Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/54

 3 i A History of Art in Ciialh.ea and Assyria. temple mounds did not offer the same facilities. They were solid, and graves would have had to be cut in them before a corpse could be buried in their substance. The Kasr was a ready-made catacomb into which any number of coffins could be thrust with the smallest expenditure of trouble. Excavations in the Kasr and at Tell-Amran might bring many precious objects to light, but we can hardly think that any room or other part of a building in such good preservation as many of those in the Assyrian palaces would be recovered. To the latter, then, we shall have again to turn to complete our study of the civil architecture of Mesopotamia. If we have placed the edifices from which the English explorers have drawn so many precious monuments in the second line, it is not only because their exploration is incomplete, but also because they do not lend themselves to our purpose quite so readily as that cleared by MM. Botta and Place. At Khorsabad there have never been any buildings but those of Sargon ; city and palace were built at a single operation, and those who undertake their study do not run any risk of confusion between the work of different generations. The plan we have discussed so minutely is really that elaborated by the Assyrian architect to whom Sargon committed the direction of the work. We can hardly say the same of the ruins explored by Mr. Layard and his successors. The mounds of Nimroud and Kouyundjik saw one royal dwelling succeed another, and the architects who were employed upon them hardly had their hands free. They had, to a certain extent, to reckon with buildings already in existence. These may some- times have prevented them from extending their works as far as they wished in one direction or another, or even compelled them now and then to vary the levels of their floors ; so that it is not always easy for a modern explorer to know exactly how he stands expression, t//oAiSoj//aTa /ca/xapojTa, which means vaulted arcades. Both writers agree that there were several terraces one above another. Diodorus says that the whole — as seen from the Euphrates no doubt — looked like a theatre. Both give the same measurements to these hanging gardens; they tell us they made a square of from three to four plethra each way (410 feet). The mound of Tell-Amran is much larger than this, and if it really be on the site of the famous gardens, it must include the ruins of other buildings besides, pleasure houses, chapels and kioskr, like those figured in the reliefs, to which we have already had frequent occasion to allude.