or the Romans push the application of the vault to an equal degree of perfection. In most of the halls of Sargon’s palace a slab pierced with a hole was remarked in the middle of the bricks which form the pavement: this was the orifice of a vertical conduit opening into a vaulted drain concealed in the terrace. One of these drains had an ogival vaulting, the description of which we will borrow from MM. Perrot and Chipiez.[29] “The bricks composing it are trapezoidal in shape, two of their sides being slightly rounded—the one concave, the other convex. The radius of this curve varies with each brick, being governed by its destined place in the vault. These bricks go therefore in pairs, and as there are four courses of bricks on each side of the vault, four separate and different moulds would be required, besides a fifth, of which we shall presently have to speak. The four narrow sides of these bricks differ sensibly from one another. The two curved faces, being at different distances from the centre, are of unequal lengths; while, as the lower oblique edge is some inches below the upper in the curve, these two edges have different directions. In their disinclination to use stone voussoirs the Assyrian builders here found themselves compelled to mould bricks of very complicated form, and the way in which they accomplished their task speaks volumes for their skill.” The two upper voussoirs meeting and touching one another by one of their corners, the triangular space left empty between their edges was filled up either by wedge-shaped bricks or by mortar. The drain which we have just given as an example is 4 ft. 7 in. high under the keystone and 3 ft. 8 in. broad; the explorers were able to follow it to a length of 216 feet. To facilitate its construction the architect conceived the ingenious idea of building it upon an inclined plane—that is to say, that all the rows of voussoirs, instead of being perpendicular, lean considerably backwards, and are supported one upon the other; this system, which did not at all affect the solidity of the vaulting, allowed the builders to do without circular wooden frames.
Fig. 42.—Vaulted drain at Khorsabad. Slope of the bricks (after Place).
So much technical skill devoted to the construction of simple subterranean conduits makes us particularly regret that the deplorable quality of the material did not allow the vaults and domes of the palaces to exist till our day. However, there were not only vaulted halls in the Ninevite buildings; a certain number of them were covered by flat roofs formed of beams of palm-wood, poplar-wood or cedar-wood, which supported light terraces. The bas-relief at Kouyunjik which we cited above shows us flat roofs side by side with parabolic and spheroidal cupolas. Nevertheless, what we said about the use of stone in the Ninevite structures we can repeat here on the subject of timber. Nineveh, not being too remote from the wooded mountains of Armenia, Kurdistan and Masius, where forests of pines, beeches, and oaks grow, did not deprive herself of the use of these woods in her structures; she had panelled halls in her palaces, and, at the apogee of her power, when thousands and thousands of slaves placed their strength at the service of her monarchs, she had the timber of the Amanus and the Lebanon transported into her buildings. The king Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857) relates in one of his inscriptions that he had an enormous quantity of pines, cedars, and oaks cut down in the Amanus and the Lebanon in order to have them carried to Nineveh, and to employ them in the construction of his palace and the temples of his favourite gods. Other princes, such as Sargon, Sennacherib, Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, make the same boast of having utilised, in the buildings which they erected or repaired, beams brought from the Amanus and the Lebanon. “I caused the tallest cedars of Lebanon,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “to be brought to Babylon; the sanctuary of E-Kua, in which the god Marduk dwells, was freshly covered with beams of cedar-wood.”[30] This is the wood of resinous nature, “the odour of which is good,” add the inscriptions. At the British Museum fragments of a cedar beam, collected among the ruins of Assur-nasir-pal’s palace at Nimroud, are preserved. Who will ever be able to say what efforts and how many human lives were required to transport these gigantic rafters across a rough country without any roads for traffic, from the Lebanon as far as the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates? Accordingly it may be affirmed that the use of wood was always exceptional in the Chaldæo-Assyrian structures; it was never introduced except as an exotic element, of which the monarchs boast on account of its rarity. The climate and the nature of the Mesopotamian soil were better suited by thick vaultings, which, then as at the present day, never ceased to be the rule there.
Quite as little as the Chaldæans, and for the same motives, did the Assyrians make a frequent and regular use of the column as an element of their architecture. Victor Place notices, like the explorers of Lower Chaldæa, several façades in the palace of Sargon adorned with pilasters and half-columns of brick, projecting beyond the plane of the walls, and having no object except to relieve the monotony of the structure. Perhaps, too, these half-columns, which are found in groups of seven, had, like the two famous pillars in the Temple of Solomon, a mystical and symbolical meaning, the number seven playing an essential part among the mythological conceptions of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. Elsewhere a few bases of columns and a few monolithic capitals have been found, which prove that the Assyrians used stone supports for monumental porches, as we ascertained in the palace of Tello. A fragment of a bas-relief preserved at the British Museum, and coming from the palace of Assurbanipal, shows us ([fig. 43]) the façade of a great building adorned with a projecting roof, supported by four pilasters and four columns. The base of these columns rests on the back of gigantic lions, which seem to advance to meet one another, two and two. On the back of the lion the architect has placed a coussinet, surmounted by a torus and by the stem of the column. In the ruins of the palace of Kouyunjik, four bases of columns were found still in place, and seeming to belong to a covered gallery; there were also two small winged bulls with human heads, crowned with the tiara, and supporting on their back a spheroidal base decorated with geometrical designs in relief. At Nimroud Sir A. H. Layard noticed also two crouching sphinxes bearing bases of columns ([fig. 44]); according to the same architectural principle the foot of the arches rested upon the gigantic bulls which flanked the chief entrances of the palaces.
