A Sumerian Palace and the "A" cemetery at Kish, Mesopotamia

110 A SUMERIAN PALACE AND "A" CEMETERY, KISH
MORTAR
Mud mortar seems to have been almost universally used at Kish, though
bitumen was commonly so used in the southern cities of Sumer. When used at
Kish, bitumen chiefly served to cover the surface of a pavement of burnt brick, or
it was sometimes plastered some distance up the mud-brick walls to form a water-
proof wainscot.
FOUNDATIONS
Throughout the palace, both in the older and the later portions, the founda-
tion or footing, as I prefer to call it, of a wall is considerably thicker than that
part of the wall which appeared above the level of the ground. It forms a kind of
shelf around the walls of a room, on the level of which the pavement is laid. This
shelf is not always of the same width all around the room, nor is it always of a
uniform height. The width varies from 17 cm to as much as 37 cm in the same
chamber. These foundations are filled up in their entirety with lumps of stiff
river-clay—a method of filling foundations commonly adopted at Kish at that
early period. It has been observed, not only at the palace, but also in another
building at Ingharra and in a huge fortress-palace ("P") about a mile to the N. W.
of the "A" mound. Judging from the conoidal cleavage of these lumps of clay,
they were dug out of the river bed in large masses, and then allowed to dry before
being thrown into the foundations. No particular care was taken in packing the
clay, and a section cut through a filling reveals holes and interstices between the
various lumps which range in size from pieces as big as an egg to others about
twice the size of a football. These pieces of clay were all irregular in size, not
fashioned in any way by the hand. After the foundations of a chamber had been
filled in as far as the top of the footing, it was levelled with ordinary alluvial earth,
and then bricks, baked or sun-dried, and sometimes both, were laid to make the
floor.
The exact object of filling foundations with clay instead of earth is a matter
for speculation. That it did not always prevent the subsidence of the paving is
proved by its irregularity in many of the rooms. If the palace had been a temple,
we might suggest that the filling was provided for its purity, on the basis that as
the river from which it is taken was sacred, the clay which formed its bed was
also sacred and therefore most suitable for use in a temple. As a secular building
is in question, however, the sacred or secular nature of its foundations ought not
to matter. The fact remains that in dedicatory inscriptions of a later date, the
frequent expression, "I laid this foundation with clean earth," suggests the sur-
vival of the custom of filling foundations with clean river-clay.
In practically every chamber, we cleared right down to the bottom of its
foundations with the hopes of finding objects that had been buried beneath the
pavement. Disappointment followed invariably, except for occasionally finding
graves of a later period. In the course of these investigations, however, one inter-
esting feature came to light—the foundations were themselves laid upon pavements
of mud brick. These pavements were so common that we are forced to
conclude that when the ground beneath the palace was levelled for building, a