The Assyrian palace, like Arab houses, developed itself entirely in area, and not in height; there was rarely a second story on the platform. Nevertheless such a second story exists sometimes; it is then open at the sides, and the roof is supported by small columns. These columns, of wood rather than of stone or brick, form a gallery over the façade, and they are adorned at their upper extremity with a double volute as a capital. Bas-reliefs show us houses thus surmounted by a colonnade, which supports a light, flat roof of wooden beams. At the present day, houses in Kurdistan are still built on the same lines, and show an identical arrangement in two stories; the lower without windows, the upper open at the sides.
Fig. 48.—Base of small column (British Museum).
In a word, the Assyrians, like the Chaldæans, not having at their disposal building-stone in great abundance, were obliged to construct their edifices almost exclusively of brick, the capabilities of which they tried to the utmost. The result of this was that they never had those halls of columns which are the triumph of Egyptian architecture. However thick one may suppose pillars of brick, or columns formed of bricks moulded in the shape of segments of a circle, to be, these supports will never offer the same guarantee of solidity as the stone column. Wherever a heavy burden, such as a vault or a terrace, had to be supported, great walls were raised of an extraordinary thickness, which it would have been imprudent to pierce with windows capable of diminishing its resistance. Air and light only penetrated into the apartments by the doors; often, too, an opening was contrived at the summit of the vault or dome, formed of a cylindrical pipe of burnt clay carried through the entire thickness of the structure.
§ II. Palaces.
The town of Dur-Sarrukin (the Fortress of Sargon) stood three leagues north of Nineveh, on the Khaswer, one of the branches of the Tigris, where the Kurdish village of Khorsabad has been built. Discovered in 1843 by E. Botta, French Consul at Mosoul, it was almost completely excavated by this illustrious explorer and his successor, Victor Place, and it is from Khorsabad that most of the Assyrian monuments in the Louvre come. It was the custom that each of the Ninevite monarchs should have a special palace built at some distance from the great Assyrian capital, and this became the royal residence round which stood the dwellings of the court-officers, the guards, the servants, and all persons who depended upon the prince or lived at his expense. Dur-Sarrukin was built by Sargon, the father of Sennacherib, about the year 710 before our era. The palace and the town which was annexed to it formed a group of structures contained within a fortified enclosure ([fig. 49]) the plan of which was a square of 5905 feet.