Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/69

 Other Palaces of Mesopotamia. 51 Balawat} of Kaleh-Shergat? of Kar amies? and in the valley of the Khabour? the explorers have encountered the remains of buildings and of ornamental figures that must have formed parts of royal palaces, or at least of the dwellings of great nobles. We shall not stop to notice all these discoveries. None of the mounds in question have been explored with sufficient care and completeness to add anything of importance to what we have learnt by our study of Khorsabad. The chief thing to be gathered from these widely scattered excavations is that during the great years of Assyria there was no town of any importance in which the king did not possess a habitation, arranged and decorated in the same spirit as the great palaces at Calah and Nineveh, and differing from these chiefly in the size of their courts and chambers. No doubt the pavilions sprinkled about the park, or paradise, as the Greek writers called it, in which the king sought amuse- ment by exercising his skill as an archer upon the beasts that roamed among its trees, were ornamented in the same fashion, although in all probability, wood and metal played a more important part in their construction. As for the dwellings of the great officers of the crown and of vassal princes, they must have reproduced on a smaller scale the plan and ornamentation of the royal palace. Of the house properly speaking, the dwelling of the artizan or peasant, whether in Assyria or Chaldsea, we know very little. We are unable to turn for its restoration to paintings such as those in the Egyptian tombs, which portray the life of the poor with the same detail as that of the rich or even of the monarch himself. The Assyrian bas-reliefs, in which the sieges of towns are often represented, always show them from' the outside (Fig. 22), nothing is to be seen but the ramparts and the towers that flank them. The only bas-relief in which we can venture to recognize one of the ordinary houses of the country belongs to the series of pictures in which Sennacherib has caused the 1 Seethe article by Mr. Rassam quoted on the last page. The plan (p. 52) he gives does not tell us much. 2 See La yard, Nineveh, vol. ii. pp. 45-63 ; and Discoveries, p. 581. 3 See Place. Ninive, vol. ii. p. 169. 4 It is in chapters xi. to xiv. of his second work (Discoveries, &c.) that La yard tells the story of his discoveries in that valley of the Chaboras from which the writings of Ezekiel were dated.