orways were mostly placed without any regard to regularity, seldom
opposite one another, and generally towards the corners of the
apartments. There was the curious feature, common in Assyrian edifices,
of a room being entered from a court, or from another room, by two or
three doorways, which is best explained by supposing that the rank of
the person determined the door by which he might enter. Squared recesses
in the sides of the rooms were common. The thickness of the walls was
great. The apartments, though wider than in other palaces, were still
narrow for their length, never much exceeding forty feet; while the
courts were much better proportioned.

It was in the size and the number of his rooms, in his use of passages,
and in certain features of his ornamentation, that Sennacherib chiefly
differed from former builders. He increased the width of the principal
state apartments by one-third, which seems to imply the employment of
some new mode or material for roofing. In their length he made less
alteration, only advancing from 150 to 180 feet, evidently because he
aimed, not merely at increasing the size of his rooms, but at improving
their proportions. In one instance alone--that of a gallery or
passage-room, leading (apparently) from the more public part of the
palace to the hareem or private apartments--did he exceed this length,
uniting the two portions of the palace by a noble corridor, 218 feet
long by 25 feet wide. Into this corridor he brought passages from the
two public courts, which he also united together by a third passage,
thus greatly facilitating communication between the various blocks of
buildings which composed his vast palatial edifice.

The most striking characteristic of Sennacherib's ornamentation is its
strong and marked realism. It was under Sennacherib that the practice
first obtained of completing each scene by a background, such as
actually existed as the time and place of its occurrence. Mountains,
rocks, trees, roads, rivers, lakes, were regularly portrayed, an attempt
being made to represent the locality, whatever it might be, as
truthfully as the artist's skill and the character of his material
rendered possible. Nor was this endeavor limited to the broad and
general features of the scene only. The wish evidently was to include
all the little accessories which the observant eye of an artist might
have noted if he had made his drawing with the scene before him. The
species of trees is