Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/183

 CONSTRUCTION. 161 of several of these buildings was due in the first instance to fire. Several pieces of sculpture, those from the palace of Sen- nacherib, for instance, may be quoted, which when found were black with soot. They look like castings in relief that have been long fixed at the back of a fire-place. Long and narrow rooms may have been roofed with beams of palm or poplar resting upon the summits of the walls. As for the large halls, in the centre they would be open to the sky, while around the opening would run a portico, similar to that of a Roman atrium, whose sloping roof would protect the reliefs with which the walls were ornamented. 1 FIG. 50. Present state of one of the city gates, Khorsabad. Perspective compiled from Place's plans and elevations. As to this, however, doubt had already been expressed by an attentive and judicial observer like Loftus ; who thought that the arch had played a very important part in the architecture of Mesopotamia. 2 As he very justly remarked, the conditions were rather different from those that obtained in the maritime and mountainous provinces of Persia ; there. was no breeze from the gulf or from the summits of snowy mountains, to which every facility for blowing through their houses and cooling their heated chambers had to be given ; the problem to be solved was how best to oppose an impenetrable shield against a daily and long continued heat that would otherwise 1 LAYARD, Nineveh > vol. ii. pp. 256-264. - LOFTUS, Travels and Researches, pp. 181-183.