an the
modern ones that have taken their place. The overpowering heat from which
the inhabitants of modern Mossoul suffer so greatly is largely owing to the
unintelligent employment of stone and plaster in the construction of
dwellings. During his stay in that town the thermometer sometimes rose, in
his apartments, to 51 deg. Centigrade (90 deg. Fahrenheit). The mean temperature of
a summer's day was from 40 deg. to 42 deg. Centigrade (from 72 deg. to about 76 deg.
Fahrenheit).

[159] See LAYARD, _Monuments of Nineveh_, 2nd series, plates 21 and 40.

[160] The _serdab_ is a kind of cellar, the walls and floor of which are
drenched periodically with water, which, by its evaporation, lowers the
temperature by several degrees.

[161] The town represented on the sculptured slab here reproduced is not
Assyrian but Phoenician; it affords data, however, which may be
legitimately used in the restoration of the upper part of an Assyrian
palace. We can hardly believe that the Mesopotamian artists, in
illustrating the wars of the Assyrian kings, copied servilely the real
features of the conquered towns. They had no sketches by "special artists"
to guide their chisels. They were told that a successful campaign had been
fought in the marshes of the lower Euphrates, or in some country covered
with forests of date trees, and these they had no difficulty in
representing because they had examples before their eyes; so too, when
buildings were in question, we may fairly conclude that they borrowed their
motives from the architecture with which they were familiar.

[162] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. ii. pp. 77-84.

[163] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 112; GEO. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p.
341.

Sec. 3.--_Construction._

As might have been expected nothing that can be called a structure of
dressed stone has been discovered in Chaldaea;[164] in Assyria alone have
some examples been found. Of these the most interesting, and the most
carefully studied and described are the walls of Sargon's palace at
Khorsabad.

Even there stone was only employed to case the walls in which the mound was
inclosed--a cuirass of large blocks carefully dressed and fixed seemed to
give solidity to the mass, and at the same time we know by the arrangement
of the blocks that the outward appearance of the wall was by no means lost
sight of. All those of a single course were of one height but of different
depths and widths, and the arran