Gates Charles. Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome
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62 THE NEAR EAST AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
periods, the major constructions in a city honored
these divine beings. Eventually, however, the ruler
assumed a more deeply entrenched authority. This
process began in the ED period, but developed sig-
nificantly under the Akkadian Empire and the states
that followed. The affirmation of kingship associ-
ated especially with the Akkadians seems to result
not from any deliberate invention, but from the
expansion of the political unit from the city-state to
empire. Gods ruled in city-states, but empires were
the creation of men. Such exalted treatment of king-
ship appealed to subsequent monarchs, needless
to say, even when the territories they ruled hardly
qualified as empires.
Changes in the role of the ruler were paralleled
by new emphases in urban architecture. In the Ur
III period, for example, palaces of the rulers crept
closer to the temples, even in the heart of a classi-
cally Sumerian city such as Ur. By the time of Old
Babylonian Mari, the prerogatives of the ruler were
great. Kingship had become the umbrella that shel-
tered both the secular and the religious aspects of
administration. Although royal palaces had been
built as early as the ED period, including a substan-
tial example at Mari itself, complexes that predate
the eighteenth century BC are incompletely known.
It is thanks to the accidents of archaeological dis-
covery and exploration that the Palace of Zimri-
Lim, thoroughly excavated and well published, has
won its reputation as the prime example of the early
Mesopotamian palace.
“Show me the palace of Zimri-Lim! I wish to see
it.” Thus wrote an eighteenth-century BC king of
Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast to the king of
Yamhad (modern Aleppo) in central Syria. The pal-
ace was indeed a wonderful architectural complex
that combined spaces for religious ritual, public
ceremony, the private life of the ruler, and a wide
range of commercial activities. Today, its mud
brick walls, preserved in the south-west to over 4m
in height, are sadly disintegrating from unchecked
exposure to rain, wind, and sun, but even so, the
visitor can understand its ancient renown. A com-
plex of over 260 rooms in the surviving ground
floor, the palace measured 200m × 120m, cover-
ing an area of ca. 3ha (Figure 3.10). The exterior
walls, mud bricks piled in places to an impressive
Figure 3.9 Stele of Hammurabi, from Susa.
Louvre Museum, Paris
MESOPOTAMIAN CITIES 63
Figure 3.10 Plan, Palace of Zimri-Lim, Mari
thickness of 4m, were protected with a coat of clay plaster. The main entrance gate lay on the
north, off a paved street. From this gate, an important visitor proceeded to two large courtyards
at the heart of the palace (131 and 106 on the plan) and to two key rooms off court 106, an ante-
chamber (64) and an audience hall, generally identified as the throne room (65).
Paintings decorated the south wall of court 106 on either side of the doorway leading into
room 64. The investiture of the king was illustrated to the west of the door, and a sacrificial
procession, now badly fragmented, to the east. An overhanging roof may have protected these
important figural scenes. On the other three walls of the court, a red and blue geometric band
ran 2m above the ground. Additional finds of fragments at the base of these walls indicate more
images were originally present.
The Investiture of the king, the best known of the wall paintings from Mari, imparts a visual
message appropriately placed here at the entrance to the throne room: the king has the blessing
of the gods, and the result is agricultural plenty (Figure 3.11). The painting measures 1.75m ×
2.50m. The key scene takes place in the center in a small rectangular panel, a spatial form that
hearkens back to Sumerian art. In the presence of three other divinities, the goddess Ishtar, with
one foot on the back of a lion, hands the insignia of power to the king. The insignia, a circle and
a stick, resemble the items held out to Hammurabi by Shamash on the Stele of Hammurabi and
depicted as well on the Stele of Ur-Nammu. The theme is thus familiar to us, but the elaboration
offered here is new. In the secondary panel just below, two goddesses, identifiable as such by the
horns on their headdresses, are holding vases from which emerge a plant (a sign of vegetal fertil-
ity) and streams of water adorned with fish, the representation of the Euphrates River, the source
of life in this arid region. These two panels are framed by a fantastic landscape created by two tall
papyrus-like trees and two date palms with people climbing up to clusters of fruit. Three tiers of
bulls, griffins, and winged human-headed lions, the last two composite creatures much loved in
64 THE NEAR EAST AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
Mesopotamian mythology, also inhabit the garden, as do female
divinities standing beyond the lions.
The goddesses who hold the vases take on three-dimensional
form in a statue discovered in fragments both in Court 106 and
in Room 64. Reassembled for display in the Aleppo Museum,
the almost life-size (1.43m) goddess stands stiffly, her feet held
together and revealed beneath the hem of her dress (Figure 3.12).
