Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/242

 220 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. Sennacherib's palace. They were in couples, one couple close to the palace wall, the other in a line with it but some eight-and-twenty yards farther from the building. In each pair the distance from centre to centre was 9 feet 3 inches. With such a width the covered way may very well have been roofed with wood, a hypothesis which is supported by the discovery, at the same point, of the remains of crude brick walls. The columns would mark in all likelihood the two extremities of the passage. As for the other conjecture thrown out by the explorer, it seems to us to be much less probable. lie asks whether these bases may not have been the pedestals of statues. Many Assyrian statues have been found together with their pedestals, and these are always simple in the extreme and without any kind of ornament. More- over, the statues themselves were made rather to be set up against a wall than to pass an independent existence in an open court-yard. Moreover, George Smith saw two of these bases in place at one of the entrances to the palace of Assurbanipal. Unfortunately he gives no drawing and his description is wanting in clearness, but he seerns to have noticed the traces left by a cylindrical shaft on the upper surface of one base ; his expression, " a flat circle to receive the column," evidently means that the latter was sunk into the substance of the base. 1 Here, no doubt was the end of a gallery, like that in front of Sennacherib's palace. There must in ail probability have been other remains of these columns besides those noticed by the English explorer, but at Khorsabad alone were the excavations superintended by a professional architect, there alone were they watched by the trained eye of a man capable of giving its true meaning and value to every detail of a ruinous building. At Nimroud, at Kouyundjik, at Nebbi-Yotmas, many interesting traces of ancient arrangements may have been obliterated in the course of the excavations without those who stood by having the least suspicion of their significance. We might perhaps, if it were worth while, come upon further representations of columns on engraved stones, on ivories, and bronzes, 2 but upon such small objects forms are indicated in a 1 GEORGE SMITH, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 431. 2 One curious example of this is figured in the work of M. CHIPIEZ, Histoire critique de f Origine et de la Formation des Ordres grecs, p. 20. See also LA YARD,