Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/166

 146 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. encountering, in many of the villages of Upper Syria and Meso- potamia, peasants' houses with sugar-loaf roofs like these. 1 We need not here go further into details upon this point. In these general and introductory remarks we have endeavoured to point out as concisely as possible how the salient characteristics of Assyrian architecture are to be explained by the configuration of the country, by the nature of the materials at hand, and by the climate with which the architect had to reckon. It was to these conditions that the originality of the system was due ; that the solids were so greatly in excess over the voids, and the lateral over the vertical measurements of a building. In this latter respect the buildings of Mesopotamia leave those of all other countries, even of Egypt, far behind. They were carried, too, to an extraordinary height without any effort to give the upper part greater lightness than the substructure ; both were equally solid and massive. Finally, the nature of the elements of which Mesopotamian architects could dispose was such that the desire for elegance and beauty had to be satisfied by a superficial system of decoration, by paint and carved slabs laid on to the surface of the walls. Beauty unadorned was beyond their reach, and their works may be compared to women whose attractions lie in the richness of their dress and the multitude of their jewels. 3 . Construction. As might have been expected nothing that can be called a structure of dressed stone has been discovered in Chaldsea ; 2 in Assyria alone have some examples been found. Of these 1 LA YARD, Discoveries, p. 112 ; GEO. SMITH, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 341. 2 The remains of stone walls are at least so rare in Lower Mesopotamia that we may disregard their existence. In my researches I have only found mention of a single example. At Abou-Sharein TAYLOR found a building in which an upper story was supported by a mass of crude brick faced with blocks of dressed sand- stone. The stones of the lower courses were held together by mortar, those of the upper ones by bitumen. We have no information as to the "bond" or the size of stones used (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 408). The materials for this revetment must have been quarried in one of those rocky hills islands, perhaps, formerly with which Lower Chaldsea is sparsely studded. TAYLOR mentions one seven miles west of Mougheir, in the desert that stretches away towards Arabia from the right bank of the Euphrates {Journal, &c. vol. xv. p. 460).