodgings of the troops; the Via Sagularis, within and
parallel to the Intervallum, was carried round the whole rectangle. To
this general scheme the camps which have been excavated conform, with
little divergence.[190] I give as an example the fort at Housesteads,
on the Roman Wall (Fig. 21). The sanctuary, X, which is here
rectangular, is not infrequently apsed.[191] As a rule not much remains
of the interior buildings except the Praetorium and a few large public
edifices, such as granaries and armouries. The Praetorium varies
considerably in detail, but in general disposition it resembles the
Greek peristyle house. A typical, well-preserved example is to be found
at Wiesbaden.[192]
Fig. 21. Roman fort at Housesteads. (By kind permission
of Professor Haverfield.)
One of the most imposing of Praetoria is that of Lambaesis[193] in
northern Africa, where a stone-built camp was constructed about the same
date as Odhruḥ to replace the older earthwork. The development of the
Praetorium varies with the size and importance of the station. As
regards the outer fortifications the four gateways were flanked by
towers which projected inwards, from the inner face of the wall, and not
uncommonly had a slight salience upon the exterior also.[194] There are
one or two examples in which the gate towers are rounded upon the
outside and have a more considerable projection.[195] Towers are usually
placed at the rounded corners of the wall, and sometimes at intervals
along the wall; they have no salience upon the exterior.[196] The
barracks, which were as a rule roughly built huts, were more solidly
constructed in some of the great permanent camps, and the whole interior
plan has been traced at Carnuntum and at Novaesium. The barracks in
these camps consisted of long double rows of small chambers, more or
less regularly disposed and standing back to back. A street or court,
open at either end, unless it happened to terminate against one of the
larger official buildings, separated each row from the row opposite. The
Intervallum was left open, that free access might be given to the walls;
at Carnuntum only, part of the west side was occupied by buildings.
Fig. 22. Odhruḥ. (From Provincia Arabia, by kind
permission of Professor Brünnow.)
In the Trajanic camp at Odhruḥ (Fig. 22) no trace of the interior
buildings remains except a small apsed Sacellum, placed precisely in
the position in which it would be found in a camp on the European
frontiers. Since the four gateways compare equally well with those of
the European camps, we may conclude that the interior arrangement of
Odhruḥ was normal. But the fortifications are not normal. Rounded towers
project some ten metres from the outer face of the wall and the angles
are strengthened by circular towers of still greater salience. Thus in
the earliest camp of the Arabian limes we encounter a developed system
of flanking towers which is completely absent in Europe.
Fig. 23. Ledjdjûn. (From Provincia Arabia, by kind
permission of Professor Brünnow.)
The second or outer limes cannot be much later in date, and in all
probability it belonged to the time which saw the fortification of the
road from Palmyra to Damascus. Ḍumair (Plate 78, Fig. 2), the second of
the chain of forts that extended from Damascus to the desert
capital,[197] is dated by an inscription in the year A.D. 162; it bears
a close resemblance both to Trajan’s camp at
Fig. 24. Da’djaniyyeh. (From Provincia Arabia, by kind
permission of Professor Brünnow.)
Odhruḥ and to Ledjdjûn, a camp on the outer Arabian limes. The salient,
rounded, intermediate towers and circular angle towers of Odhruḥ are
repeated at Ḍumair with unimportant variations in detail. No part of the
Praetorium is standing, but there are traces of some of the rows of huts
in the Praetentura, and according to Domaszewski’s plan they extended,
on one side at least, over the Intervallum to the wall.[198] In the
Retentura one ruined building remains, which the learned archaeologist
believes to have been the Armamentarium. In the camp of Ledjdjûn the
walls and towers are an exact copy of those of Odhruḥ (Fig. 23). The
interior buildings belong to two periods. The greater part of the
Praetorium, and a small apsed structure to the north of it, belong to
the first period; and to the same date, Domaszewski assigns certain
buildings placed along the walls between the towers, the largest of
which he takes to have been a Horreum. The rows of barracks which fill
the eastern half and a part of the western half of the camp are of
later date and belong probably to the time of Diocletian.
No other legionary camps of the size of these three exist along the
Arabian limes; the other fortresses which have been examined and planned
are smaller, different in character, and later in date. Of these there
are three which I propose to consider, Da’djaniyyeh, Bshair, and Qasṭal.
Da’djaniyyeh is undated, but from its plan I should judge it to be
earlier than the other two. Bshair is dated by an inscription in the
time of Diocletian; for Qasṭal there is no epigraphic evidence, but the
capital found among the ruins of the Sacellum can scarcely be earlier
than the fifth century.[199] That the towers in the fortress of
Da’djaniyyeh should be rectangular and set à cheval upon the walls, is
not of any significance (Fig. 24). Round and square towers are commonly
found at one and the same time, though the round tower, which is
strategically an improvement upon the rectangular tower, is in fact
later in origin (see below, p. 108). It is worth noting that the details
of construction in the walls and towers of Da’djaniyyeh are exactly
reproduced at Qasṭal, a fort which diverges much more than Da’djaniyyeh
from the Roman camp scheme, but even at Qasṭal the stairs and approaches
to the towers are copied from the Odhruḥ prototype. The remarkable
feature at Da’djaniyyeh is that the Roman camp plan is obscured and
almost lost. The greater part of the Intervallum is filled in with
buildings; stables, horrea, and armamentaria are linked to the
encompassing wall in a manner which recalls the ancient oriental system,
a system which is perhaps foreshadowed at Ḍumair and Ledjdjûn.[200] In a
wall set round with chambers there is no room for gates; the suppression
of gateways is therefore a necessary corollary of the change of scheme,
and at Da’djaniyyeh the Portae Praetoria and Decumana have disappeared.
