f his own. After carefully
reviewing all the circumstances, he gave it as his opinion that the
Khorsabad building had been roofed throughout with a flat, earth-covered
roofing of wood. He observed that some of the buildings on the
bas-reliefs had flat roofs, that flat roofs are still the fashion of the
country, and that the debris within the chambers were exactly such as a
roof of that kind would be likely, if destroyed by fire, to have
produced. He further noticed that on the floors of the chambers, in
various parts of the palace, there had been discovered stone rollers
closely resembling those still in use at Mosul and Baghdad, for keeping
close-pressed and hard the earthen surface of such roofs; which rollers
had, in all probability, been applied to the same use by the Assyrians,
and, being kept on the roofs, had fallen through during the
conflagration.

The first difficulty which presented itself here was one of those
regarded as most fatal to the vaulting theory, namely, the width of the
chambers. Where flat timber roofs prevail in the East, their span seems
never to exceed twenty-five feet. The ordinary chambers in the Assyrian
palaces might, undoubtedly, therefore, have been roofed in this way, by
a series of horizontal beans laid across them from side to side, with
the ends resting upon the tops of the side walls. But the great halls
seemed too wide to have borne such a roofing without supports.
Accordingly, M. Botts suggested that in the greater apartments a single
or a double row of pillars ran down the middle, reaching to the roof and
sustaining it. His theory was afterwards warmly embraced by Mr.
Fergusson, who endeavored to point out the exact position of the pillars
in the three great halls of Sargon at Khorsabad. It seems, however, a
strong and almost a fatal objection to this theory, that no bases of
pillars have been found within the apartments, nor any marks on the
brick floors of such bases or of the pressure of the pillars. M. Botta
states that he made a careful search for bases, or for marks of pillars,
on the pavement of the north-east hall (No. VIII.) at Khorsabad, but
that he _entirely failed to discover any_. This negative evidence is the
more noticeable as stone pillar-bases have been found in wide doorways,
where they would have been less necessary than in the chambers, as
pillars in doorways could have had but little weight to sustain.

M. Botta and Mr. Fergusson, who both suppose that in an