ion; but even this edifice
did not equal the great work of Sennacherib in the number of its
apartments, or the grandeur of its dimensions. Sennacherib's palace
covered an area of above eight acres. It consisted of a number of grand
halls and smaller chambers, arranged round at least three courts or
quadrangles. These courts were respectively 154 feet by 125, 124 feet by
90, and probably a square of about 90 feet. Round the smallest of the
courts were grouped apartments of no great size, which, it may be
suspected, belonged to the seraglio of the king. The seraglio seems to
have been reached through a single narrow passage, leading out of a long
gallery--218 feet by 25--which was approached only through two other
passages, one leading from each of the two main courts. The principal
halls were immediately within the two chief entrances one on the
north-east, the other on the opposite or south-west front of the palace.
Neither of these two rooms has been completely explored: but the one
appears to have been more than 150 and the other was probably 180 feet
in length, while the width of each was a little more than 40 feet.
Besides these two great halls and the grand gallery already described,
the palace contained about twenty rooms of a considerable size, and at
least forty or fifty smaller chambers, mostly square, or nearly so,
opening out of some hall or large apartment. The actual number of the
rooms explored is about sixty; but as in many parts the examination of
the building is still incomplete, we may fairly conjecture that the
entire number was not less than seventy or eighty.

The palace of Sennacherib preserved all the main features of Assyrian
architecture. It was elevated on a platform, eighty or ninety feet above
the plain, artificially constructed, and covered with a pavement of
bricks. It had probably three grand facades--one on the north-east,
where it was ordinarily approached from the town, and the two others on
the south-east and the south-west, where it was carried nearly to the
edge of the platform, and overhung the two streams of the Khosr-su and
the Tigris. Its principal apartment was that which was first entered by
the visitor. All the walls ran in straight lines, and all the angles of
the rooms and passages were right angles. There were more passages in
the building than usual but still the apartments very frequently opened
into one another; and almost one-half of the rooms were passage-rooms.
The do