The postern in the south-east wall is not a survival of the Porta
Praetoria; its existence is due to the fact that the main water-supply
of the fort was a cistern lying outside the walls at this point. Apart
from these striking innovations the interior preserves the Roman plan.
The Praetorium and Sacellum stand in their accustomed place, but the Via
Praetoria, besides having no independent gate, is no longer laid quite
symmetrically with regard to the Praetorium. Something like the same
combination of camp and oriental fortress can be seen in the Byzantine
citadel at ‘Abdeh, but the features of the Roman camp are more
completely obliterated and the Praetorium is probably represented by a
large ruined building, placed unsymmetrically against one of the
walls.[201] At Bshair the orientalizing process is carried a long step
further (Fig. 25). The chambers are placed symmetrically round the
enclosing wall; there is but
Fig. 25. Bshair. (From Provincia Arabia, by kind
permission of Professor Brünnow.)
one gate, and the Sacellum itself (k) is set against the wall, leaving
the central court clear. Bshair is no longer a Roman limes fortress, it
is a military caravanserai. The same definition applies to the undated
fort at Qasṭal (Fig. 26). Again, the interior buildings are set round
the encompassing wall, but they are not single chambers; they are the
baits of the Mesopotamian palaces, minus the lîwân. Each unit is
composed of a small open court with rooms on either side (this is the
normal arrangement, though three of the baits at Qasṭal have rooms upon
one side only), and in the interior of the complex a court is left over.
There is no room in this scheme for a Praetorium and accordingly it is
given a place outside the walls,[202] but fragments of carved ornament
found in the principal court make it probable that a small Sacellum
occupied the centre. This principle is retained in the caravanserai
fortresses of other parts of Syria. At Dair al-Kafh (A.D. 306) a small
temple, which was subsequently converted
Fig. 26. Qasṭal. (From Provincia Arabia, by kind
permission of Professor Brünnow.)
into a chapel, stood in the centre of the court;[203] in the barracks at
Anderîn (A.D. 558) a chapel is similarly placed,[204] and at Qaṣr ibn
Wardân (A.D. 561) a building, the uses of which have not been
determined, stands in the barrack yard.[205] Beyond this small
resemblance, the divergence of Qasṭal from the Roman camp type is
complete. All the more noticeable is its likeness to the only Sasanian
castrum of which we have any sufficient record. Qasṭal belongs to the
same family as the fort at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn (Plate 73, Fig. 1). The towered
walls, the single gate, the chambers or baits placed round the interior
of the walls so as to leave a central court over, all these are
characteristic of the older building; but at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn the lodging
of the commandant is placed inside the court, whereas at Qasṭal it is
outside.[206] In the Zohâb district there is another building of a
somewhat similar type, but it looks more like the ordinary caravanserai
than like a fortress.[207]
The caravanserai type, when once it had established itself on the
Arabian limes, was not to be ousted, but its later application is not
only to fortress and barrack, but to genuine lodgings for caravans. In
the Roman or Byzantine caravanserai of Khân al-Zebîb enough remains to
show that the interior buildings were placed round the encompassing
wall.[208] At Umm al-Walîd this interior arrangement is clearly
preserved;[209] at Umm al-Rasâs baits, not unlike those of Qasṭal, are
linked to the wall,[210] and the plan of a later building at Khân
al-Zebîb (it is probably Moslem) differs not at all from that of a small
modern caravanserai.[211] Khirbet al-Baiḍâ (see above, p. 56) belongs to
the same group, but from its geographical position it must be regarded
as a military station rather than as a true caravanserai, though it may
have served both purposes. To what cause is the singularly rapid change
from Roman camp to Asiatic caravanserai to be attributed? The answer is
obvious. On the Arabian limes the builders were brought into contact
with a strong Asiatic tradition; they were probably themselves local
workmen, and they orientalized the Roman scheme. They applied from the
first their own system of flanking towers to the defences; they grafted
an injunctive plan on to the Roman camp plan, and they ended by
discarding the latter in favour of the former.
The covering of dead ground by means of flanking towers and crémaillères
goes back in western Asia to the earliest times. The plan of the
acropolis of Gudea, drawn upon a tablet which is placed in the lap of a
statue of the patesi of Lagash, exhibits, in the middle of the third
millennium B.C., a system of fortification so fully developed that
scarcely a dead angle exists in the whole circuit of the walls (Fig.
