Department of Architecture

College of Environmental Design

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals

Module 3: Architecture of the Ancient Near East

 

 

Architectural Characteristics

Buildings and other Architectural Elements

Three types of architectural elements were examined as part of our study of the architecture of the ancient Near East: Cities and houses, temples and palaces. Out of these temples and palaces stand out as their outstanding building type. The importance of temples and palaces varied during the various period of the Mesopotamian civilization. The period of the ancient Near East witnessed significant development in city and house form. The courtyard house emerged as the dominant house form in the region. This originated from the Sumerian civilization and was used in all the civilizations that followed. The house consisted of a grouping of rooms around a courtyard. The house was inward looking with no opening to the outside, except for the entrance. Houses were grouped together sometimes sharing walls to form the dominant buildings of the city. Interspaced within the houses are found places for commerce and industrial production. Completing the picture of the city are narrow passages and roads that distribute people to its different parts. Across all the civilizations, cities were usually walled with thick massive brick walls punctuated with evenly distributed towers serving as buttresses. The ziggurat precinct at Ur, the palaces at Khorsabad and Parsepolis and the city of Babylon all had such walls

 

Temples started during the Sumerian period and were also common during the Babylonian period. They however declined in importance from the Sumerian period to the period of the Persian Empire. The Sumerian temples were raised on Ziggurats, while the character of the Babylonian temples is not certain because there is no trace of them. The Sumerian temples were divided into chief temples located outside the city and the city temple located within the fabric of the city. Palaces became important during the Assyrian period, when they became more prominent and important than temples as we saw in the Palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. The scale and complexity of palaces increased from the Assyrian period to the period of the Persian Empire. The legendary palace of Nebuchadnezzar during the Neo-Babylonian civilization with its hanging garden is widely reported in history. The Palaces at Parsepolis shows the level reached in palace development in the ancient Near East. There was no temple at the Parsepolis palace.

 

Building Materials, Construction System and Technologies

Materials

The buildings materials used in the ancient Near East were mud bricks, stone and timber. Clay was abundant and it was compressed in moulds and dried in the sun to provide mud bricks that was widely used in the construction of all types of buildings. It was used across all the cultures of the ancient Near East. Stone and timber were however scarce. Wood was scarce but was available for construction, being imported from Lebanon. It was applied mainly for roofing or for producing tools and ornaments. Stone was used by the Assyrians but only for relieve carving and for columnar support. Stone was extensively used in ancient Persia. Persia had richer stone resources because of its mountainous location compared to the other civilizations. The Babylonians also introduce glazed brick as a finishing in the façade of their gates and prominent buildings.

 

Construction

The predominance of mud brick as a building material led to the development of construction methods appropriate to its physical properties. Structurally such brick are weak when compared to stone. To compensate, the walls of buildings were very thick and reinforce with buttresses. This construction system is evident in the Sumerian temples. Vaulting and domes were also used in roofing to address the weak nature of mud bricks. Rooms were usually roofed with domes or vaults. Tunnel vaults were used to cover long narrow oblong spaces. The practice showed that the Mesopotamian civilizations had knowledge of the principles of vault and dome construction. Columnar construction was not very popular in the ancient Near East. It was used in few instances in the late Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. It was however extensively used in the Persian civilization. Persian architecture was columnar in nature, with column treatment incorporating practices borrowed from other civilizations in the region including the Egyptian and Greek civilizations.  

 

Technologies

Two technologies appear to have been commonly used in the Ancient Near East; passive cooling and water supply. Courtyards evolved in Mesopotamia probably as a means to modify its desert climatic environment. Courtyards were used as a passive control mechanism in buildings for cooling to create livable environments in houses. The thick walls of houses may also have served as a thermal storage, helping to alleviate the wide fluctuations of temperature that is common in desert environments. People of the ancient Near East also mastered the earth of water supply. Channels were used to move water and supply it to agricultural fields and houses. Ancient Babylonians were said to have an aqueduct that supplied water to the city. The hanging garden in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace would also be impossible without a means of transporting water from the ground to the garden.

 

Architectural Organizing principles

In reviewing the architecture of the ancient Near East, it is possible to identify three principles that are used in organizing both architectural form and the city. First, all architectural elements have a courtyard type organization. Thus houses, palaces and built temples are all organized around courtyards.  The second is that buildings, especially significant ones, are usually raised above the ground on a mountain. Within the city, the fabric is organized in an organic order with streets penetrating into neighborhoods and the whole city fenced. Three forces can be identified which account for the prevailing architectural organization principle; the nature of the geography of the region, symbolism and meaning to the people and social factors. Geography is a strong factor in shaping both the spatial organization of buildings and their built form. The area has very limited availability of construction materials. Limited availability means that Mud which is most common became the predominant material. The weakness of mud limited ability to construct wide spaces and to go beyond two stories in height. Because mud buildings were usually short lived, there was a practice of rebuilding new buildings on old ones. As new buildings were built on old ones this gradually led to the elevation of buildings and the realization that once elevated they are more secured from the floods that were common with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Such mountains increased in scale and complexity with time and resulted in the staged towers or ziggurats of the temples. The ancient Near East is located in a desert environment. This means that hash climatic conditions prevailed in the area. The grouping of rooms around a space and the evolution of courtyard design probably evolved in response to the hash climatic conditions. The prevalence of mud bricks as construction material coupled with the use of courtyard fixed the form of buildings as a regional solution. Most buildings, whether at a house or palace scale, were of one story multi-courtyard form.

Architectural organizing principles are as much a product of physical and natural forces as of the symbolisms and meanings attached to buildings by the people who built them. The role of symbolism is evident in the case of the Ziggurat temples and palaces. Located in an area where the forces of nature are unpredictable, the Sumerians had evolved a well-defined religious beliefs of a sort to which monumental architecture could give expression. As the Sumerians gradually elevated their buildings, they came to associated the resulting ziggurat with the belief that it was a ladder to the sky and that God came down to the Ziggurat to communicate with the chief priest and that the process of climbing the ladder also offered a holy experience. This gave symbolic meaning to the ziggurat and provided the motivation for building more impressive and larger mountains. Palaces expressed the power of Kings, who it is possible to say, were in competition with gods for attention. In Assyria, architecture expressed the authority and power of the king along with the use of the regional practice of courtyard construction. The palace at Khorsabad also shows the decline in the symbolic importance of the temple compared to the palace of the king, which is the epicenter of authority. In Persia, architecture reflects authority and power. The scale and treatment of the palace at Parsepolis is a reflection of the power of the Sovereign king of the Persian Empire. The form of the building is however the product of both time tested tradition of courtyard building coupled with the availability of new material, stone and its technique of construction. The availability of stone enabled the Persian emperors to building the huge reception rooms of the palace, while the general form of the palace reflects the practices of courtyard construction and fortified buildings. Social concerns may have also ultimately contributed to the evolution of the principles that guide the creation of architectural and urban form in the ancient Near East. Warfare was a common event in the area and so there was need for defense and protection from invading armies. The practice of building walls with towers was dictated by this practical need for defense. The Ziggurat tower also evolved as a point to last defense where people could flee to when they are under attack. From the relative safety, both physical and spiritual, of the temple precinct, they are able to repel any attack by invading armies. The courtyard house may also have evolved as a result of privacy needs by individual families. The courtyard house offers a privacy shield, which is able to seclude the private domain of the house from the public.