ruins, especially at Tello, recently excavated by M. de Sarzec; but
we can easily tell from the appearance of these blocks that they played a
very subordinate part in the buildings into which they were introduced.
Some of them seem to have been employed as a kind of decoration in relief
upon the brick walls; others, and those the most numerous, appear to have
been used in the principal entrances to buildings. Upon one face a
semicircular hollow or socket may be noticed, in which the foot of the
bronze pivots, or rather the pivot shod and faced with bronze, upon which
the heavy timber doors and their casings of metal were hung, had to turn.
The marks of the consequent friction are still clearly visible.[137] The
dimensions of these stones are never great, and it is easy to see that
their employment for building purposes was always of the most restricted
nature. They had indeed to be brought from a great distance. The towns upon
the Persian Gulf might get them from Arabia.[138] Babylon and Nineveh must
have drawn them from the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.[139]
But quarrying and transport involved an expenditure that prevented any
thought of bringing these volcanic rocks into common use.

[Illustration: FIG. 33.--Brick from Khorsabad; Louvre. 12-2/3 inches
square, and 4-4/5 inches thick.]

Compared with the towns of the lower Euphrates, Babylon was not far from
mountains whence, by means of canals and rivers, she might have easily
obtained a limestone of good quality. Even in these days, when commerce and
industry have fallen so low in those regions, the gypseous alabaster from
the neighbourhood of Mossoul is transported in no unimportant quantities as
far as Bagdad. It is used for lining baths and those _serdabs_ to which the
people retreat in summer.[140]

The remains of the great capital show no trace of dressed stone. And yet it
was used during the second empire in some of the great public works
undertaken by Nabopolassar and more especially by Nebuchadnezzar.
Herodotus, who saw Babylon, declares this in the most formal manner in his
description of the bridge which then united, for the first time, the two
banks of the Euphrates. While the river was bordered by quays of burnt
brick, the bridge, says the historian, "was built of very large stones,
bound together with iron clamps embedded in lead."[141]

That, however, was but one exception, and it was necessitated by the very
nature of the work to be car