27). In the science of military engineering even Egypt would seem to
have lagged behind Chaldaea, for the advantage of flanking towers was
not understood there until the Asiatic expeditions of the Eighteenth
Dynasty had taught the Pharaohs how to correct the defects in the
unbroken lines of their massive defences.[212] In the Assyrian reliefs,
double and triple rings of walls set thick with towers surround the
towns; towered walls are represented in the ground-plans,[213] and
excavation has proved the existence of rectangular towers in the walls
of Khorsâbâd and of Assur.[214] A chemin de ronde, loopholes, and
machicolations have been found in situ in the walls of Assur, together
with traces of crenellation,[215] and all these features, as well as
hourds projecting from the battlements, and the ladders and
battering-rams which they were intended to counteract, are familiar upon
Assyrian reliefs. Rounded towers have not been revealed by Babylonian or
Assyrian excavations. They belonged to a later age or perhaps to a
different sphere of culture, the Hittite or Syrian. But Dieulafoy
observed them on the Achaemenid fortifications of Susa;[216] and at
Hatra, while the inner walls of the town were flanked by rectangular
towers, solid or casemated, and casemated bastions, on the outer wall a
rounded tower has been recorded, and Dr. Andrae conjectures that it was
one of many.[217] In this particular, as in the approximately circular
outline assumed by its walls, Hatra may exhibit traits borrowed from the
civilization of the southern Hittites. There are rounded and rectangular
towers in the larger Parthian palace at Niffer.[218] In Sasanian
fortifications the rounded tower seems practically to have displaced the
rectangular.[219]
Fig. 27. Lagash. (From L’Acropole de Suse, by kind
permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
Flanking towers strengthened the walls of Hittite cities. At Zindjirli
the gradual development of more scientific methods can be traced in the
successive walls which encompassed the town and the acropolis. The inner
city wall, which was the first in date (it was probably built in the
thirteenth century), is provided with rectangular towers which have a
salience of 2 metres. The outer acropolis wall (Fig. 5), built about 900
B.C., has semicircular towers with a salience of 3½ metres; the
strategic disadvantages of rectangular towers had been realized and
corrected. A further improvement was effected in the inner cross wall,
behind the main gate of the acropolis. The wall is built in retreating
angles, and set with towers alternately rounded and rectangular; the
rectangular towers project 1·80 metres from the face of the wall, while
the rounded towers cover them with a projection of 4·50 metres. The
outer city wall was built after the destruction of the city by
Asarhaddon in 681 B.C. and is no more than a copy of the earliest wall,
but at the same period casemates were added to the walls of the
acropolis.[220] The Hittite capital of Qadesh on the Orontes, as
depicted in the frescoes at Abû Simbel, a temple built by Rameses II
(1388-1322), was protected by a wall with towers, the height of which
must be due partly to the imagination of the Egyptian craftsman.[221]
These towers have the appearance of being round, but the absence of
architectural records of round towers at so early a date throws doubt
upon the matter. In Asia Minor rectangular towers have been found upon
the outer and the inner walls of Boghâz Keui;[222] they do not as a rule
exceed a projection of 2½ metres. At Troy the earliest walls had
towers 3 metres wide, and 2 metres salient; the curtain wall was in some
places not longer than 10 metres, and the city gates were flanked by
deep bastions. In the walls of the third period at Troy three towers
were uncovered on the south-east side; they are 3·20 metres wide, 2·35
salient, and are separated from one another by a distance of only 6·40
metres.[223] But on the Greek mainland, at Tiryns, and at Mycenae, the
fortifications are characterized by crémaillères and by deep bastions
rather than by towers.[224] Much more lavish is the use of towers in the
pre-Hellenic cities of Asia Minor, other than Troy. The very ancient
acropolis on the Yamanlar Dâgh above Smyrna possessed rectangular
towers.[225] In Caria the fortification known as the Wall of the Leleges
opposite Iassos had rounded towers and crémaillères,[226] and the walls
of Alinda rectangular towers à cheval.[227] The Lycian towns depicted
upon the bas-reliefs in the tombs at Pinara, discovered by Benndorf and
Niemann, exhibit salient rectangular towers,[228] while fortified towers
of the same character are depicted on the monument of the Nereids at
Xanthos,[229] and we have a plan of the ancient walled town of Pydnai in
which the features portrayed on the reliefs are clearly to be
recognized.[230] Nor must the towns of the Phoenicians be forgotten, the
towered walls of Mount Eryx in Sicily, of the acropolis of Lixos in
Mauritania Tingitana, of Thapsus, of Carthage, and of Tyre.[231]
With such a wide development of fortifications by means of flanking
towers, extending from the cultural spheres of the Babylonians and the
Hittites over all the western parts of Asia, and carried by the
Phoenicians into the furthest limits of the Mediterranean, it is not
surprising that the fortifications of Greek towns in the fifth century
should exhibit the same features. Assos, the finest example of this
period, carries on the tradition in the crémaillères and rectangular
towers of its walls;[232] and Messene, with its rounded and rectangular
towers, shows in the succeeding century a yet more complete
understanding of military architecture.[233] The acropolis of Selinus,
with semicircular towers, bears witness at a like age to the carrying
over of the Greek system of defences into Sicily.[234] The walls of
Ephesus, built by Lysimachus towards the close of the third century,
‘one of the greatest monuments of fortification which have been left to
us by antiquity,’[235] show the towered wall of the Hellenistic age,
while Mantineia, with its circular outer wall, is like an isolated
reversion to the round cities of Hittite lands.[236] Philon of Byzantium
formulated the laws which governed Greek fortification in the
Alexandrian age. Towers, crémaillères, and casemated walls combined to
make a system of defence all the elements of which had been familiar to
the Hittites and to the Assyrians, and the methods of attack which he
sought to counter were the same as those which can be seen on the
Assyrian reliefs.[237] Vitruvius advocates the flanking of walls by
round or polygonal rather than by rectangular towers, but his words
should be taken as a counsel of perfection, not as representing the
practice of his day, for the systematic use of rounded towers by Roman
engineers is later than Augustan times and polygonal towers are unusual
before the age of Diocletian. At Aosta, which was fortified soon after
25 B.C., the towers are rectangular,[238] but at Fréjus and at Autun,
both of which were fortified in the Augustan age, we have two of the
rare instances of circular or semicircular towers.[239] As Schultze has
pointed out, the planning of towers varies with time and place, but not
infrequently rounded and rectangular towers can be seen on buildings of
the same date.[240] As at Zindjirli the rounded tower denotes a
technical advance, though the rectangular tower is not necessarily
displaced by it. The typically Roman conception of frontier defences,
the fortified limes, was definitely abandoned in Europe about the year
A.D. 360, but a century earlier the invasion of Gaul and Spain by the
Franks had proved that the long line of strongholds was powerless to
check the inrush of barbarian hordes, and in the last half of the third
century the fortified town was virtually substituted for the fortified
frontier. Towered walls sprang up about the cities of Roman Gaul, and
the work of fortification begun by Probus was carried on by
Diocletian.[241] The same process can be observed throughout the empire
during the course of the third century, and almost without exception
these later fortifications were strengthened by circular or semicircular
towers.
