ade a slight change.
The abundance of stone in the country induced them to substitute it in
several places where in Babylonia it was necessary to use burnt brick,
as in the facings of platforms and of temples, in dams across streams,
in pavements sometimes, and universally in the ornamentation of the
lover portions of palace and temple walls. But otherwise they remained
faithful to their architectural traditions, and raised in the
comparatively hilly Assyria the exact type of building which nature and
necessity had led them to invent and use in the flat and stoneless
alluvium where they had had their primitive abode. As platforms were
required both for security and for comfort in the lower region, they
retained them, instead of choosing natural elevations in the upper one.
As clay was the only possible material in the one place, clay was still
employed, notwithstanding the abundance of stone, in the other. Being
devoid of any great inventive genius, the Assyrians found it easier to
maintain and slightly modify a system with which they had been familiar
in their original country than to devise a new one more adapted to the
land of their adoption.

Next to the architecture of the Assyrians, their mimetic art seems to
deserve attention. Though the representations in the works of Layard and
Botta, combined with the presence of so many specimens in the great
national museums of London and Paris, have produced a general
familiarity with the subject, still, as a connected view of it in its
several stages and branches is up to the present time a desideratum in
our literature, it may not be superfluous here to attempt a brief
account of the different classes into which their productions in this
kind of art fall, and the different eras and styles under which they
naturally range themselves.

Assyrian mimetic art consists of statues, bas-reliefs, metal-castings,
carvings in ivory, statuettes in clay, enamellings on brick, and
intaglios on stones and gems.

[Illustration: PLATE 63]

Assyrian statues are comparatively rare, and, when they occur, are among
the least satisfactory of this people's productions. They are coarse,
clumsy, purely formal in their design, and generally characterized by an
undue flatness, or want of breadth in the side view, as if they were
only intended to be seen directly in front. Sometimes, however, this
defect is not apparent. A sitting statue in black basalt, of the size of
life, representing an ear