Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/239

 THE COLUMN. 217 with fact the junction is direct without the interposition of any ornamental motive. In what M. Place calls the state doorways {portes orndes) of Khorsabad, the arches spring from the backs of the great mitred bulls that guard the entrance. 1 But, whether the columns rose from the backs of animals real or fantastic, they always seem to to have had a base. Almost the only instance of its absence is in the open gallery in Fig. 76, and there, perhaps, they are hidden by a balustrade. Everywhere else we find a more or less orna- mental member interposed between the shaft and the ground. At Khorsabad (Fig. 41) it is a simple torus (Fig. 87), at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42) it is a kind of cushion (Fig. 88), which we find 'repre- sented in not a few of the bas-reliefs. The curves bear a distant resemblance to the volutes of a capital ; above this base appears a ring or astragal, the origin of which may be easily guessed. The FIGS. 87, 88. Bases of columns ; from the bas-reliefs. original timber column, the newly felled tree that was set up to support the roof of a tent or a house, must have been placed upon a block of stone or wood, to which it was joined, in some degree, by hollowing out the latter and setting the foot of the timber beam' in the hollow, and then hiding the junction by those reed bands that, as travellers tell us, were still used for the same purpose in the last years of Babylon. 2 In time a ring of metal would take the place of the reeds, and when stone columns came to be used, a feature which was at first a necessity, or, at least, a useful expedient and a guarantee of duration and solidity, came at last to be simply an ornament. We have now studied the Assyrian column as a whole and in detail. Most of its features seem to us to be survivals from the methods and processes of what we have called the architecture 1 PLACE. Ninive, vol. iii. plate n. 2 STR/BO, xvi. i, 5. F F