The Babylonian World (Routledge Worlds)

which were clearly located within residential areas is also attested, and contracts for
the construction of reed structures have survived. Other evidence for the location of
craft production and industry is slight, apart from those activities which we know
from the textual evidence to have taken place within the temple precinct (see above).
Small-scale production could well have taken place within the residential areas, in
the aforementioned workshops, but those processes that were noxious (such as tanning)
or required copious amounts of water would presumably have been located elsewhere;
direct evidence is lacking.

Open spaces and gardens

Open spaces have not often been identified in excavations at first millennium sites.
Even where they have, it is difficult to assess their extent and function. The textual
corpus provides ample evidence for vacant land within the city in the form of privately
owned unbuilt plots. These could be bought and sold, just like built structures, and
were ripe for redevelopment. On the other hand, there is practically no reference to
unbuilt land belonging to the institutions of temple and state which might have
been used for dumping refuse, recreation, or any other kinds of communal activities

• the lack is inevitable, since the textual record is concerned essentially with tracking
  the transfer of private property, and (to a lesser extent) with the exploitation of that
  owned by the temple. It is worth drawing attention to the sale of a remarkable 5 , 600
  square metres of derelict land in the city of Sippar which took place in 570 BC( Jursa
  1999 : 89 , 142 – 144 ); we assume that the buyer intended to develop the land, and it
  is surely no coincidence that the sale took place at a time which saw a surge in
  economic prosperity and, most likely, a growth in urban population.
  There is textual evidence for the existence of a ‘Royal Garden’ within the city of
  Uruk, and we might speculate that this was located in the vicinity of the royal palace
  there, whose approximate location has been suggested by Kessler ( 1999 : 171 ). There
  is also abundant evidence for the presence of date orchards within the city. Babylon,
  on the other hand, was too densely populated for orchards to be established within
  the walled city itself, but cultivation did take place within the area between the inner
  walls and the long, triangular stretch of outer wall on the east side of the city. The
  location of the so-called ‘Hanging Gardens’ remains a matter of controversy.

Sanitation

While monumental structures were equipped with well-built, sometimes elaborate
drainage installations, drainage and sanitation within the residential areas were, rather,
matters for the individual households to take care of. Water had to be fetched from
the nearest water course and would therefore be used as sparingly as possible; activities
that required a lot of water would have taken place by the canal or river. Drainage
within the house, at ground floor level, was usually effected by means of soakaways,
i.e. shafts dug into the floor and lined with hollow ceramic drums laid vertically one
above the other. Built drains consisting of baked brick channels running through the
bases of walls and draining onto the street are somewhat less common, no doubt
because the level of the street outside was often higher than that of the internal floors.
This difference in levels was no barrier, however, to draining rainwater off the roofs

— Heather D. Baker —