Her eyes no longer contain the inlay, and her nose is broken off,
but her pleasant smile and full face give this goddess of fertility
an appeal still effective today. In addition, the craftsmen of Mari
rigged this statue as a fountain. Water from a tank would have
flowed through the channel carved inside her body and out the
vase, just as the wall painting illustrates. The inhabitants of Mari
took their water imagery seriously.
From Court 106 one entered the two long narrow rooms, 64
and 65. In Room 64, just opposite the doorway from the court,
stood a brick podium with a limestone surface decorated to
imitate marble. Since steps led up to it, it would seem a likely
spot for a dais surmounted by a canopy, as Parrot proposed.
The inner room, 65, was the throne room of the palace. A low
base at the west end marks the location of the throne. At the
opposite, east end of the room, a broad flight of steps led to
another platform, generally restored as a shrine. The lavish use
of the sealant bitumen on the steps and on the statue bases
Figure 3.11 Investiture of the king, wall painting, Mari. Louvre Museum, Paris
Figure 3.12 Goddess holding
a flowing vase, statue from
Mari. Aleppo Museum
MESOPOTAMIAN CITIES 65
Figure 3.13 Main functional
units, Palace of Zimri-Lim, Mari
flanking the stairs suggests rituals utilizing much liquid, perhaps provided by goddesses with
flowing vases.
The rooms around this core of courts and audience halls can be divided into four main sectors
(Figure 3.13). The functions of these rooms are in dispute, however. The arguments illustrate
the difficulties of interpreting archaeological remains. A room may contain material collapsed
from an upper floor or merely random trash, or looters may have stripped it of its identifying
contents. How can the archaeologist know which is the correct explanation of what he or she
finds? At Mari, for example, Parrot located the king’s private quarters in the north-west rooms
grouped around Court 31. This area, which recalls the traditional Mesopotamian house with
rooms arranged around a court, is furnished with such amenities as toilets and terracotta bath-
tubs. But Jean-Claude Margueron, Parrot’s successor, assigned this sector to dignitaries, and
preferred to see the king at home in an upper story above the long, narrow storerooms south of
Court 131 (the eastern end of the quadrant marked “King’s Residence” on Figure 3.13). Those
upper rooms collapsed and disappeared in antiquity, but the remains of Staircase 81 prove they
did exist. Limiting his remarks to the surviving ground floor rooms, Parrot had conjectured little
about possible upper stories.
THE KASSITES
After its destruction by the forces of Hammurabi, the city of Mari never recovered and habitation
ceased. As for the empire of Hammurabi and his successors, it gradually eroded before threats
on various fronts. In the south, peoples from the Arabian Gulf moved northwards, while the
Kassites pressed in from the north-eastern mountains. The fatal blow was delivered by the Hit-
tite king Mursili I, who captured and sacked Babylon in 1531
BC. Quickly returning to Anatolia,
66 THE NEAR EAST AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
Mursili I never consolidated his victory in Mesopotamia. In the absence of the Hittites, the Kas-
sites moved in and took control of central and southern Mesopotamia. They founded a new capi-
tal city at Dur Kurigalzu, some 30km west of modern Baghdad. Like the Akkadians, the Kassites
soon absorbed the traditional Sumerian culture of the region they now ruled.
Our investigation of Ancient Near Eastern cities has concentrated on developments in south-
ern and central Mesopotamia. To the north, meanwhile, the Assyrians prospered throughout the
second millennium BC. In the Iron Age, in the ninth to seventh centuries BC, they would burst
forth from their homeland and take their turn as masters of empire, creating monumental cities
in the process. But that is a story for Chapter 10. Let us first turn our attention to other Bronze
Age civilizations of south-west Asia and the Mediterranean basin, the contemporaries of the
Sumerians, Akkadians, Old Babylonians, and Kassites.
CHAPTER 4
Cities of the Indus Valley
Civilization
The Indus Valley Civilization, also called Harappan after one of its major cities, is the second of
the three great river-based civilizations of the third millennium BC in northern Africa and south-
west Asia. Its cities, with their distinctive choices in architecture and town planning, provide an
instructive counterpoint to those of regions further west, Mesopotamia and Egypt. In certain
features, the Harappans seem particularly advanced.
