Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/405

 ATTEMPTS TO RESTORE THE PRINCIPAL TYPES. 379 clear both at front and back, providing an ample promenade. On the other three it showed it-self just sufficiently to "furnish" the building and diversify its aspect without in any way encumbering it. The whole structure terminated in a chapel placed on the central axis of the tower, and surmounted by a cupola. The inscriptions mention the dome covered with leaves of chiselled gold which crowned at Babylon that temple " to the foundations of the earth " which was restored by Nebuchadnezzar. 1 In these texts another sanctuary included in the same building and placed half way between the base and summit is mentioned. This was the sepulchral chamber of Bel-Merodach in which his oracle was consulted ; in M. Chipiez's restoration the entrance to this sanctuary is placed in the middle of the fifth story. The vast esplanade about the base of the temple was suggested by the description of Herodotus. It is borne by two colossal plinths flanked and retained by buttresses. In our plate the lower of these two plinths is only hinted at in the two bottom corners. In the distance behind the temple itself may be seen one of those embattled walls which divided Babylon into so many fortresses, and, still farther away, another group of large buildings surrounded by a wall and the ordinary houses of the city. This double-ramped type is at once the most beautiful and the most workmanlike of those offered by these staged towers. With a single ramp we get a tower whose four faces are repetitions of each other, but here we have a true facade, on which a happy contrast is established between the unbroken stages and those c> upon which the ramps appear between oblique lines and lines parallel with the soil. The building gains in repose and solidity, and its true scale becomes more evident than when the eye is led insensibly from base to summit by a monotonous spiral. We cannot positively affirm that the architects of Mesopotamia understood and made use of the system just described ; there 1 " I undertook in Bit-Saggatou," says the king, " the restoration of the chamber of Merodach ; I gave to its cupola the form of a lily, and I covered it with chiselled gold, so that it shone like the day," London inscription, translated by M. Fr. LENORMANT, in his Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. pp. 228-229. See also a text ot" Philostratus in his life of Apollonins of Tyaua, (i. 25). The sophist who seems to have founded his description of Babylon on good information, speaks of a "great brick edifice plated with bronze, which had a dome representing the firmament and shining with gold and sapphires."