al walls of their buildings;
and even then its employment suggested rather that of a band of
embroidery carefully disposed on some garment to relieve the plainness
of the material. Crude brick, burnt brick, enamelled brick, but always
and everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction.
The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles
and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped
straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot,
furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity.
This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across,
and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger: they were stamped on
the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of
the reigning sovereign, and were then dried in the sun.* A layer of
fine mortar or of bitumen was sometimes spread between the courses, or
handfuls of reeds would be strewn at intervals between the brickwork to
increase the cohesion: more frequently the crude bricks were piled one
upon another, and their natural softness and moisture brought about
their rapid agglutination.** As the building proceeded, the weight
of the courses served to increase still further the adherence of the
layers: the walls soon became consolidated into a compact mass, in which
the horizontal strata were distinguishable only by the varied tints of
the clay used to make the different relays of bricks.

* The making of bricks for the Assyrian monuments of the
time of the Sargonids has been minutely described by Place,
_Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. i. pp. 211-214. The methods of
procedure were exactly the same as those used under the
earliest king known, as has been proved by the examination
of the bricks taken from the monuments of Uru and Lagash.

** This method of building was noticed by classical writers.
The word "Bowarieh," borne by several ancient mounds in
Chaldoa, signifies, properly speaking, a mat of reeds; it is
applied only to such buildings as are apparently constructed
with alternate layers of brick and dried reeds. The
proportion of these layers differs in certain localities: in
the ruins of the ancient temple of Belos at Babylon, now
called the "Mujelibeh," the lines of straw and reeds run
uninterruptedly between each course of bricks; in the ruins
of Akkerkuf, they only occu