A little further evidence can be drawn from other Mesopotamian sites.  The city of Asshur had a long, broad avenue like the sacred road of Babylon, but the one insula of its private houses which has yet been excavated, planned and published, shows no sign of rectangular planning.[16] There is also literary evidence that Sanherib (765-681 B.C.) laid out a ‘Kingsway’ 100 ft. wide to promote easy movement through his city of Nineveh, and Delitzsch has even credited the Sargonid dynasty generally (722-625 B.C.) with a care for the dwellings of common men as well as of gods and of kings.[17]

    [16] Mitt, deutsch.  Orient-Gesell. 28, Sept. 1905; 31, May
    1906.

    [17] F. Delitzsch, Asurbanipal und die assyr.  Kultur seiner
    Zeit (Der alte Orient, Leipzig, 1909), p. 25.

In conclusion, the mounds of Babil and Kasr and others near them seem to represent the Babylon alike of fact and of Herodotus.  It was a smaller city than the Greek historian avers; its length and breadth were nearer four than fourteen miles.  But it had at least one straight, ample, and far-stretching highway which gave space for the ceremonies and the processions, if not for the business or the domestic comforts, of life.  In a sense at least, it was laid out with its streets straight.  Nor was it the only city of such a kind in the Mesopotamian region.  Asshur and Nineveh, both of them somewhat earlier in date than Babylon, possessed similar features.  These towns, or at least Babylon, seem to have been known to Greek travellers, and probably suggested to them the adornment of their Hellenic homes with similar streets.  The germ of Greek town-planning came from the east.

CHAPTER III

GREEK TOWN-PLANNING:  FIRST EFFORTS

Greek town-planning began in the great age of Greece, the fifth century B.C.  But that age had scant sympathy for such a movement, and its beginnings were crude and narrow.  Before the middle of the century the use of the processional highway had established itself in Greece.  Rather later, a real system of town-planning, based on streets that crossed at right angles, became known and practised.  Later still, in the early fourth century, the growing care for town-life produced town by-laws and special magistrates to execute them.  In some form or other, town-planning had now taken root in the Greek world.

The two chief cities of Greece failed, indeed, to welcome the new movement.  Both Athens, the city which by itself means Greece to most of us, and Sparta, the rival of Athens, remained wholly untouched by it.  Alike in the days of Themistocles and Pericles and in all its later history, Athens was an almost Oriental mixture of splendid public buildings with mean and ill-grouped houses.  An often-quoted saying of Demosthenes puts the matter in its most favourable light: 

’The great men of old built splendid edifices for the use of the State, and set up noble works of art which later ages can never match.  But in private life they were severe and simple, and the dwelling of an Aristides or a Miltiades was no more sumptuous than that of any ordinary Athenian citizen’ (Third Olynthiac Oration, 25).