[289] The same process was employed at Nimroud in a drain or water channel, of which Layard gives a sketch (Discoveries, p. 164). In connection with these vaults we must remember that a pointed arch has no key properly speaking; the top stone is merely a joint. It looks as if the Assyrian architect had a kind of instinctive appreciation of the fact.
[290] The slope, the height, and the width of this channel are not the same throughout. In some places it is wide enough to allow two men to walk abreast in it.
[291] Layard, Nineveh, vol. i. p. 79.
[292] Ottfried Müller, Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, § 107 and 168 (3rd edition).
[293] Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. i. p. 112, and vol. ii. chap. ii. § 4.
[294] Ibid. vol. ii. fig. 44.
(Doors, windows, steles, altars, obelisks, mouldings.)
We have been obliged to dwell at length on the arch and the column because those two elements of construction are of the greatest importance to all who wish to gain a true idea of Mesopotamian art and of its influence upon neighbouring peoples and over subsequent developments of architecture. On the other hand we shall have very little to say upon what, in speaking of Egyptian art, we called secondary forms.[295]
We have already had occasion to speak of some of these, such as windows and doors. We have explained how the nature of his materials and the heat of the climate led the architect to practically suppress the former, while, on the other hand, he gave extravagant dimensions to the latter. It was to the door that the rooms had mainly to look for the light and air, with which they could not entirely dispense. We have now to give a few details as to the fashion in which these large openings were set in the walls that enframed them. As for salient decorative members—or mouldings, to give them their right name—their list is very short. We shall, however, find them in some variety in a series of little monuments that deserve, perhaps, more attention than they have yet received—we mean altars, steles, and those objects to which the name of obelisks has, with some inaccuracy, been given. Some of these objects have no little grace of their own, and serve to prove that what the Chaldæans and Assyrians lacked was neither taste nor invention, but the encouragement that the possession of a kindly material would have given to their genius.