Fig. 40.—Vaulted drain (after Layard).
The place where it has been possible to observe the employment of the vault in the architecture of the Assyrian palaces, is in the very bowels of the basements of these edifices. A vast corridor, surmounted by a semicircular vaulting, was discovered by the English explorers, in the flanks of the mound of Nimroud; the lower courses are of enormous slabs of stone, all the rest is brick. In the scientific system of drains which carried off the sewage of the palace of Sargon, Place distinguished every kind of vaulting: the pointed or ogival vault, the semicircular vault, the flat-arched vault, the shallow vault, the elliptical vault.
Never, at any point in their history, did the Egyptians
Fig. 41.—Vaulted drain at Khorsabad (after Place).