a great awkwardness in the communications. Very few corridors
or passages exist in any of the buildings. Groups of rooms, often
amounting to ten or twelve, open into one another; and we find
comparatively few rooms to which there is any access except through some
other room. Again, whole sets of apartments are sometimes found, between
which and the rest of the palace all communication is cut off by thick
walls. Another peculiarity in the internal arrangements is the number of
doorways in the larger apartments, and their apparently needless
multiplication. We constantly find two or even three doorways leading
from a court into a hall, or from one hall into a second. It is
difficult to see what could be gained by such an arrangement.

The disposition of the various parts of a palace will probably be better
apprehended from an exact account of a single building than from any
further general statements. For this purpose it is necessary to select a
specimen from among the various edifices that have been disentombed by
the labors of recent excavators. The specimen should be, if possible,
complete; it should have been accurately surveyed, and the survey should
have been scientifically recorded; it should further stand single and
separate, that there may be no danger of confusion between its remains
and those of adjacent edifices. These requirements, though nowhere
exactly met, are very nearly met by the building at Khorsabad, which
stands on a mound of its own, unmixed with other edifices, has been most
carefully examined, and most excellently represented and described, and
which, though not completely excavated, has been excavated with a nearer
approach to completeness than any other edifice in Assyria. The
Khorsabad building--which is believed to be a palace built by Sargon,
the son of Sennacherib--will therefore be selected for minute
description in this place, as the palace most favorably circumstanced,
and the one of which we have, on the whole, the most complete and exact
knowledge. [PLATE XLIV.]

[Illustration: PLATE 44]

The situation of the town, whereof the palace of Sargon formed a part,
has been already described in a former part of this volume. The shape,
it has been noted, was square, the angles facing the four cardinal
points. Almost exactly in the centre of the north-west wall occurs the
palace platform, a huge mass of crude brick, from 20 to 30 feet high,
shaped like a T, the upper limb lying within the cit