rsal ruin that
has overtaken their superstructures. Finally, certain square rooms have
been discovered which must have been covered with vaults in the shape of
more or less flattened domes.

[Illustration: FIG. 43.--View of a group of buildings; Kouyundjik; from
Layard.]

We must here call attention to the importance of a bas-relief belonging to
the curious series of carved pictures in which Sennacherib caused the
erection of his palace at Nineveh to be commemorated. Look well at this
group of buildings, which seems to rise upon a platform at the foot of a
hill shaded with cypresses and fruit-laden vines (see Fig. 43). The
buildings on the right have flat roofs, those on the left, and they seem
the most important, have, some hemispherical cupolas, and some tall domes
approaching cones in shape. These same forms are still in use over all that
country, not only for public buildings like baths and mosques, but even
here and there for the humblest domestic structures. Travellers have been
often surprised at encountering, in many of the villages of Upper Syria
and Mesopotamia, peasants' houses with sugar-loaf roofs like these.[163]

We need not here go further into details upon this point. In these general
and introductory remarks we have endeavoured to point out as concisely as
possible how the salient characteristics of Assyrian architecture are to be
explained by the configuration of the country, by the nature of the
materials at hand, and by the climate with which the architect had to
reckon. It was to these conditions that the originality of the system was
due; that the solids were so greatly in excess over the voids, and the
lateral over the vertical measurements of a building. In this latter
respect the buildings of Mesopotamia leave those of all other countries,
even of Egypt, far behind. They were carried, too, to an extraordinary
height without any effort to give the upper part greater lightness than the
substructure; both were equally solid and massive. Finally, the nature of
the elements of which Mesopotamian architects could dispose was such that
the desire for elegance and beauty had to be satisfied by a superficial
system of decoration, by paint and carved slabs laid on to the surface of
the walls. Beauty unadorned was beyond their reach, and their works may be
compared to women whose attractions lie in the richness of their dress and
the multitude of their jewels.

NOTES:

[147] OPPERT (_Expedition sci