rom materials like these
no system of carpentry could be developed that should allow great spaces to
be covered and great heights to be reached. When Nineveh and, after her,
Babylon, had conquered all Western Asia, she drew, like Egypt before her,
upon the forests of Lebanon. There she obtained the beams and planks for
the ceilings and doors of her sumptuous palaces.[145] The employment,
however, of these excellent woods must always have been rare and
exceptional. Moreover, other habits had become confirmed. When these new
resources were put at the disposition of architecture, the art was too old
and too closely wedded to its traditional methods to accept their aid. In
the use of wood, as in that of brick, Assyria neglected to make the best of
the advantages assured to her by her situation and her natural products.

If Chaldaea was ill-provided with stone and timber, she had every facility
for procuring the useful and precious metals. They were not, of course, to
be found in her alluvial plains, but metals are easy of transport,
especially to a country whose commerce has the command of navigable
highways. The industrial centres in which they are manufactured are often
separated by great distances from the regions where they are won from the
earth. But to procure the more indispensable among them the dwellers upon
the Tigris and Euphrates had no great distance to cover. The southern
slopes of Zagros, three or four days' journey from Nineveh, furnished iron,
copper, lead, and silver in abundance. Mines are still worked in Kurdistan,
or, at least, have been worked in very recent times, which supply these
metals in abundance. The traces of abandoned workings may be recognized
even by the hasty and unlearned traveller, and a skilful engineer would,
no doubt, make further discoveries.[146] Mr. Layard was unable to learn
that any gold had been won in our days; but from objects found in the
excavations, from inscriptions in which the Assyrians boast of their wealth
and prodigality, from Egyptian texts in which the details of tributes paid
by the Roten-nou, that is by the people of Syria and Mesopotamia, are
given, it is clear that in the great days of Nineveh and Babylon those
capitals possessed a vast quantity of gold, and employed it in a host of
different ways. In the course of several centuries of war, victory, and
pillage, princes, officers, and soldiers had amassed enormous wealth by the
simple process of stripping the nati