The architecture of the Ancient Near East is a vast subject.1 Over the past century and a half excavations have uncovered architecture in many of the capitals and major cities of the Bronze and Iron Ages in all parts of the Near East. New capitals have been discovered,2 smaller city and village sites have been investigated, and the beginnings of architecture have been discovered to be much older than previously thought. Semi-permanent settlements first appear in the Near East around 14,000 bce (Aurenche 1981: 293), while the development of urbanism happened in the fourth millennium bce.
Although the corpus of Ancient Near Eastern architecture is large and very rich, buildings and other structures are always found incomplete to some degree.3 Sometimes preservation is quite spectacular, due to sudden destruction of the buildings, as in the case of the Old Babylonian palace at Mari on the Euphrates in Syria (Parrot 1958; Margueron 1982) or the Iron Age buildings at Hasanlu in north western Iran (Dyson 1989). More often archaeologists only find the ground plan - the lower parts of the walls, the floors and the foundations, if any. Even in the best of cases, second stories and roofs are not preserved in their original locations, but are deduced from such evidence as thickness of walls, remains of staircases, fallen roof material or the stratigraphy of the artifacts and collapsed walls that fill the buildings (Margueron 1982; Dyson 1989: 119-20). Nevertheless, from the ground plan, building materials and methods, and contents of a building, archaeologists can often gain convincing ideas about its relation to other structures contemporary with it at the same site or other sites, its probable function, and the possibilities for what its original appearance might have been. In addition, a building may have had several phases, which are traceable archaeologically and can, hence, show its development. Also, at multiperiod sites, earlier and later levels may reveal the predecessors and successors of a building, and so give a diachronic view of its place in the architecture of a site. While comparison with other excavated structures is the prime method for evaluation and interpretation of architectural remains, it can be supplemented by three other resources: (1) ancient artistic representations, (2) ancient texts (in literate periods and places), and (3) comparisons to village architecture in the Near East in recent times.
The first of these, ancient artistic representations, can depict parts of buildings which are usually not preserved, such as domed roofs or battlements and parapets on city walls. An example is Porada’s 1967 study of battlements and their symbolic meaning in different periods. Another is Heinrich’s 1957 study of architectural depictions in southern Mesopotamian art of the fourth and third millennia. One thing he analyzes is ancient depictions of reed buildings, which were not found preserved in excavations, but which probably were very much like the reed houses of the Iraqi Marsh Arabs of recent times (Heinrich 1957: 11-20). A special class of objects, which has been recently studied by Bretschneider (1991), is that of the so-called ‘‘architectural models.’’ These are objects, usually for some cultic or ceremonial purpose - ossuaries, altars, offering stands, small shrines - which appear to be in the shape of a building and to show architectural details such as windows, doors, and battlements. While interpretation of these in relation to real-life architecture is difficult, they can be understood as depicting what were some of the important symbolic parts of architectural structures for the ancients.
Indeed, the symbolic role of architecture in defining and reinforcing the order of a society’s world should not be underestimated. It is certainly expressed in the second resource mentioned above, the ancient texts available from the literate places and periods of the Ancient Near East. For instance, in the prologue to the Epic of Gilgamesh the narrator exhorts the listener to
Go up, pace the walls of Uruk,
Study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork.
Is not its masonry of kiln-fired brick?
And did not seven masters lay its foundations?
One square mile of city, one square mile of gardens,
One square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Ishtar’s dwelling
Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk! (Foster 2001, 3)
City walls were military defensive works, designed for protection from attacking enemies. Archaeologists rightly interpret them as evidence of conflict among competing kingdoms. Here, however, the military aspect is not mentioned. Instead the focus is on the excellent brickwork, the expert building, and the different parts of the city enclosed within the wall. The city wall is here a symbol of a prosperous and powerful Uruk.
Besides revealing the ancients’ attitudes toward their architecture, however, ancient texts in the form of building inscriptions stamped on bricks, carved in door sockets, or written on tablets in foundation deposits can also identify a building’s purpose and builder (Sauvage 1998: 38-40). Furthermore, there are many archival texts - business and legal documents of private individuals or public institutions (temples, palaces) - that have been found in houses and other buildings of various cities. Detailed study of these in conjunction with their archaeological and historical contexts can reveal some of the social and political dynamics of urban life and how this may be reflected in the architecture. Such is convincingly presented in Stone’s study of two areas of houses in Nippur in the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods (Stone
1987). In her study, Stone observes that the texts found in the houses of these two areas, TA and TB, show that the residents in TA were mostly small property owners who gained their livelihood through management of privately held real estate and temple offices, while those of TB were landless officials tied to the temple bureaucracy. These differences in occupation are reflected in the houses of each area. The houses in TA were variable in size, shape, organization, and quality of construction, as might be expected where the buildings were constructed by their owners. In TB, however, where the houses were built by the dominant institution, they were generally uniform in plan and well constructed (Stone 1987: 126).
The third resource mentioned above, comparisons with village architecture of the Near East in recent times, is one that has been used ever since systematic archaeology began in the Near East (Krafeld-Daugherty 1994: 3). Archaeologists realized that the architecture ofthe villages in the areas around their excavations was built with the same materials and technology and in the same environment as the ancient structures whose remains the excavations uncovered. They also noticed that the processes of abandonment, decay, and rebuilding were similar to those observed in archaeological excavations (Frankfort 1934: 5-6). Thus, they realized that by observing contemporary village architecture they could better understand the structural qualities and possibilities of the ancient building remains they found (Heinrich 1934; Pfalzner 2001: 12).
The study of contemporary villages with the goal of gathering data that will aid in the understanding of archaeological remains has developed over the past several decades into an approach called ethnoarchaeology. In relation to the study of Ancient Near Eastern architecture, this has meant that contemporary villages are studied with the goal of determining how the present customs and ways of life of the inhabitants might be traceable in an archaeological deposit (Watson 1979a, 1979b; Kramer 1979, 1982).5 This is felt to be a valid source for comparison to the archaeological record because many aspects of rural life in the Middle East are seen to have cultural continuity with ancient times (Kramer 1982: 259; Aurenche 1984: 12, Watson 1979a: 3, 7; Pfalzner 2001: 71). Such studies have been carried out in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.6 Examples of this use of ethnographic data in specifically architectural studies include Aurenche 1981, Krafeld-Daugherty 1994, and Pfalzner 2001. Aurenche traces the development of domestic architecture from its beginnings up to the mid-fourth millennium bce. Krafeld-Daugherty analyzes the evidence for different activity areas (sleeping, work, living, storage, cooking) by comparing the ethnographic data with the archaeological evidence in Mesopotamia from the middle of the fourth millennium to the end of the Old Babylonian period. In his study of house types in north Mesopotamia in the third millennium bce, Pfalzner studies how different types might reflect the different socioeconomic situations of the inhabitants (nomads, semi-sedentary herders and farmers, fully sedentary farmers).
World History