But if the walls of Roman cities can claim to have inherited, through
Greece and the civilizations of the Aegean, the formulae of the ancient
East, the fortified camp was essentially the creation of Rome herself.
The stockaded earthwork, with rounded corners and lines devoid of
flanking defences, determined the plan of the stone wall which replaced
it in Europe and in Africa,[242] and it was not until the Romans applied
their system to lands which had seen the birth and development of a
science of warfare different from their own that they modified their
design. The difference was fundamental. The Roman camp was intended
primarily for purposes of attack. It was the camp of an army on the
march, indispensable, in the eyes of commanders as wary as they were
daring, to a halt that lasted no longer than a single night, but in its
essence impermanent. The oriental fortress displays a contrary
intention. It was defensive and abiding, a stronghold provided with few
exits (since the gateway is the weakest point of a fortified position),
but with high walls, heavily flanked by towers which would give the
garrison every advantage against the besiegers.
By the time of Diocletian the transition upon the Arabian limes from
camp to fortress had been completed. The Umayyad khalifs, when they in
turn strewed the fringes of the Syrian desert with the creations of
their architects, copied, not the Roman plan which had been imported
under Trajan and had survived, in broad outline at any rate, at least,
as late as the year A.D. 162 (the date of Ḍumair), they copied its
oriental counterpart, adapting it to the use of princes by methods
borrowed from Byzantium and from Persia. We know that the Umayyads, like
the Ghassânids before them, repaired and re-occupied the Roman
fortresses. Hamza al-Iṣfahâni believed that Qasṭal and Odhruh had been
built by Djabala ibn al-Ḥârith;[243] Yâqût mentions that Yazîd ibn ‘Abd
al-malik (Yazîd II) lived at Muwaqqar, and judging from the existing
remains it is probable that he either built or rebuilt it.[244] His son
Walîd occupied Qastṭal and Azraq.[245] But princes whose passion for
magnificent construction was so great that the subjects of Yazîd III
could see cause for exacting from him, when he came to the throne, a
promise that he would not lay stone to stone or brick to brick,[246]
were not likely to content themselves with the forts of the Roman limes.
The poets, who were welcome guests at their palaces in the wilderness,
have left descriptions of the luxury of their surroundings,[247] and the
picture has been completed by the discovery of some of the buildings
themselves. None of the ruins which have been examined are mentioned by
contemporary writers under the name by which they are known to the
Beduin, but a palace or palaces are recorded in the Wâdi Ghadaf, and it
is in that district that Ṭûbah, Kharâneh, and Qṣair ‘Amrah stand.[248]
Mshattâ, which was the first to be visited by archaeologists, bears a
name which is probably modern.
Qṣair ‘Amrah lies somewhat outside the architectural type to which the
other three buildings belong. It is a small unfortified pleasure-palace
with a reception hall and throne-room on a basilical plan, and a bath.
Very closely related to it is the early Mohammadan ruin of Ḥammâm
al-Ṣarakh, discovered by the Princeton Expedition.[249] The bath at
Djebel Sais is not dissimilar, but in the light of our present knowledge
it requires re-examination.[250] Both at Qṣair ‘Amrah and at Ḥammâm
al-Ṣarakh there is a small dome over a square chamber. At Ḥammâm
al-Ṣarakh this chamber is 2·15 metres square; the dome is set on
pendentives and lighted by windows. It is laid up in gores with
projecting ribs constructed of long, thin, wedge-shaped bits of shale,
entirely undressed and completely covered by plaster. When intact it
must have presented an appearance not unlike that of the ribbed dome at
Ukhaiḍir, except that the ribs were set wider apart and the pendentive
substituted for the primitive bracket. Concerning the structural
features of the dome at Qṣair ‘Amrah, the publication of the Viennese
Academy, which leaves much to be desired, is not explicit. Dr. Musil,
who is always the best guide in matters architectural and
archaeological, describes it as being set on pendentives and lighted by
windows in the dome.[251] Here and at Ḥammâm al-Ṣarakh two semi-domed
niches are placed opposite to one another, one at either end of the
domed chamber, and a room (3·30 metres square at Ḥammâm al-Ṣarakh) next
to the domed chamber is roofed with a groined vault. We have a similar
use of the groined vault in the east annex at Ukhaiḍir. At Ḥammâm
al-Ṣarakh some of the doors are covered by straight lintels, others
(together with all the windows) by semicircular arches. Some of the
wider arches are slightly pointed, but the vaults and transverse arches
in the reception-room are semicircular. At Qṣair ‘Amrah straight lintels
are the rule for doors and windows, but over the architrave of the wide
door leading into the audience chamber there is a shallow relieving
arch. The three parallel barrel vaults of the audience chamber are
visible upon the exterior, and the absence of the flat roof obviates the
need of tubes between the vaults. In both of these bâdiyahs the walls
were decorated with frescoes. Qṣair ‘Amrah was built between the years
711 and 750, when the house of Umayyah came to an end, the earlier date
being determined by the presence among the frescoes of a representation
of Roderick, the last king of the West Goths, who came first into
contact with the Arabs at the battle of Xeres in 711.[252]
To the same group belong a small ruined bath at ‘Abdeh[253] and the bath
at Rḥaibeh,[254] the first being possibly Byzantine. At ‘Abdeh the dome
placed between two semi-domed niches is set on horizontal brackets. In
the palace of Qaṣr ibn Wardân the dome between two semi-domed niches is
the basis of the plan, but it is further elaborated by the placing of a
semi-domed chamber on the alternate sides. These two chambers are not,
however, an integral part of the domed chamber, for they are separated
from it by solid walls broken only by doorways. Fortunately we are not
reduced here to conjecture concerning the date. On the lintel of the
south gate an inscription gives the year A.D. 564.[255] It is clear,
therefore, that the dome between semi-domed niches is an architectural
scheme which was taken over by the builders of the Mohammadan age from
their Byzantine predecessors, and all the evidence points to the
conclusion that in both periods the artificers were Syrians.
