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Has this staggering of gates back and forth, been used in any type of castle before?
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Although a total of seven is pretty extravagant, it was fairly standard NOT to put gates in a line, which would give an attacker a straight shot through them; generally some setup was designed so that if the enemy breached the first gate, they would have to move sideways between (manned) walls to get to the second.
Tolkien incorporates something like this into Caras Galadhon, whose curtain-wall overlaps forming a lengthy enclosed passage between its ends.