A town in each style

The rules it illustrates

The henge: the ditch inside the bank. Enclose the gathering place with a circular bank of chalk and dig the ditch on the inside of it, so that the earthwork marks off a sacred interior rather than defending it; leave causeways of undug ground for the entrances.

Timber for the living, stone for the ancestors. Build the circle of the living in timber, which decays, beside the settlement; build the circle of the ancestors in stone, which endures, apart from it; and join the two by avenues and the river.

Link each monument to the river by an avenue. Run a straight, banked or surfaced avenue from the entrance of each monument down to the river, on the monument’s solstice axis, so that the approach itself is aligned on the sun.

The first houses: stakes, wattle and mud. Set up forked stakes, weave twigs between them and daub the walls with mud; roof them with reeds and leaves, steep enough to shed the rain.

The pyramid town: laid out at once, divided by rank. Build the town for a royal pyramid in one campaign, as a walled rectangle on a grid of straight streets; wall off the quarter of the labourers’ small houses from the quarter of the officials’ mansions, and give each rank a standard house.

Open the house to the north wind. Turn the principal rooms and the columned portico of a house to face north, towards the cool prevailing wind, and keep the walls to the south and west blank against the sun.

Size the granary by reckoning. Find a granary’s capacity from its measures: multiply length, breadth and height in cubits (or, for a round bin, the square of eight-ninths of the diameter by the height), and add half as much again to turn cubic cubits into the grain measure, the khar.

Babylon: straight streets to the river. Lay the city out square, walled and moated, with the river through its middle; run the streets straight, some along the river and others across it at right angles, each ending at a gate in the wall along the bank.