Al-Ṭûbah is the southernmost of the Wâdi Ghadaf palaces[256] (Fig. 28).
Its plan is that of Qasṭal repeated three times, with the addition of
projecting rectangular chambers on either side of the gates. When the
three main courts adjoin one another the side chambers against the
dividing walls are omitted. The individual baits are very similar to
those of Qasṭal, but only one row of chambers is interposed between each
of the small courts. Thus at first sight it looks as if the Ṭûbah bait
consisted of a court with rooms on one side only, except in the
north-east and north-west angles, where the courts have chambers on both
sides, that the corner spaces may be filled in. Actually, however, the
Fig. 28. Ṭûbah. (From Qṣeir ‘Amra, by kind permission
of the Akad. der Wiss. in Vienna.)
bait centres round each alternate court, which communicates with the two
chambers on either side, and the intermediate court is merely a yard
common to two baits. The bait of Ṭûbah is therefore the same as the
typical bait of Qasṭal. The enclosing walls and the foundation of all
other walls are of stone, the rest of the building is constructed of
brick tiles. The western end of the palace, and most of the northern
side were completed; the eastern and south-eastern parts were never
carried above the foundations. The doorways are covered by brick and
stone arches, but a stone or wood lintel was placed under the arch.
Where the lintel is of stone its outer side is adorned with an
interesting early Mohammadan pattern, which has affinities with the
carving on the eastern end of the façade at Mshattâ. The stone lintels
are not carried through to the inner side of the arch. The arches, which
are round, are built of stone, as is the wall below them. The wooden
lintels have rotted away or have been removed by the Arabs. They were
laid in brick walls and covered by brick relieving arches composed of
two rings of brick tiles. In the inner ring the bricks are set
vertically, parallel to the main axis of the arch, with the broad side
outwards; in the outer ring they are laid horizontally, at right angles
to the main axis, with the narrow end outwards. It is the principle on
which many of the smaller arches at Ukhaiḍir are constructed. The brick
arches at Ṭûbah are a stilted, slightly pointed oval; that is to say
that the transition from the ovoid to the pointed arch is illustrated
here in much the same manner as at Ukhaiḍir.
Fig. 29. Kharâneh, upper floor. (From Qṣeir ‘Amra, by
kind permission of the Akad. der Wiss. in Vienna.)
Kharâneh lies a few hours to the west of Qṣair ‘Amrah[257] (Fig. 29). It
is two stories high and about 35 metres square, and it consists of baits
grouped round a central court (Plate 79, Fig. 1). A rounded tower is set
at each of the four corners, a semicircular tower in the middle of each
of three sides, and in the fourth side stands a gate between
semicircular towers, which are cut away on the interior face, like the
towers on the south, east, and west gateways of Ukhaiḍir (Plate 79, Fig.
2). The rooms on the ground floor are ill lighted, and were probably
intended for stables, storehouses, and guard-rooms. The court was
surrounded by a cloister, the roof of which rested on arches springing
from angle piers. On the upper floor this roof, which was constructed of
stone slabs, provided a passage or gallery into which the baits of the
first floor opened (Plate 80, Fig. 1). The rooms on the upper floor
correspond with those below, but in some of the larger chambers (three,
according to Musil’s plan) the vault is divided into sections by means
of transverse arches borne on slender engaged columns in groups of three
(Plate 80, Fig. 2). The column groups recall with singular fidelity the
triple reed-columns on the façade of Sarvistân. Beyond the evidence
afforded by Dr. Moritz’s photograph, we have no information regarding
structural details, though they must be well worth a careful study. The
vaults and transverse arches seem to belong to the same family as those
of room 32 at Ukhaiḍir. The end of the chamber at Kharâneh is closed by
a semi-dome reaching from the back wall to the first transverse
arch—the same arrangement as has been described in the mosque and in
gallery No. 134 at Ukhaiḍir. It is also extremely significant that the
semi-dome at Kharâneh should be carried over the angles of the walls on
squinch arches. The arches spring over the angle instead of being filled
in with a small semi-dome. The fillets round the arches and round the
rectangular windows must be compared with the fillets round the arched
niches in room 32 and round the archivolts of squinch and niche at
Chehâr Qapû. Another very important point is mentioned by Dr. Moritz. To
the right of the audience chamber, which he photographed, and connected
with it by a door, is a small rectangular room, beyond which lies
another rectangular room of about the same size. Round this last room
runs a moulding, above which stand circular plaques of stucco decorated
with formal plant-motives in Sasanian style, and with late Syrian
leaf-motives. One of the plaques Dr. Moritz detached from the wall, and
it can be seen standing upon the floor in his photograph (Plate 80, Fig.
