Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/173

 CONSTRUCTION. pressure exercised by the courses above. 1 The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single huge block. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorways and drains, that were constructed on rather different principles, shut your eyes to the merely decorative additions, and you will have a huge mass of kneaded earth which might have been shaped by giants in a colossal mould. The masons of Babylon and of other southern cities made a much more extensive use of burnt brick than those of the north. In Assyria the masses of pise have as a rule no other covering than the slabs of alabaster and limestone, and above, a thin layer of stucco. In Chaldsea the crude walls of the houses and tow^ers were cuirassed with those excellent burnt bricks which the in- habitants of Bagdad and Hillah carry off to this day for use in their modern habitations. 2 The crude bricks used behind this protecting epidermis have not lost their individuality, as at Nineveh they seem to have been used only after complete dessica- tion. They are of course much more friable than those burnt in the kiln ; when they are deprived of their cuirass and exposed to the weather they return slowly to the condition of dust, and their remains are seen in the sloping mounds that hide the foot of every ancient ruin (see Fig. 48), and yet if you penetrate into the interior of a mass built of these bricks, you will easily distinguish the courses, and in some instances the bricks have sufficient solidity to allow of their being moved and detached one from another. They are, in fact, bricks, and not pise. But in Chaldaea, as in Assyria, the mounds upon which the great buildings were raised 1 BOTTA tells us how the courses of crude brick were distinguished one from another at Khorsabad (Monuments de Ninire, vol. v. p. 57). 2 Speaking of Hillah, GEORGE SMITH tells us (Assyrian Discoveries, p. 62) : "A little to the south rose the town of Hillah, built with the bricks found in the old capital. The natives have established a regular trade in these bricks for building purposes. A number of men are always engaged in digging out the bricks from the ruins, while others convey them to the banks of the Euphrates. There they are packed in rude boats, which float them down to Hillah, and on being landed they are loaded on donkeys and taken to any place where building is in progress. Every day when at Hillah I used to see this work going on as it had gone on for centuries, Babylon thus slowly disappearing without an effort being made to ascertain the dimensions and buildings of the city, or to recover what remains of its monuments. The northern portion of the wall, outside the Babil mound, is the place where the work of destruction is now (1874) most actively going on, and this in some places has totally disappeared." X