Britain and the Arab Middle East

by Cooper, Lisa;

  Fig. 3.13 One of the principal doors into the mosque court of the palace, from the north. The door is set within a recess, while the archway above is embellished with a distinctive cusped pattern of stucco.

  Fig. 3.14 The south-eastern corner of the southern arcade of the mosque (no. 11), which was among the most highly decorated vaults in the palace. It consists of a quarter-dome formed by transverse arches and covered in a decorative stucco pattern of fluting, crenellated lozenges, recessed circles, a fluted corner squinch and flanking shallow semi-domes.

  Once more, Bell seems to have shown incredible restraint in the face of this stupendous scoop. To make matters even worse, she probably recognized that she had prompted the Germans’ work in the first place. Back in 1909, just two days after having departed from Ukhaidir (on 30 March), Bell had made her first visit to the German excavations at Babylon. Still brimming with excitement over her discovery, she had not hesitated to announce her visit to Ukhaidir and was forthcoming about her plans and observations with the German team members, who included Friedrich Wetzel.80 Her letter implies that the Germans had not known about the place and certainly had never seen it, much less were planning their own expedition there. Nevertheless, they were clearly impressed by its description, agreeing that it was, to use Bell's words, ‘the most important building of its period that has yet been found’.81 Bell was sufficiently proud of her discovery to write at the time: ‘It's the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me. I shall publish it in a big monograph all to itself and it will make a flutter in the dovecotes’.82 Such a statement surely reflects her impression of having a sole claim to the site.

  We can only conclude that the Germans, having now heard through Bell of the magnificence of Ukhaidir, resolved to explore the place themselves. Ukhaidir was, after all, fewer than two days from Babylon, and a short excursion into the desert such as this would have been an entirely feasible, if not welcome, respite from long and arduous days of archaeological investigations in the mudbrick mounds of Babylon. Moreover, Reuther and his colleagues possibly felt they were capable of producing a more thorough and scholarly study than Bell, given their prodigious architectural skills and archaeological training, and so set out to publish their own report in a timely fashion. Bell, for her part, never reported what might have been construed as an underhanded scheme, nor, throughout her lifetime, did she ever express any bitterness over the incident. The only hint of her true feelings comes not from her own writings but from a speech penned after her death by her step-sister, Elsa (Lady Richmond). In this lecture on Bell's life and achievements, which was given to raise funds for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, Lady Richmond recounts Gertrude's discovery of Ukhaidir and consequent publication.83 She proceeds with the words: ‘But it was a great disappointment of her that some German archaeologists who visited it after she did, brought out a book on it first before hers appeared.’ Tellingly, a line was struck through that part of the sentence, indicating that Lady Richmond ultimately chose not to speak those words. We wonder whether, in the end, she also elected to preserve Bell's propriety over this disappointment.

  There is no denying that Oskar Reuther's Ocheïdir, published on behalf of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, is a fine report. Particularly noteworthy is its focus on the architectural details of the Ukhaidir palace. Every room, court, doorway, arch and vault was carefully described, measured and exquisitely drawn. Considerable energy was also spent describing and visualizing the various construction techniques used. The report's greatest strengths are the splendid reconstructions of the desert edifice's various features, bringing the palace to life and impressing upon the reader its truly magnificent character when it was in use. It is hard not to be affected by the splendour of the Court of Honour as Reuther rendered it, with its dazzling, open space framed by arcades, the towering three-storey gatehouse walls at the back, and a peacock in the foreground, enhancing the court's noble character (Fig. 3.15). The solemn grandeur of the southern arcade of the mosque, with its stuccoed vaults and brick-columned portico, is evoked in another reconstruction.84 Through such skilful recreations, the reader can enjoy the sensation of experiencing the palace in a way that plan drawings and even photographs of the present ruined mass can but hint at. Both Bell and Creswell, the latter visiting Ukhaidir in 1930, were clearly impressed by Reuther's publication and included several of his illustrations in their reports, thus acknowledging the clarity and experiential quality such images conveyed.

  Bell's own published reports of Ukhaidir differ from Reuther's Ocheidir in several significant ways. For one, as she was not an architect and no doubt found the task of drawing and planning architectural features challenging, she endeavoured to compensate for this weakness by producing extensive photographic records of Ukhaidir's many structural features. She took something in the range of 164 photographs of the palace in 1909 and 1911, of which about 87 were included in her final report, and they enhance her architectural descriptions considerably, clarifying the manner and appearance of certain architectural features and providing an incontestable record of their state when she observed them. Bell rightly remarks:

  Accurate reproduction of detail is of the highest value, and one good photograph of a dome that stands is worth a thousand conjectures after it has fallen. It is therefore essential that those who have the opportunity of visiting ancient monuments should spare no pains in making a careful record of structural methods, and, judging from my own experience, however lavish they may be in the taking of photographs, they will always have subsequent occasion to wish that they had been more lavish still.85

  Bell, however, was not simply satisfied by the task of producing a careful, detailed report of what she had seen and recorded. She was more ambitious than Reuther in that she wished to be able to explain Ukhaidir. She wanted to know who had occupied the palace, the date of its construction, and the range of architectural inspirations from both East and West that had affected its construction and end appearance. She was ultimately interested in Ukhaidir's place in the history of the architecture of the Near East and the Mediterranean world, and its relation to the cultural, religious and political developments of Late Antiquity and the Islamic period. To fulfil these ambitious aims, Bell felt the need to carry out research beyond Ukhaidir itself, incorporating not only information that she already had gained – in large part through her study of Late Antique ecclesiastical architecture – but also more recently acquired information from other Near Eastern archaeological and architectural reports. She also solicited the expertise and opinions of scholars working on the same issues and geographical region, to provide the most reliable, up-to-date reconstruction.