2), and is now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It is more than
a coincidence that to the right of an audience hall there should be
found both at Ukhaiḍir and at Kharâneh a chamber, the elaborate
ornamentation of which points to its having some special ceremonial
significance. At Ukhaiḍir this side chamber is carried through to the
audience hall, at Kharâneh it is divided from it by an interposed room,
but the principle is the same in both cases, and in both cases it must
be connected with laws of etiquette of the Umayyad courts with which we
are unacquainted. Over the above-named doorway, leading from the
audience hall into the first right-hand chamber, Dr. Moritz found a
graffito inscription in which a date corresponding with November, A.D.
710, is mentioned. Kharâneh, therefore, must have been standing at that
time. The archway he describes as an ordinary round arch; in the
photograph the door appears to be set within a niche, whereof the arch
oversails the wall, like the larger archways at Ukhaiḍir. The door
itself is covered by a lintel, and a lintel of solid stone covers the
door of the main entrance (Plate 79, Fig. 2). In his section Dr. Musil
represents some of the doors as round-arched and some with a lintel and
a relieving arch above it; the latter follow a scheme which is common to
most of the buildings in the west side of the Syrian desert and exists
at Ctesiphon, but is unknown at Ukhaiḍir and unusual in the later
Mohammadan buildings of Mesopotamia. Of the loophole windows in the
outer wall at Kharâneh, those on the ground floor are finished in
precisely the same manner as the loopholes in the towers at Ukhaiḍir,
the opening is filled in with an upright stone against which two bricks
are placed diagonally. On the upper floor the loopholes show the same
method somewhat simplified. There is but one main door, as in the
original scheme of Ukhaiḍir. The masonry is of undressed stones set in
mortar, with an occasional bonding course as at Ukhaiḍir. All round the
castle, between the two upper rows of loopholes, runs a decoration
consisting of two horizontal courses of brick with a brick zigzag
between. On the towers this band of ornamental brickwork is repeated
lower down. The presence of brick used decoratively leads one to suspect
that it may be used also in the finer vaults, but like all the technical
questions at Kharâneh, this cannot be answered without further
observation. Over this main gate there appears to have been some kind of
hourd, corresponding in level with the upper story; above it the wall
between the towers is decorated with five perpendicular bands of late
Syrian leaf-motives. Dr. Musil’s reconstruction of the gate[258] cannot
be correct; it does not take into account the horizontal floor-line
below the opening which gave access to the hourd, and it covers the
bands of ornament. The Kharâneh gateway must be reconstructed in much
the same fashion as the three gates in the outer wall at Ukhaiḍir. A
vaulted chemin de ronde seems to have crowned the walls.
The rooms of the upper story are grouped into five baits. Over the
entrance an additional chamber is interposed between two baits (compare
the courts at Ṭûbah which are common to two baits) and on the opposite
side there are two extra rooms to fill up the angles. These two
additional rooms communicate with the baits on either side, and the
gate-house chamber communicates with either bait; otherwise the baits
are kept distinct from one another. The scheme is in fact that of Ṭûbah
or Da’djaniyyeh, but with the small courts vaulted over and turned into
audience halls or big living-rooms, and here we may seek the explanation
of the difference between the baits of the palaces on the eastern side
and of those on the western side of the Syrian desert. The normal bait
on the Mesopotamian side consists of two lîwân groups with a court
between, and the lîwân is derived, as has been shown, from the khilâni.
The domestic arrangements of the East, where the women are lodged apart
from the men, and if possible the several wives apart from each other,
make the bait system in some form indispensable to every dwelling-house,
but in Syria the khilâni plan was adopted only for monumental façades,
such as that of Solomon’s temple, and from it, through temples of the
pagan era, to Christian churches. The normal bait on the Syrian side has
therefore no connexion with the khilâni; the lîwân is absent. The group
of chambers consists of two pairs of rooms with an intervening court, or
in complexes more closely knit together, an intervening hall. The group
thus formed is the half of a new unit, and may either share a central
court with other half-baits, as at Kharâneh, or be provided with a small
court of its own and another half-bait, as at Mshattâ. This distinction
apart—it is a distinction which is due to local custom and local
architectural tradition—the close relationship which exists between
Kharâneh and Ukhaiḍir cannot be insisted upon too strongly, for it helps
to determine the date of Ukhaiḍir.
Mshattâ lies a few hours to the west of Kharâneh (Plate 81).[259] It is
the best known of the Syrian ḥîrahs, and its magnificent carved façade
is now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. All that concerns me here,
however, is its place in the architectural group of which Ukhaiḍir is
the eastern representative. It was perhaps built by Yazîd II,[260] and
it was left unfinished at his death. It may therefore be a little later
than Kharâneh, for Yazîd died in A.D. 724. As at Ṭûbah and Ukhaiḍir, the
materials used in it are brick and stone. It is surrounded by a wall set
with towers, of which, as at Ukhaiḍir, more than the half-circle
projects. The towers on either side of the main gateway are octagonal.
