Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/178

 156 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. hardly distinguishable from the banks that bordered the canals. But in those deserts of Lower Chaldsea, where the nomad tent is now almost the only dwelling, structures have been found but little damaged, in which layers of reeds placed at certain intervals among the bricks may be easily distinguished. As a rule three or four layers are strewn one upon the other, the rushes in one being at right angles to those above and below it. Here and there the stalks may still be seen standing out from the wall. 1 Fragments of bitumen are everywhere to be picked up among the ddbris about these buildings, upon which it must have been used for mortar. It never seems to have been employed, however, over the whole of a building, but only in those parts where more than the ordinary cohesive power was required. Thus, at Warka, in the ruin called Buvariia, the buttresses that stand out from the main building are of large burnt bricks set in thick beds of bitumen, the whole forming such a solid body that a pickaxe has great difficulty in making any impression upon it. 2 Travellers have also found traces of the same use of bitumen in the ruins of Babylon. It seems to have been in less frequent employment in Assyria. It has there been found only under the two layers of bricks that constitute the ordinary pavement of roofs, courts, and chambers. The architect no doubt introduced this coat of asphalte for two purposes partly to give solidity to the pavement, partly to keep down the wet and to force the water in the soil to flow off through its appointed channels. A layer of the same kind was also spread under the drains. 3 In spite of all their precautions time and experience compelled the inhabitants of Mesopotamia to recognize the danger of crude brick as a building material ; they endeavoured, therefore, to sup- plement its strength with huge buttresses. Wherever the ruins have still preserved some of their shape, we can trace, almost 1 Warkah, its Ruins and Remains, by W. KENNETH LOFTUS, p. 9. (In the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, second series, Part I.) According to SIR HENRY RAWLINSON this introduction of layers of reeds or rushes between the courses of brick continued in all this region at least down to the Parthian epoch. Traces of it are to be found in the walls of Seleucia and Ctesiphon (RAWLINSON'S Herodotus, vol. i. p. 300 note i). 2 LOFTUS, Travels and Researches, i. p. 169. The abundance of bitumen in the ruins of Mugheir is such that the modern name of the town has sprung from it ; the word means the bituminous (TAYLOR, Notes on the Ruins of Mugeyr). 3 PLACE, Ninive etlAssyrie, vol. i. p. 236 ; LAYARD, Nineveh t vol. ii. p. 261.