  Fig. 3.15 Reuther’s reconstruction of the Court of Honour, facing the northern gateway block. The northern façade, as also observed by Bell, had a second storey consisting of arched recesses, each separated from one another by piers made of clustered columns, while the arches themselves were decorated in plaster with a scalloped or lobed pattern similar to that which exists over the doors of the mosque. Within each of the arched recesses were two levels of blind niches. The upper storey was plain, with only two arched openings giving onto interior courts, while the top consisted of a band of shallow arched niches.

  Bell's Architectural Analyses and Dating of Ukhaidir

  Bell's first architectural investigations of Ukhaidir, which resulted in her proposal for the date of the palace, focused principally on several distinctive architectural features, which included its vaulting, the construction and employment of domed spaces, the use of masonry tubes and the presence of a mosque. These features were explored first in Bell's scholarly article ‘The Vaulting System of Ukheidar’, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1910.86 The features subsequently formed the basis for further investigations of Ukhaidir that took place after Bell's second visit, in 1911, and were incorporated and expanded upon in her final publication on Ukhaidir, which appeared in 1914. Bell's observations and findings concerning the
se features are discussed briefly here, with special emphasis on their contribution to the dating and identity of Ukhaidir. Further research by Bell – which endeavoured to situate Ukhaidir temporally within the wider tradition of Near Eastern palatial constructions and summoned comparable materials from Mesopotamia and beyond – will be described in a later chapter after further investigations by Bell, both in the field and at home, have been considered.

  Vaults

  The vault, an architectural feature that abounds at Ukhaidir, was used to cover the majority of spaces within the palace, from the smallest galleries and narrow corridors to the grandest of hallways, such as the Great Hall (no. 7) with its impressive, intact, seven-metre-wide brick vault (Fig. 3.16), and the principal iwan (no. 29), the palace's ceremonial focal point. Bell observed that while much of the construction of the vaults in the Ukhaidir castle had been accomplished with uncut stones laid in a thick bed of mortar, some of the finer vaults, such as the Great Hall, had been built of brick tiles.87

  Whichever material was used, Bell observed that the vaults had all been constructed using a time-honoured Mesopotamian technique known as the pitched vault. Such a construction was favourable because it was quite stable and did not require the placement of wooden centring beams in the vaults during the erection process, a quality much appreciated in timber-poor Mesopotamia.88 Relying on A. Choisy and other earlier scholars’ descriptions of the pitched vault technique, Bell describes the construction as often (but not always) consisting of walls that were first corbelled inwards on either side so as to reduce the space to be vaulted. Thus, the first few courses of brick or stone in the vault would have been laid lengthways, with each course receiving a slight inward projection. Above this, the bricks were set upright in concentric courses, or slices, thus forming the curve of the vault. The bricks were leaned at an angle against the head-wall at the back of the hall, so that each course of brick adhered to the course before it by means of a fast-drying mortar (Fig. 3.17). Slanting the bricks ensured that the succeeding course did not slip off before the mortar dried, and in this way the vault could be built without wooden centring beams. The result was a vault of ovoid or elliptical curve.89 Bell noted that this technique of vault construction could be seen in buildings dating to the earlier Sasanian period. In particular, she observed such vaults set on slightly inwardly projecting courses of brick in the side chambers of the Taq-i Kisra at Ctesiphon.90 The great vault of the Taq-i Kisra itself, which spans over 25 metres, was constructed using the same technique, although in this case there are no observable inwardly projecting courses to support it.91

  Bell placed the origins of the vault technique back in the much earlier periods of Mesopotamian history, where it regularly appeared in brick.92 In addition to its appearance among the Assyrian brick tombs at Assur, she reports a barrel vault with a span of four metres, found in the gateway of Sargon's Assyrian palace at Khorsabad and dating back to the eighth century BCE.93 Actually, we now know that this type of construction dates even earlier in Mesopotamia. Vaults of pitched brick have been encountered at Tell al-Rimah in northern Mesopotamia, for example, the earliest examples dating back to around 2000 BCE.94 They have also been found over brick drainage pits at Khafajeh and in Isin-Larsa levels at Nippur.95 Whatever the precise date of the pitched brick vault's first appearance, current evidence does suggest that it originated in ancient Mesopotamia, and that by emphasizing these earlier instances, Bell correctly traced the vaults at Ukhaidir – not back to some Western architectural tradition but back to their direct ancestors in Iraq.