Of the buildings immediately within the gate we have nothing but the
ground-plan. Roughly speaking they correspond to the three-storied block
at Ukhaiḍir, and as Dr. Herzfeld has pointed out,[261] a further
correspondence lies in the fact that the oblong court to the right of
the gate-house group, with a niche in the qiblah wall, was probably a
mosque. The mosque at Ukhaiḍir occupies much the same position with
regard to the gate, but since the orientation of the two buildings is
different, the qiblah niche at Mshattâ is hollowed out of the main outer
wall, while the niche at Ukhaiḍir is hollowed out of an opposite wall.
(It must be noted that the big mosque in the palace of Balkuwârâ
occupies the same position relatively to the gate.) The conclusion which
Dr. Herzfeld reaches, namely that neither palace was a copy of the
other, but that both were reproductions by different hands of the same
general scheme, is borne out in all other particulars. Beyond the
gate-house block lies the central court; beyond the court the hall of
audience. At Mshattâ, where the lîwân was unknown, its place was taken
by an aisled hall on a basilical plan. Instead of the simple apse there
is a trifoliate chamber covered by a dome. The most renowned example of
the trifoliate apse is in the church at Bethlehem. The learned disagree
as to whether that apse was built by Constantine or by Justinian, but in
either case it was earlier than Mshattâ. For the rest, the trifoliate or
quadrifoliate chamber covered by a dome is a familiar Hellenistic motive
which occurs frequently in palaces and in the baptisteries of early
Christian churches. At Ukhaiḍir we have, in the same position as the
trifoliate chamber, the quadrangular room No. 30. The throne-room, if I
may so term it, at Mshattâ bears comparison with the throne-room at
Qṣair ‘Amrah, where two small apsed rooms correspond to the apsed side
niches. On either side of the ceremonial chambers of Mshattâ lies a
bait, the unit, now complete, which was foreshadowed at Kharâneh and at
Qasṭal. Such is the arrangement of the central part of the palace. The
two wings (to return to Mas’ûdi’s definition) were never built.
Schultz’s ingenious reconstruction gives in each wing a row of baits,
all adhering more or less closely to the norm, with subsidiary courts,
and chambers at either end to fill up the space. When we come to
structural details, the materials are sadly lacking. Either the
buildings are too much ruined to afford the necessary information, or
the photographs which have been taken are insufficient.[262] Those given
by Brünnow and Domaszewski are the best. From them, and from the
reconstruction of Schultz, it is possible to see that the vaults
oversail the walls[263] and that they are built of a double slice of
tiles laid vertically, parallel to the main axis, so as to dispense with
centering. The only photograph of a doorway which has been
published[264] shows a relieving arch constructed of the same double
slice of tiles, with place for a lintel below it. Schultz was able to
determine that the lintel was composed of a wooden beam carrying a
straight arch of stones. The straight arch occurs at Ukhaiḍir, but
without the support of a lintel. The relieving arch has the form of the
brick arches at Ṭûbah, a stilted and slightly pointed oval, and from the
photograph it would seem that it was set back from the face of the jambs
below the lintel, but Schultz in his reconstructions gives it the same
width as the door opening.[265] Brünnow and Domaszewski reconstruct the
doorways in the domed chamber without lintels, and the doorways in the
small chambers of one of the baits without arches—that is to say, they
are arch-shaped, but the arch is merely cut out of the solid wall.
Schultz places lintels and relieving arches over all the doors. Kim
belir? The windows are small and round-arched. The closets were in the
towers as at Ukhaiḍir, and Schultz in one of his drawings[266] places
over the niche a fluted semi-dome. We know no more.
It now remains to sum up the conclusions reached with regard to the
origin of ḥîrah and bâdiyah on either side of the desert. And first it
is clear that Ukhaiḍir stands in the closest relations to the Syrian
group, not only in general conception, but in details of construction.
But Ukhaiḍir reflects the older Lakhmid ḥîrahs, those palaces that were
supposed to represent an army in battle with two wings, and through them
it re-echoes the Sasanian palaces which were contemporary with them.
These too, as we know from the palace of Khusrau at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, were
composed of a centre and two wings. Again, allowance must be made for
Byzantine influence in the Sasanian palaces and the Lakhmid ḥîrahs.
Justinian lent artificers to Khusrau I; Khawarnaq was built by a Greek.
The intercourse, friendly and unfriendly, between the Sasanian and the
Byzantine empires was unbroken. When it was friendly it took the form of
commerce, and architects were among the exchangeable commodities; when
it was unfriendly it took the form of prisoners of war. Khusrau I must
have captured a large and varied selection of artificers when he removed
the whole population of Antioch to Seleucia. It is improbable that they
should have sat idle in their new abode. They exercised their crafts,
and they exercised them in their own manner. It may well have become the
fashion among the citizens of Ctesiphon to shop in the Greek Bazaar,
just as the citizens of Damascus shop in the Greek Bazaar of their own
town. Greek influence, as we know, did not begin with Justinian. It
began with a mightier figure than that of the imperial lawgiver—with
the mightiest of all, with Alexander. I have already shown that the
Mohammadan lîwân took to itself a part of the Greek peristyle and uses
it still under the name of ṭarmah. Who can tell when this process began?
The Greek peristyle exists in a Parthian palace at Niffer and in
Parthian houses at Babylon. Hatra fronts the desert with a Hellenistic
façade; so does Ctesiphon; it adorns the central court of Ukhaiḍir. But
that Byzantine or earlier Western influence affected in any fundamental
manner the plan of palace or ḥîrah is not borne out by this evidence. No
fundamental change can be observed at any time, but on the contrary a
steady, continuous growth of oriental methods, on oriental lines, and a
steady development based on developing needs, ceremonial and social.
