certainly Assyrian. It appears from this specimen
that the houses were small, isolated from one another, and either
flat-roofed, or else covered in with a dome or a high cone. They had no
windows, but must have been lighted from the top, where, in some of the
roofs, an aperture is discernible. The doorway was generally placed
towards one end of the house; it was sometimes arched, but more often
square-headed.

The doors in Assyrian houses were either single, as commonly with
ourselves, or folding (_fores_ or _valvoe_), as with the Greeks and
Romans, and with the modern French and Italians. Folding-doors were the
most common in palaces. They were not hung upon hinges, like modern
doors, but, like those of the classical nations, turned upon pivots. At
Khorsabad the pavement slabs in the doorways showed everywhere the holes
in which these pivots had worked, while in no instance did the wall at
the side present any trace of the insertion of a hinge. Hinges, however,
in the proper sense of the term, were not unknown to the Assyrians; for
two massive bronze sockets found at Nimrud, which weighed more than six
pounds each, and had a diameter of about five inches, must have been
designed to receive the hinges of a door or gate, hung exactly as gates
are now hung among ourselves. [PLATE CXXXVIII., Fig. 4.] The
folding-doors were fastened by bolts, which were shot into the pavement
at the point where the two doors met; but in the case of single doors a
lock seems to have been used, which was placed about four feet from the
ground, and projected from the door itself, so that a recess had to be
made in the wall behind the door to receive the lock when the door stood
open. The bolt of the lock was of an oblong square shape and was shot
into the wall against which the door closed.

The ordinary character of Assyrian furniture did not greatly differ from
the furniture of modern times. That of the poorer classes was for the
most part extremely plain, consisting probably of such tables, couches,
and low stools as we see in the representations which are so frequent,
of the interiors of soldier's tents. In these the tables are generally
of the cross-legged kind; the couches follow the pattern given in a
previous page of this volume, except that the legs do not end in
pine-shaped ornaments; and the stools are either square blocks, or
merely cut _en chevron_. There are no chairs. The low stools evidently
form the ordinary seats of the peop