ch they desired to build, a different
substance.

The earliest traditions, and the existing remains of the earliest
buildings, alike inform us that the material adopted was brick. An
excellent clay is readily procurable in all parts of the alluvium; and
this, when merely exposed to the intense heat of an Eastern sun for a
sufficient period, or still more when kiln-dried, constitutes a very
tolerable substitute for the stone employed by most nations. The baked
bricks, even of the earliest tines, are still sound and hard; while the
sun-dried bricks, though they have often crumbled to dust or blended
together in one solid earthen mass, yet sometimes retain their shape and
original character almost unchanged, and offer a stubborn resistance to
the excavator. In the most ancient of the Chaldaean edifices we
occasionally find, as in the Bowariyeh ruin at Warka, the entire
structure composed of the inferior material; but the more ordinary
practice is to construct the mass of the building in this way, and then
to cover it completely with a facing of burnt brick, which sometimes
extends to as much as ten feet in thickness. The burnt brick was thus
made to protect the unburnt from the influence of the weather, while
labor and fuel--were greatly economized by the employment to so large an
extent of the natural substance. The size and color of the bricks vary.
The general shape is square, or nearly so, while the thickness is, to
modern ideas, disproportionately small; it is not, however, so small as
in the bricks of the Romans. The earliest of the baked bricks hitherto
discovered in Chaldaea are 11 1/4 inches square, and 2 1/2 inches thick,
while the Roman are often 15 inches square, and only an inch and a
quarter thick. The baked bricks of later date are of larger size than
the earlier; they are commonly about 13 inches square, with a thickness
of three inches. The best quality of baked brick is of a
yellowish-white tint, and very much resembles our Stourbridge or fire
brick; another kind, extremely hard, but brittle, is of a blackish blue;
a third, the coarsest of all, is slack-dried, and of a pale red. The
earliest baked bricks are of this last color. The sun-dried bricks have
even more variety of size than the baked ones. They are sometimes as
large as 16 inches square and seven inches thick, sometimes as small as
six inches square by two thick. Occasionally, though not very often,
bricks are found differing altoget