Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/93

 Towns and their Defences. /d their series of military pictures can be named in which they do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid disks of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage with its Fig. 30. — An attack by escalade ; from Layard. tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of to-day can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number (Figs. 21 and 31). In the interior of the town — we are still speaking of the town of Sargon — these same causeways formed the principal streets.