The caravan route leads through the desert to the city
gate, and if we substitute two massive temple towers for the domes of
the mosques that rise above the wall, little else in the picture need be
changed.
[Illustration: 284.jpg APPROACH TO THE CITY OF SAMARRA, SITUATED ON THE
LEFT BANK OF THE TIGRIS.]
A small caravan is here seen approaching the city at sunset
before the gates are shut. Samarra was only founded in A. D.
834, by the Khalif el-Motasim, the son of Harun er-Rashid,
but customs in the East do not change, and the photograph
may be used to illustrate the approach of an early
Babylonian caravan to a walled city of the period.
The houses, too, at this period must have resembled the structures of
unburnt brick of the present day, with their flat mud tops, on which
the inmates sleep at night during the hot season, supported on poles
and brushwood. The code furnishes evidence that at that time, also, the
houses were not particularly well built and were liable to fall, and,
in the event of their doing so, it very justly fixes the responsibility
upon the builder. It is clear from the penalties for bad workmanship
enforced upon the builder that considerable abuses had existed in the
trade before the time of Hammurabi, and it is not improbable that the
enforcement of the penalties succeeded in stamping them out.
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