Fig. 43.—Façade with pilasters (from bas-relief in British Museum representing Babylon).
Fig. 44.—Base of column (after Layard).
The stem of the columns was probably of wood, painted or covered with a metallic envelope. Round the inner courtyards there were, as in the courts of oriental palaces in our own day, porticoes formed of cedar beams resting on bases analogous to those which we have just noticed. Strabo[31] reminds us that in Babylon beams of palm-wood were used in the construction of houses: “They are careful,” he says, “to wrap round each palm-wood pillar with rush-cords, which are then covered with several coats of paint.” Things were not done quite in this way in the houses of the rich and in princely residences. A fragment of a cedar beam of the size of a man was discovered at Khorsabad. It was still overlaid with a plating of bronze decorated with designs in repoussé, which imitate the bark of a palm-trunk.
Fig. 45.—Assyrian capital (after Place, Ninive et l’Assyrie, pl. 35).