From the days of the Hittites the palace was composed of a centre and
two wings. The khilâni palaces of Zindjirli were laid out on a small
scale; the khilâni palaces of Pasargadae and Persepolis covered a wide
area, but provided little better accommodation; for the courtiers and
guards were lodged elsewhere, in buildings of a less permanent
character. Persepolis was the capital of an empire; all the needs of the
time were fulfilled there. But this is not the case at Firûzâbâd and
Sarvistân. Of the capital seats of the Sasanian kings we know but two,
in any real sense, Ctesiphon and Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, and at Ctesiphon we know
only the great hall of audience—together with a fairly accurate guess
at its flanking chambers. Before we can say that the extensive wings,
which at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn were added to the khilâni palace, were not a
natural development (and they are planned on principles which are
entirely oriental) we must have a clear conception of that which lay
about the great hall at Ctesiphon, of the palace at Dastadjird which
Heraclius committed to the flames, and of the palaces in the Zohâb
district. The oriental palace, in the form which it had received from
Chosroës and Nu’mânid, laid a strong hold upon the imagination of the
East. In the Days of Ignorance the Arab of the desert entered its courts
with praise; in the days of conquest he divided its spoils with his
fellow soldiers, and sent a part to Mekkah, glorying in the God-given
strength which had dispossessed the kings of the earth. Not by literary
evidence alone can the deep impression which it created be measured. It
gave birth to the Syrian ḥîrahs and to the stupendous residences of the
Abbâsids.
On the Syrian side of the desert there is another element to be
considered, the Roman legionary camp, and this too had a centre and two
wings. The truth is that any complex of buildings laid out on an ordered
plan falls almost inevitably into this disposition. The palace of the
Flavians on the Palatine had a centre and two wings, yet it was not for
that reason derived from the khilâni or related to the oriental palaces.
Its ancestor was the Greek peristyle house which goes back in turn to
the megaron palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns and Troy. Neither were
Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn and its offspring in the Syrian desert derived from the
limes camp. Gradually but surely, while Rome still held the Syrian
frontier, or rather while Rûm—the Hellenistic, the Byzantine Rome,
itself half-orientalized—held it, the ancient Asiatic scheme invaded
the limes fortress, pushed out the Praetorium, or pushed it back against
the encompassing wall, which had become an indispensable requisite, and
having grouped its baits after its own fashion, left a court over. The
union of both sides of the desert under the hand of a single ruler
quickened the process. Neither the Roman Qasṭal nor the Umayyad Ṭûbah
are palaces on the Persian ḥîrah plan; then suddenly Kharâneh and
Mshattâ spring into being, uniting the oriental traditions of the
Mesopotamian side of the desert with oriental traditions which had
developed independently from the same root on the Syrian side. The
Syrian architects were masters of a more scientific technique, for they
had been trained in a Graeco-Roman school. They taught their
Mesopotamian brothers, and even the builders of remote Ukhaiḍir had
learnt how to lay a cross vault.
But if the legionary camp is powerless to affect the ancient palace
plan, it did not wither away, unnoticed, like a plant upon uncongenial
soil. It bloomed again in the cities of the eastern Roman empire, in
Boṣrâ, in Damascus, in Apamea. Towns such as Diyârbekr, where not one
Roman stone remains upon another, still betray a Roman origin in their
crossed thoroughfares and quadruple gateways.[267] And therewith it
returned, remodelled, to the West. The palace at Antioch was built on
the plan of the Roman limes camp. Diocletian copied it at Spalato, and
Constantine’s palace in his new capital was in some respects an echo of
that of Diocletian, though the true oriental palace was not without
effect upon Constantinople.[268] The imperial residence, stereotyped by
him, went on into other phases, too complex, and often too obscure, to
be followed here, but it is curious to note that five hundred years
later, Theophilus, himself an Asiatic, since his father, Michael II, was
a Phrygian by birth, built for himself a palace on the Bithynian coast
which was modelled avowedly on the palace of the khalifs at
Baghdâd.[269] A few years later Mutawakkil laid out Balkuwârâ—what
sister ḥîri with two sleeves stood at Bryas, on the shores of Marmora?
One other point remains. The palace of Ukhaiḍir is contained within a
towered wall which is wholly distinct from it. This is not the
encompassing wall of the ancient East, the primary condition of the
structure. It has the four gateways of the Roman camp, though the
unneeded cross-roads have dropped away. Here at last Imperial Rome has
come to her own. For all its oriental system of fortification, its
towers and its hourds, its machicolations and its loopholes, its
casemates and its crenellations, this wall is perhaps no other than the
wall which surrounded the legionary camp. But I doubt whether the camp
itself, which made so fleeting an apparition on the Asiatic frontiers,
was the deciding factor. The camp lived on in the city and made a far
deeper impression through the city than through the limes fortresses.
The scheme is repeated at Sâmarrâ. Balkuwârâ forms part of a great
enclosure similarly disposed, with three gates, like the gates of
Ukhaiḍir, the palace taking the place of the fourth.[270] The area
covered by the enclosure is so extensive that it resembles a town rather
than a royal dwelling, and through this town run the crossed
thoroughfares which were once the Via Principalis and the Via
Praetoria.
![[Image of the bookcover not available.]](images/cover_lg.jpg)
![[Image of Arabic writing not available.]](images/ill_pg-161_lg.png)
![[Image of Arabic writing not available.]](images/ill_pg-162a_lg.png){kind=small}
![[Image of Arabic writing not available.]](images/ill_pg-162b_lg.png){kind=small}
