Build the temple tower as a solid stepped mass of brick, each stage set back on the one below, with a shrine on its summit and stairs climbing its principal face.
Rules · Cities · Plans · Walls
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.
Herodotus describes Babylon as a vast square, each side 120 stades (over 20 km, a gross exaggeration), girdled by a deep moat and a wall of baked brick; the Euphrates flows through the middle, walled along both banks; and the streets, lined with houses of three and four storeys, run straight, those across the river ending at little bronze gates that open onto the water.
The excavated inner city is a rectangle of about 2.5 by 1.5 km, and the residential quarter of Merkes does have streets roughly straight and roughly at right angles. The houses found there are of one or two storeys round a court; Herodotus’s taller houses may be a misunderstanding, or may have stood elsewhere.
Related rules
Build the core of sun-dried mud brick; case it with baked brick laid in bitumen, with layers of reed matting through the mass and weep holes to let water out.
Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.
Raise and pave the processional road from the city gate to the god’s temple, wall it on both sides, and build the gate of glazed brick bearing the beasts of the gods, with cedar roofs and bronze-clad doors.
Build the house blank to the street, enter it through a bent passage, and arrange its rooms round a single open court, with the principal room broad and on the south side so that it faces north into shade.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Babylon: straight streets to the river”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/herodotus-babylon-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.