palaces

   All of the great rulers of the ancient Mes-opotamian kingdoms and empires had palaces. The earliest one whose remains have survived was erected in the city of Eridu, southwest of Ur, in the early third millennium b.c. Most palaces in Mesopotamia were not strictly residential mansions for the king and his family. They also functioned as administrative centers, storage facilities, and sometimes as manufacturing centers featuring workrooms for artisans of various types. Usually, these diverse functions were separated within a palace, each consisting of a number of rooms clustered around a central, unroofed courtyard. In many cases the throne room, meeting halls, and storage and work facilities were on the ground floor and the residential suites on the upper stories. Typically, for security purposes, the throne room could be reached only by walking through a series of twisting corridors and doors, all of which were heavily guarded by soldiers. The larger palaces in the region also featured gardens and parks; archives filled with cuneiform tablets, bearing both administrative records and literature; and sturdy defensive walls running around the perimeter.

   One of the more impressive of the early royal Mesopotamian palaces was the one built at Mari in the eighteenth century B.C. by King Zimri-Lim. That it was well planned is evident from the ingenious complex of drainage channels beneath the floors. The structure had some three hundred rooms, several of which were devoted to an enormous archive of tablets. Many of these tablets contain letters exchanged by the monarchs of Zimri-Lim's day. The palace of the Assyrian king Sar-gon II at Dur-Sharukkin was notable for a massive spiral staircase that led to the roof, where the king and his astronomers could study the night sky. Another Assyrian city, Nineveh, featured several palaces, including those of Sennacherib (the so-called Palace Without Rival) and Ashurbanipal. Both had pairs of mammoth stone man-headed bulls guarding the entrances, a sight that must have struck visitors with awe and fear. Both palaces also had lengthy and elaborate panels of carved reliefs showing battles and hunting scenes; and Ashurbanipal's palace housed his famous library/archive containing thousands of baked-clay tablets.

   Even larger and more sumptuous was the palace of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. Erected in the early 500s b.c., it had at least six hundred rooms and was decorated by extensive sculptures coated with gold and lapis lazuli. After the fall of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, the Persians adopted some of the same architectural styles and decorative motifs used in earlier Mesopotamian palaces, though Persian palaces also had some distinctive features of their own. The great terrace in the Persian capital of Per-sepolis supported three palaces - those of Darius I, Xerxes I, and Artaxerxes I - all situated close to an enormous audience hall (the apadana).

   See also: building materials and methods; Palace Without Rival; Pasargadae; Persepolis; sculpture