The Indus Valley Civilization arose in the vast alluvial plain of two roughly parallel rivers, the
Indus and the now dry Saraswati (or Ghaggar-Hakra), a region now situated in modern Pakistan
and north-west India (Figure 4.1). Although the general similarity of the geographical setting and
the sophistication of its architecture and city plans suggest a cultural development comparable to
that experienced in Mesopotamia and Egypt, some major differences in the material record make
it difficult to assess this hypothesis. First, the wealth of information available from Mesopotamian
clay tablets and Egyptian papyri and stone inscriptions has no counterpart in the ancient Indus Val-
ley. The Harappans did use writing, but their script has not been deciphered. Even if it were, the
results would not yield much: inscriptions, mostly on seals or sealings, tend to be very short. Sec-
ond, we know little about the social structure. This is due not simply to the lack of textual informa-
tion, for non-textual evidence can have much to contribute about such matters. Here, the material
remains give no clear picture of social distinctions. For example, lacking are elaborate tombs with
rich grave gifts, burials of the sort that have brought the upper echelons of society so strikingly to
our attention in lands further west. The rulers of these Harappan cities are as yet invisible to our
modern eyes. Third and last, after the Indus Valley Civilization dissolved in the early second millen-
nium BC, its traditions were not carried on, at least not directly, by succeeding peoples. Moreover,
texts from later antiquity remain silent about the Harappans. As a result, this region did not have a
continuity of cultural traditions comparable to what we see in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Until recent decades, little was known about cultural developments in the Indus Valley before
the Harappan period proper. Did the Harappan cities spring up quickly, or were they the result
of a long period of gradual development? Such important questions could not be answered.
Evidence from Mohenjo-Daro, for example, is meager, and more would in any case be difficult
to obtain, the relevant deposits lying below the water table, buried deep in the silt brought by
the river. Excavations elsewhere, at such sites as Mehrgarh, are now documenting developments
of the preceding 4,000 years, the Neolithic into the Bronze Age. The picture emerging is one
The Indus Valley Civilization
The Harappan, or Mature, phase: ca. 2600–1900
BC
68 THE NEAR EAST AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
of gradual development, of the sort we have traced in Anatolia, the Levant, and Mesopotamia,
although with regional variation being important.
ENVIRONMENT
The Indus River originates in Lake Mansarovar in south-west Tibet. It makes its way westward
through Kashmir, then south through Pakistan, through the Punjab and Sind to the Indian Ocean.
Harappan sites have been found in a huge triangle, along 1,200km of coastline from south-west
Figure 4.1 The Indus Valley Civilization
CITIES OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION 69
Pakistan to the Gulf of Khambat (Cambray) in India, and, heading inland, along the final 1,600km
of the river and its tributaries. Geographical conditions vary throughout this area. The northern
sector lies largely in the Punjab, a well-watered region, thanks to adequate rainfall and to its rivers.
The best-known site here is Harappa. Rakhigarhi, a site of similarly large size, lies at the eastern
edge of the Punjab, 350km from Harappa, the north-eastern limit of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Directly south of the Punjab is Cholistan, a drier region. Its major Harappan site is Ganweriwala,
an unexcavated city that lay alongside the Saraswati River. Further south still is Sind, a hot, rainless
area whose geography and climate recall southern Iraq. Mohenjo-Daro, 570km south of Harappa,
is the major site of this region, and indeed the most extensively excavated and best known of all
Harappan sites. The last of the geographical regions is the coastal zone along the Arabian Sea, a
largely inhospitable area, rocky and with limited fresh water supplies. Despite this inhospitable
environment, the important Harappan city of Dholavira was established here, on a small island
(the region has since filled with silt, however; Figure 4.1 shows the modern coastline).
The five sites mentioned above, the largest known Harappan sites, have been identified as the
major regional centers. Excavations at smaller sites and surface surveys have given additional
information about Indus Valley urbanism and rural settlements. The five major sites are dis-
tributed at fairly regular intervals from north-east to south. Each would have controlled a large
hinterland, with its agricultural production and natural resources. In addition, Dholavira must
have profited from its maritime location. What we do not know is whether these five cities, surely
preeminent in their respective regions, and indeed all cities and towns, were joined together in a
single state, or whether, as in Sumer, the city-state was the basic unit of government.
We shall focus here on Mohenjo-Daro, with a brief look at Lothal, a smaller city in the extreme
south-east of the Harappan region, to see how the layout and architectural features of a provin-
cial town compare with those of a metropolis.
MOHENJO-DARO
Mohenjo-Daro is the largest known city of the Indus Valley Civilization, with an inhabited area
now estimated, thanks to surface survey work, at over 250ha. The city proper, covering an area of
ca. 80ha as explored through excavations, is a well-planned city located today some 5km from the
Indus River. It is not known whether the river flowed closer to the town in Harappan times.
Mohenjo-Daro is also the most extensively explored Harappan city, thanks to excavations
conducted first in 1921 by R. D. Banarji, then from 1922 to 1927 by Sir John Marshall, the first
director of antiquities of British India, with E. J. H. Mackay continuing until 1931. Work has
continued sporadically since the Second World War by British, American, and German teams.
