eem to have
been discarded, and with them the necessity for enormous columns and
piers placed very close together. In some bas-reliefs, buildings with
roofs of a domical shape are represented.

_Openings._

Doorways are the openings chiefly met with, and it is not often that
the superstructure, whether arch or lintel, remains, but it is clear
that in some instances, at least, openings were arched. Great
attention was paid to important doorways, and a large amount of
magnificent sculpture was employed to enrich them.

_Columns._

The columns most probably were of wood in Assyrian palaces. In some of
the Persian ones they were of marble, but of a proportion and
treatment which point to an imitation of forms suitable for wood. The
bases and capitals of these slender shafts are beautiful in
themselves, and very interesting as suggesting the source from which
some of the forms in Greek architecture were derived, and on the
bas-reliefs other architectural forms are represented which were
afterwards used by the Greeks.

_Ornaments._

Sculptured slabs, painted wall decorations, and terra-cotta
ornamentation were used as enrichments of the walls. These slabs,
which have become familiarly known through the attention roused by the
discoveries of Sir A. H. Layard and the specimens sent by him to the
British Museum, are objects of the deepest interest; so are the carved
bulls from gateways. In the smaller and more purely ornamental
decorations the honeysuckle, and other forms familiar to us from their
subsequent adoption by Greek artists, are met with constantly,
executed with great taste.

_Architectural Character._

A character of lavish and ornate magnificence is the quality most
strongly displayed by the architectural remains of Western Asia, and
could we have beheld any one of the monuments before it was reduced to
ruin, we should probably have seen this predominant to an extent of
which it is almost impossible now to form an adequate idea.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] In any such endeavour we should be met by the further difficulty,
that the writers of antiquity differ widely in the precise limits
which they give to the Assyrian Kingdom. Some make it include Babylon,
other writers say that it was bounded on the south by Babylon, and
altogether the greatest confusion exists in the accounts that have
come down to us.

[5] As a matter of fact there is a marked distinction between the
heads of the animals of the eas