The architect was not content with the mere play of light and shade afforded by these battlements. He gave them a slight salience over the façade and a polychromatic decoration. About three feet below the base of the crenellations the face of the wall was brought forward an inch or two, so that the battlements themselves, and some eight or ten courses of bricks below them, overhung the façade by that distance, forming a kind of rudimentary cornice (see [Fig. 106]). In very elaborate buildings enamelled bricks were inserted between the battlements and this cornice. These were decorated with white rosettes of different sizes upon a blue ground. The explorers of Khorsabad encountered numberless fragments of these bricks and some whole ones in the heaps of rubbish at the foot of the external walls. Their situation proved that they had come from the top of the walls, and on the whole we may accept the restoration of M. Thomas, which we borrow from the work of M. Place, as sufficiently justified ([Fig. 106]).[319]
This method of crowning a wall may seem poor when compared to the Greek cornice, or even to that of Egypt, but in view of the materials with which he had to work, it does honour to the architect. The long band of shadow near the summit of the façade, the bands of brilliantly coloured ornament above it, and the rich play of light and shade among the battlements, the whole relieved against the brilliant blue of an Eastern sky, must have had a fine effect. The uniformity from which it suffered was a defect common to Mesopotamian architecture as a whole, and one inseparable from the absence or comparative disuse of stone. But in the details we have been studying we find yet another illustration of the skill with which these people corrected, if we may so phrase it, the vices of matter, and by a frank use of their materials and insistence upon those horizontal and perpendicular lines which they were best fitted to give, evolved from it an architecture that proved them to have possessed a real genius for art.
Fig. 106.—Battlements of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad; compiled from Place.
The Assyrians seem to have been so pleased with these crenellations that they placed them upon such small things as steles and altars. In one of the
Fig. 107.—Altar; from Rawlinson. Kouyundjik reliefs ([Fig. 42]) there is a small object—a pavilion or altar, its exact character is not very clearly shown—which is thus crowned. Another example is to be found in a bas-relief from Khorsabad ([Fig. 107]).
We are thus brought to the subject of altars. These are sufficiently varied in form. In the Kouyundjik bas-relief ([Fig. 42]) we find those shapes at the four angles which were copied by the peoples of the Mediterranean, and led to the expression, "the horns of the altar." In the Khorsabad relief ([Fig. 107]) the salience of these horns is less marked. On the other hand, the die or dado below them is fluted. Another altar brought from Khorsabad to the Louvre is quite different in shape ([Fig. 108]). It is triangular on plan. Above a plinth with a gentle salience rises the altar itself, supported at each angle by the paw of a lion. The table is circular, and decorated round the edge with cuneiform characters.