Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/209

 Bk. n. Ch. m. PALACE AT KOYUNJIK. 177 There must always be many points, even in royal residences, which would be more easily understood if we knew the domestic manners and usages prevalent among the common peoj^le of the same era and country. This knowledge we actually can supply in the j^resent case, to a great extent, from modern Eastern residences. Such a mode of illustration in the West would be out of the question ; but in the East, manners and customs, processes of manufacture and forms of building, liave existed unchanged from the earliest times to the j^resent day. This immutability is the greatest charm of the East, and frequently enables us to understand what in our own land M'ould have utterly faded away and been obliterated. In the Yezidi House, for instance, borrowed from Mr. Layard's work, we see an exact reproduction, in every essential respect, of the style of building in the days of Sennacherib. Here we have the wooden pillars with bracket capitals, supporting a mass of timber intended to be covered with a thickness of earth sufficient to prevent the rain or heat from penetrating to the dwelling. There is no reason to doubt that the houses of the humbler classes were in former times similar to that here represented ; and this very form amplified into a palace, and the walls and pillars ornamented and carved, would exactly correspond with the j^rincipal features of the palace of the great Assyrian king. Palace of Se:n^nacherib, KoYu^fjiK. Having said so much of Khorsabad, it will not be necessary to say much about the palace at Koyunjik, built by Sennacherib, the son of the Khorsabad kin^. As the great metropolitan palace of Nineveh, it was of course of far greater extent and far more magnificent than the suburban ])alace of his father. The mound itself on which it stands is about 1^ mile in circumference (7800 ft.) ; and, as the whole was raised artificially to the height of not less than 30 ft., it is in itself a work of no mean magnitude. The principal palace stood at the south-western angle of this mound, and as far as the excavation has been carried seems to have formed a square of about 600 ft. each way — double the lineal dimensions of that at Nimroud. Its general arrangements were very similar to those at Khorsabad, but on a larger scale. It enclosed within itself two or three great internal courts, surrounded with sixty or seventy apartments, some of great extent. The principal fayade, facing the east, surpassed any of those of Khorsabad, both in size and magnificence, being adorned by ten winged bulls of the largest dimensions, with a giant between each of the two principal external ones, in the manner shown in the woodcut (No. 63), besides smaller sculptures — the whole extending to a length of not less than 350 ft. The principal facjade at Khorsabad, -irriT T 10