Furniture
Furniture
Household Furniture. Household furniture differed over time, location, and economic status of the owners. Like modern furniture, ancient Mesopotamian furniture was usually made from wood and other organic materials that decomposed. Fine furniture might be inlaid with other rare woods or ivory. Furniture designs in the third and second millennia b.c.e. were similar. Early second millennium b.c.e. texts from Mari include detailed descriptions of how royal furniture was made.
Seating. Constructed in many shapes and sizes from a wide variety of woods, chairs had legs, backs, and sometimes arms. They were often painted. Stools were made as early as the third millennium b.c.e. and were used by lower-class workers. Some stools had crossed legs and could be folded up. Padded armchairs, sedan chairs, and thrones were also made. Chair seats were covered with leather, palm fiber, rushes, or felt. Some chairs had loose linen slipcovers. One Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668 -circa 627 b.c.e.), was depicted reclining on a couch, which
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may have been made in Phoenicia or Syria, whose craftsmen decorated furniture with carved ivory inlays.
Tables. Artwork and texts from the third millennium b.c.e. reveal that Mesopotamians of that period ate their meals at tables and tray tables. Tables, models of tables, and illustrations of tables on reliefs have survived from the first millennium b.c.e. in Assyria. Tables were typically made of wood and sometimes decorated with metal or ivory inlays. They often had three legs so they would be stable on uneven ground.
Beds and Bedding. Beds were usually made of a frame and supporting base of wood. Rope, interwoven reeds, or metal strips woven in a crisscross pattern were sometimes used to support the mattress, which might be stuffed with wool, goats’ hair, or palm fibers. Linen sheets, cushions, and blankets might be placed atop the mattress. Not everybody owned a bed. The poor slept on mats made from straw or reeds.
Floor Coverings. Tablets refer to bedside mats on the floor. Palaces may have had carpets. Limestone slabs in the palaces of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib (704–681 b.c.e.) and Ashurbanipal (668 - circa 627 b.c.e.) at Nineveh were carved to imitate carpeting.
Sources
Elizabeth Simpson, “Furniture in Ancient Western Asia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, 4 volumes, edited by Jack M. Sasson (New York: Scribners, 1995), III: 1647–1661.
Marten Stol, “Private Life in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, I: 485–501.
THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON?
The fourth century b.c.e. Babylonian priest Berossus described “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon” in his-Babylonaica, written to explain the culture of Mesopotamia to the Seleucid masters of Babylonia. According to Berossus, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar .II (604–562 b.c.e.) created the Hanging Gardens to please his wife, who longed for the mountainous areas of her native Media in Iran. The Hanging Gardens became one of the “Seven Wonders” of the ancient world. However, there are no references to such a garden among Nebuchadnezzar’s many building inscriptions or among the references to Babylon in the fifth century b.c.e.Histories by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who claimed to have visited the city less than a century after Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. In a corner of one of Nebuchadnezzar’s palaces, archaeologists found an underground crypt, where a three-shafted well in one of the cellars may have been some kind of hydraulic lifting system—perhaps the water source of the Hanging Gardens—but no archaeological finds have provided compelling evidence for the existence of the Hanging Gardens. Recent scholars have suggested that late-classical writers may have confused the vast building activities of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon with those of the earlier Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 b.c.e.) at Nineveh, which did, in fact, possess a vast artificial garden.
Sources: Stanley Mayer Burstein, The Babylonaica of Berossus, Sources and Monographs, Sources from the Ancient Near East, volume 1, fascicle 5 (Malibu, Cal.: Undena Publications, 1978).
Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens; Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled,” Iraq, 56 (1994): 45–58.
Irving L. Finkel, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in The Seven of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, edited by Peter A. Clayton and Martin Price (London & New York Routledge, 1988), pp. 38–58.