Page 105 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

part one: Mesopotamia

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Figure 31. Main entrance

regular plan, an abstract symmetry, was apparently aimed at. The siting of the buildings
within the Citadel docs not suggest this, but here two reasons combine to cause con­
fusion, the imperfect setting out of the enclosure wall and platform, and the em-
pirical procedure employed in the construction of large buildings. In a country where
paper, or even papyrus, was unknown, there could not be measured drawings; the few
surviving sketch plans on clay tablets are so much abbreviated as to be barely compre­
hensible to us. But we know that large buildings were composed by joining a number
of traditional units. One of these is the group: Square Court, Throne Room, and Great
Hall found in the palace ofEshnunna (Figure 19). It recurs at Mari and, somewhat modi­
fied, in the Assyrian palaces and the buildings within the Citadel.2 It would seem that,
once a site had been allotted, the plan was worked out, to some extent, on the spot.
Building M, for instance, has a regular oblong nucleus of rooms spaced round two rect­
angular courts. But since it stood askew to die city wall, and also to the Nabu temple 011
its farther side, the regular central portion received two irregular wings on either side. It
is possible that the orientation of the Nabu temple, which is out of alignment with every
other feature of the Citadel, was dictated by religious considerations; there are some in­
dications that the planet or constellation which was one of the manifestations of each
deity was sighted in some connexion with the founding of the temple, but the exact
rules have not been recovered, and can hardly be reconstructed where the surveying
methods were so inexact. And it is quite possible that the original intention had been to
make a straight street from gate A to the square in front of the palace, but that a mis­
calculation in the placing of gate A, or of the comer of the platform (since it deviated so
much from the right angle), may have initiated a series of makeshifts of which the present
plan is the outcome. Elsewhere irregularities may be explained as a result of property
rights of buildings standing at the time construction was started, but at Khorsabad the
builders had free play; for the city was erected where none had stood before, and their
achievements allow us, therefore, to draw conclusions about procedure which are ex-

were designed on the same plan, with two

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