[275] This coincidence struck Professor Rawlinson, who compares one of these Assyrian columns to a column in the porch of the Cathedral of Trent. He reproduces them both in his Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 313.
[276] See Perrot and Guillaume, Exploration archéologique de la Galatie, vol. ii. pl. 57.
[277] Discoveries, p. 590.
[278] George Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 431.
[279] One curious example of this is figured in the work of M. Chipiez, Histoire critique de l'Origine et de la Formation des Ordres grecs, p. 20. See also Layard, Discoveries, p. 444, where a bas-relief from the palace of Sennacherib is figured, upon which appears a coffer supported by a foot in the shape of a column, which ends in a regular volute.
In the preceding pages we have determined the rôle played by the column in Assyria, and have explained that in spite of the care and taste lavished upon some of its details, it never rose above the rank of a secondary and subordinate member. There is nothing, then, to surprise us in the fact that the Assyrian architect never placed his arches or vaults upon columns or piers; he seems never to have had a glimpse of the great possibilities such a procedure involved, a procedure from which upon the very soil of the East, his remote descendants were to evolve the architecture of the Byzantine church and the Arab mosque. His archivolts and the pendentives of his vaults always rest upon thick walls, and yet almost every variety of the simple arch or tunnel-vault are to be found among the ruins of his buildings.