Struck by major floods in antiquity on at least three occasions, the city still faces danger today.
Through capillary action, the ancient brick buildings suck water from deep in the ground. The
salts left behind after the water evaporates corrode the buildings. Effective protection against the
rapid disintegration of Harappan architecture has yet to be found.
Although the city wall has not yet come to light, Marshall assumed Mohenjo-Daro was forti-
fied, as has been attested at Harappa and at other, smaller sites. The wall would lie buried beneath
the unexcavated alluvial deposits in the surrounding plain. The city plan consists of two main
sectors, a higher part in the west, misleadingly called the “citadel” (Figure 4.2), and a lower, larger
town to the east. The placement of important public buildings in the north-west, characteristic of
the major Harappan sites, recalls Mesopotamian practice: one thinks of the ziggurat and temenos
at Ur, sited in the north-west of that city. In contrast with Mesopotamia, however, the lower town
70 THE NEAR EAST AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
was laid out on a rough grid plan,
with straight streets crossing at right
angles. The streets were oriented to
the cardinal points of the compass,
perhaps for religious reasons, such
as to connect the city with the cos-
mos. In another major difference,
baked brick was extensively used,
with air-dried mud bricks reserved
for fill. Both baked and air-dried
bricks came in standard sizes, such as
7cm × 14cm × 28cm. In bathrooms
they might be sawn into smaller
pieces, and for curved structures
such as wells, wedge-shaped bricks
were used. This ratio of 1:2:4 for
thickness to width to length was
standard throughout the Harap-
pan world. These proportions were
used not only for bricks but also
appeared often in the design of
rooms, houses, and public build-
ings. Similarly, stone weights, abun-
dant at Mohenjo-Daro, conform to
a uniform system of weights and
measures.
Why baked bricks? It has been
proposed that baked bricks were
developed as protection against
flooding. Whatever the reason
for the initial development, baked
bricks became standard in other
construction where its water-
resistant qualities were key: lin-
ing the drains routinely installed
in Harappan streets. Such networks of drains, from the latrines of private houses to side streets
to large drains from the main streets, covered with bricks or dressed stone, were a common
and distinctive feature of Harappan cities. Such systems of public hygiene far surpassed contem-
porary Mesopotamian or Egyptian efforts.
The “citadel”
The “citadel” must be a city center. Its physical setting is prominent, and it features large, impos-
ing buildings, some most likely the sites of religious ritual or public ceremony. The citadel is built
on an artificial platform, ca. 400m × 200m, made of sand and silt enclosed in a mud brick retain-
ing wall 6m thick. It rises some 13m above the plain, and well above the rest of the city.
Figure 4.2 Plan, the Citadel, Mohenjo-Daro
CITIES OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION 71
The exact functions of its fascinating, enigmatic buildings can only be guessed. Textual evidence
is, as noted, silent. In addition, the excavators did not uncover inside these buildings objects that
clearly revealed their functions. Today, excavators faced with such a situation would hope that
answers might come from the modest remains, such as potsherds, animal bones, and plant remains,
where their types, frequencies, and find spots have been carefully recorded, this evidence then
scrutinized for instructive patterns. But this was not standard practice in the 1920s on sites with
monumental architectural remains. Moreover, the plan of the “citadel” is incompletely known,
because of erosion, and because of the preservation in a key position on the top of the mound
of a second century AD Buddhist stupa and monastery. Nonetheless, certain hypotheses can be
advanced. Absent are any cult centers comparable to the temples that characterize Sumerian cit-
ies. Also lacking are buildings associated with secular rulers: palaces, for example, or royal tombs.
What, then, was going on here?
The most striking building on the citadel is the so-called Great Bath (Figure 4.3). This
complex contained in its core a large rectangular basin of baked brick, ca. 12m × 7m × 2.5m,
with steps, originally timber treads set in bitumen, at both short ends. The floor of the bath was
made of sawn bricks set on edge in gypsum mortar, with a layer of bitumen sealant between
the inner and outer “brick skins.” Water was supplied from a well in an adjacent room. An
outlet from one corner of the bath led to a drain that evacuated water onto the west side of the
mound.
This Great Bath lay in the open air, surrounded by a portico on all four sides. The entrance,
located on the south, provided access into a long, narrow room. The entire eastern side beyond
the portico consisted of small, cell-like rooms, while to the north lay an irregularly spaced set of
larger rooms, including at the far north a group reached by a staircase. It is usually assumed that
Figure 4.3 The Great Bath, Mohenjo-Daro