Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/180

 158 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/F.A AND ASSYRIA. impossible to preserve them in the soft paste, the kind of pise, we have described. Another thing that had to be carefully provided for was the discharge of the rain water which, unless it had proper channels of escape, would filter through the cracks and crevices of the brick and set up a rapid process of disintegration. In the Assyrian palaces we find, therefore, that the pavements of the fiat roofs of the courtyards and open halls had a decided slope, and that the rain water was thus conducted to scuppers, through which it fell into runnels communicating with a main drain, from which it was finally discharged into the nearest river. It rained less in Chalda^a than in Assyria. But we may fairly conclude that the Chalda^an architects were as careful as their northern rivals to provide such safeguards as those we have described ; but their buildings are now in such a condition that no definite traces of them are to be distinguished. On the other hand, the ruins in Lower Chaldaea prove that even in the most ancient times the constructor had then the same object in view ; but the means of which he made use were much more simple, although contrived with no little ingenuity. We shall here epitomize what we have learnt from one of those few observers to whom we owe all our knowledge of the earliest Chaldsean civilization. Mr. J. E. Taylor, British vice-consul at Bassorah, explored not a few of the mounds in the immediate neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf which mark the sites of the burying places belong- ing to the most ancient cities of Chaldaea. The summits of these mounds are paved with burnt brick ; their mass consists of heaped up coffins separated from one another by divisions of the same material. To insure the preser- vation of the bodies and of the objects buried with them liquids of every kind had to be provided with a ready means of escape. The structures were pierced, therefore, with a vast number of vertical drains. Long conduits of terra-cotta (see Fig. 49) stretched from the paved summit, upon which they opened with very narrow mouths, to the base. They were composed of tubes, each about two feet long and eighteen inches in diameter. In some cases there are as many as forty of these one upon another. They are held together by thin coats of bitumen, and in order to give them greater strength their sides are slightly concave.