  Fig. 3.16 Bell’s photograph of the pitched brick vaulted ceiling of the Great Hall in Ukhaidir’s palace, looking south into the Court of Honour, where Bell made her camp during her visit to the site in 1911.

  Besides the employment of pitched brick vaulting, Bell observed another distinctive vault construction at Ukhaidir, this taking the form of an intersecting or ‘groin’ vault. Bell noted eight examples at Ukhaidir, these occurring in the corners of Corridor 28, where the barrel-vaulted spaces meet at right angles. They also appear in the middle of the east and west arms of Corridor 28, where they were set between two transverse arches, and in Vestibule 61, the southern continuation of the corridor as it enters into the suite of rooms centred on Courts D and E.96 Finally, she observed a groin vault in the square Room 141 of the East Annex.97 These distinctive groin vaults were constructed of stone slabs cut to resemble the shape of bricks, the exception being the vault in Vestibule 61, which was actually made of bricks.98 All of the vaults, regardless of their materials, were characterized by vertical courses, laid with a slight backwards inclination against the head wall or transverse arch and emanating from horizontally laid, corbelled springers that spanned the corners of the spaces to be covered (Fig. 3.18).99 The groin vaults demanded little or no centring, and once constructed, they were covered over with plaster (Fig. 3.19).100

  According to Bell, the groin vault originated to the west – first in Asia Minor (Anatolia) as early as the second century BCE – but developed more boldly in Rome after that.101 Its prolific presence is well documented in Constantinople during the Byzantine Era of the sixth century CE.102 Nevertheless, it appears to have been unknown in Sasanian architecture further to the east.103 This factor made Bell increasingly doubtful of a Sasanian date for Ukhaidir's construction, although many of her contemporaries, including the French scholar Marcel Dieulafoy, preferred this early period. Dieulafoy, a leading expert on Sasanian art and architecture who had excavated and recorded a great number of Sasanian-dated monuments in Persia, argued in a letter to Bell that the groin vault was the product of the many expeditions that Sasanian rulers had made around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean up to the beginning of the seventh century, and their exposure to the cultural traditions of Greece and Rome.104 Bell, however, preferred hard physical evidence to this kind of conjecture, and for this reason she placed considerable stock in the work of A. Choisy, who had argued for an Islamic Umayyad date for the first appearance of the groined vault in Syria, based on his own survey of its known occurrences from this period.105 Other data supporting an early Islamic date for the introduction of the groined vault, as reported by Bell, included its appearance at the hunting lodge of Qasr ‘Amra on the western side of the Syrian desert (in present-day Jordan), just recently investigated in Bell's time and dated to the caliphs of the Umayyad Era in the first half of the eighth century.106 Significantly, there is still no justification for the groin vault's presence in Sasanian-period architecture, underlining the reliability of some of Bell's early convictions concerning the spread and date of this distinctive feature in the East and her ultimate assertion that its appearance at Ukhaidir indicates an Islamic date for the complex.107

  Fig. 3.17 A drawing of a pitched brick vault from the Neo-Assyrian site of Khorsabad, showing how each course of bricks was leaned at an angle against the head-wall of the room, providing the necessary support for the next course. This same time-honoured Mesopotamian tradition of vault construction was also employed within the palace at Ukhaidir, as observed by Bell.

  Domed Spaces

  Considering when Bell's discussion of domed spaces was written, its depth and accuracy is considerable and its contribution to an understanding of Ukhaidir's architectural influences is not insignificant. Domed spaces were used sparingly at Ukhaidir. One dome, which is fluted on the interior and may have had an aperture at its summit, covers the small chamber (Room 4) between the North Gate and the Great Hall (Fig. 3.20).108 Although not preserved, it is likely that a dome also covered the space (no. 27) between the Great Hall and the Court of Honour.109 Last, Bell observed that the tower chambers in the chemin de ronde of the outer enclosure wall, none of which were found intact, were covered with ovoid domes.110 Bell perceptively noted that many other spaces in the castle could have been domed, but instead the architect covered the space with barrel or groin vaults.111 Moreover, of the spaces that are domed, none is particularly large – i.e., none is wider t
han about 3.1 metres.112 Both of these facts suggest that the Ukhaidir builders were neither sufficiently experienced nor confident in their dome construction skills to make the dome a prolific element of the castle's architecture.

  Bell's discussion probes the use of domed spaces in history, particularly from the perspective of the Near East and the development of the technology of dome construction through time in this part of the world. She points to early Mesopotamian examples of the dome, including an Assyrian carved relief image from the Kuyunjik mound at Nineveh, showing domed buildings dating back to the seventh century BCE.113 She is probably correct to liken some of these Assyrian examples to contemporary mudbrick beehive houses known from parts of northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia, where the covered spaces are built of ‘oversailing rings’, or corbelling, and not true domes.114 One may add to Bell's repertoire of Mesopotamian domes several other early examples encountered in excavations in parts of Mesopotamia over the past 100 years, some even going back into prehistory, but it remains to be proven that anything but small spaces were ever covered by such features.115 Like vaults, domes over large spaces – such as would occur in monumental palaces or temples, for example – do not seem to have been present in ancient Mesopotamia.