y the hand into smalls balls or loaves. Bread
and cakes made in this way still form the chief food of the Arabs of
these parts, who retain the habits of antiquity. Wheaten bread is
generally eaten by preference; but the poorer sort are compelled to be
content with the coarse millet or _durra_ flour, which is made into
cakes, and then eaten with milk, butter, oil, or the fat of animals.

Dates, the principal support of the inhabitants of Chaldaea, or
Babylonia, both in ancient and in modern times, were no doubt also an
article of food in Assyria, though scarcely to any great extent. The
date-palm does not bear well above the alluvium, and such fruit as it
produces in the upper country is very little esteemed. Olives were
certainly cultivated under the Empire, and the oil extracted from them
was in great request. Honey was abundant, and wine plentiful.
Sennacherib called his land "a land of corn and wine, a land of bread
and vineyards, a land of oil olive and of honey;" and the products here
enumerated were probably those which formed the chief sustenance of the
bulk of the people.

Meat, which is never eaten to any great extent in the East was probably
beyond the means of most persons. Soldiers, however, upon an expedition
were able to obtain this dainty at the expense of others; and
accordingly we find that on such occasions they freely indulged in it.
We see them, after their victories, killing and cutting up sheep and.
oxen, and then roasting the joints, which are not unlike our own, on the
embers of a wood-fires [PLATE CXXXVII., Fig. 2.] In the representations
of entrenched camps we are shown the mode in which animals were prepared
for the royal dinner. They were placed upon their backs on a high table,
with their heads hanging over its edge; one man held them steady in this
position, while another, taking hold of the neck, cut the throat a
little below the chin. The blood dripped into a bowl or basin placed
beneath the head on the ground. [PLATE CXXXVII., Fig. 3.] The animal was
then no doubt, paunched, after which it was placed either whole, or in
joints--in a huge pot or caldron, and, a fire being lighted underneath,
it was boiled to such a point as suited the taste of the king. [PLATE
CXXXVII., Fig. 5.] While the boiling progressed, some portions were
perhaps fried on the fire below. [PLATE CXXXVII., Fig. 5.] Mutton
appears to have been the favorite meat in the camp. At the court there
would be a supply of venis