Page 108 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE LATE ASSYRIAN PERIOD

white. Perhaps this was bleached blue, for the succession of colours of the three lowest
stages'correspond with Herodotus’ report on the tower of Babylon, where the fourth
stage was blue. Whether there were seven stages at Khorsabad, as there were at Babylon,
we have no means of knowing. If this was so, the uppermost stage would have measured
only fifty feet across, and the shrine would have been a small one. In favour of the
assun lption of seven stages is the fact that they would give the tower a height equal to
the length of the base (143 feet), and this was, according to Strabo, the case in Babylon.
But the distinctive feature of the Ziggurat of Sargon is the connexion between the

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10 20 30 METRES

30 60 90 FEET
Figure 32. Reconstruction of Ziggurat of Khorsabad

stages: a continuous ramp winds round the core of the building from the base to the
summit. It was about six feet wide and edged with a crenellated parapet. There were
not, then, properly speaking, stages, as at Ur, but vertical faces on each side separating
successive turns of the ramp.
The temple of Nabu (Plate 78, centre; Plate 79, left) repeats the plan of the palace
temples on a grand scale. The whole is placed on a terrace, ten to twenty feet high above
t e sloping ground, and entirely paved with baked bricks set in bitumen. Its outer face
was decorated with buttresses and recesses built in mud-brick and white-washed. Large
ornamental clay nails with glazed heads were inserted in a horizontal row.7 A ramp led
to t e front gate which was set back between two towers decorated with plastered half-
co umns of mud-brick. A similar gate led from the forecourt to the second court, but

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