Openings.
Doorways are the openings chiefly met with, and it is not often that the superstructure, whether arch or lintel, remains, but it is clear that in some instances, at least, openings were arched. Great attention was paid to important doorways, and a large amount of magnificent sculpture was employed to enrich them.
Columns.
The columns most probably were of wood in Assyrian palaces. In some of the Persian ones they were of marble, but of a proportion and treatment which point to an imitation of forms suitable for wood. The bases and capitals of these slender shafts are beautiful in themselves, and very interesting as suggesting the source from which some of the forms in Greek architecture were derived, and on the bas-reliefs other architectural forms are represented which were afterwards used by the Greeks.
Ornaments.
Sculptured slabs, painted wall decorations, and terra-cotta ornamentation were used as enrichments of the walls. These slabs, which have become familiarly known through the attention roused by the discoveries of Sir A. H. Layard and the specimens sent by him to the British Museum, are objects of the deepest interest; so are the carved bulls from gateways. In the smaller and more purely ornamental decorations the honeysuckle, and other forms familiar to us from their subsequent adoption by Greek artists, are met with constantly, executed with great taste.
Architectural Character.
A character of lavish and ornate magnificence is the quality most strongly displayed by the architectural remains of Western Asia, and could we have beheld any one of the monuments before it was reduced to ruin, we should probably have seen this predominant to an extent of which it is almost impossible now to form an adequate idea.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] In any such endeavour we should be met by the further difficulty, that the writers of antiquity differ widely in the precise limits which they give to the Assyrian Kingdom. Some make it include Babylon, other writers say that it was bounded on the south by Babylon, and altogether the greatest confusion exists in the accounts that have come down to us.