Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/139

 MATERIALS. 119 part in the buildings into which they were introduced. Some of them seem to have been employed as a kind of decoration in relief upon the brick walls ; others, and those the most numerous, appear to have been used in the principal entrances to buildings. Upon one face a semicircular hollow or socket may be noticed, in which the foot of the bronze pivots, or rather the pivot shod and faced with bronze, upon which the heavy timber doors and their casings of metal were hung, had to turn. The marks of the consequent friction are still clearly visible. 1 The dimensions of these stones are never great, and it is easy to see that their employment for building purposes was always of the most restricted nature. They had indeed to be brought from a great I' I<; - 33- Brick from Khorsabad ; Louvre. I2j inches square, and 4i inches thick. distance. The towns upon the Persian Gulf might get them from Arabia. 2 Babylon and Nineveh must have drawn them from the 1 Some of these fragments are in the Louvre. They are placed on the ground in the Assyrian Gallery. Their forms are too irregular to be fitted for reproduction here. But for the hollow in question, one might suppose them to be mere shapeless boulders. LA YARD noticed similar remains among the ruins of Babylon, Discoveries, &c., p. 528. 2 M. OPPERT is even inclined to think that some of them came from the peninsula of Sinai and the eastern shores of Egypt (Revue Arch'cologique, vol. xlii. p. 272). The formation of the Arabian hills is not yet very well known, and we are not in a position to say for certain whence these rocks may have come. It seems probable however, that they might have been obtained from certain districts of Arabia, from which they could be carried without too great an effort to within reach of the canals fed by the Euphrates, or of some port trading with the Persian Gulf.