Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/406

 380 A HISTORY OF ART ix CIIALD.F.A AND ASSYRIA. is no positive evidence on the point. 1 It contains, however, nothing- but a logical development from the premises, nothing- but what is in perfect keeping with Mesopotamian habits, nothing that involves difficulties of execution or construction beyond those over which we know them to have triumphed. Besides, we have proots that they were not content to go on servilely reproducing one and the same type for twenty centuries ; their temples were not all shaped in the same mould. The type of the Mugheir temple differed sensibly from that of the Khorsabad Observatory. One of the Kouyundjik sculptures reveals a curious variant of the traditional theme, so far as Assyria was concerned, in an arrange- ment of the staged tower that we should never have suspected but FIGS 180 182. Square Assyrian tcm;>le. Longitudinal section, hori/.ontal section a -id plan. for the survival of this relief (Fig. 34). The picture in question is no doubt very much abridged and far from true to the propor- tions of the original, but yet it has furnished M. Chipiez with the elements of a restoration in which conjecture has had very little to say. This we have called the SQUARE ASSYRIAN TEMPLE (see Plate IV. and Figs. 180-182). 1 The idea has also occurred to M. OPPERT of restricting the ramp to two sides of the tower, to the exclusion of the others (Expedition scientifique, vol. i. p. 209) ; but so far as we understand his system which he has not illustrated with any figure he does not double his incline, he merely alternates its side at each stage, so that part of it would be on the north-west, part on the south-west face of his tower.