Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/274

 252 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. battlement, being only one brick wide, is formed by laying three whole bricks one upon the other. 1 The crenelations we have been describing are those upon the retaining walls of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad. Those of the Observatory are slightly different in that they are three stories high instead of two (Fig. 105). The lowest is three bricks wide, the second three, the topmost two. They are each three bricks high. Why were these battlements given a height beyond those of the royal palace ? That question may be easily answered. The crenelations of the observatory were destined for a much more lofty situation than those of the palace. The base of the former monument rose about 144 feet above the summit of the artificial hill upon which it. was placed; the total elevation was about 190 feet, a height at which ordinary battlements, especially when for the most part they had nothing but the face of the Fie. 105. Battlements from the Khorsabad Observatory. higher stories to be relieved against, would be practically invisible. Whether composed, of two or three stages this battlement was always inscribed within an isosceles triangle ; in fact, when a third story was added, the height and the width at the base increased in the same proportions. M. Place lays great stress upon this triangle. He makes it cut the upper angles of each of the superimposed rectangles, as we have clone in our Figs. 104 and 105, and he points out how such a process gives an outline similar to that of a palisade cut into points at its summit, a precaution that is often taken to render the escalade of such an obstacle more difficult, and M. Place is inclined to think that the idea of these crenelations was sucjp-ested by those of a. c>o J wooden Dalisade, a succession of rectangles beinof substituted for -- o <_> See M. PLACE'S diagrams, Ninire, vol. ii. p. 54.