inhabitants of Bagdad and Hillah carry off to this day for use in
their modern habitations.[173] The crude bricks used behind this protecting
epidermis have not lost their individuality, as at Nineveh they seem to
have been used only after complete dessication. They are of course much
more friable than those burnt in the kiln; when they are deprived of their
cuirass and exposed to the weather they return slowly to the condition of
dust, and their remains are seen in the sloping mounds that hide the foot
of every ancient ruin (see Fig. 48), and yet if you penetrate into the
interior of a mass built of these bricks, you will easily distinguish the
courses, and in some instances the bricks have sufficient solidity to allow
of their being moved and detached one from another. They are, in fact,
bricks, and not pise. But in Chaldaea, as in Assyria, the mounds upon which
the great buildings were raised are not always of crude brick. They are
sometimes made by inclosing a large space by four brick walls, and filling
it with earth and the various _debris_ left by previous buildings.[174] Our
remarks upon construction must be understood as applying to the buildings
themselves, and not to the artificial hills upon which they stood.

[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Temple at Mugheir; from Loftus.]

The Assyrians seem never to have used anything analogous to our mortar or
cement in fixing their materials. On the comparatively rare occasions when
they employed stone they were content with dressing their blocks with great
care and putting them in absolute juxtaposition with one another. When they
used crude brick, sufficient adherence was insured by the moisture left in
the clay, and by its natural properties. Even when they used burnt or well
dried bricks they took no great care to give them a cohesion that would
last, ordinary clay mixed with water and a little straw, was their only
cement.[175] Even in our own day the masons and bricklayers of Mossoul and
Bagdad are content with the same simple materials, and their structures
have no great solidity in consequence.

In Chaldaea, at least in certain times and at certain places, construction
was more careful. In the ruin known as _Babil_, a ruin that represents
one of the principal monuments of ancient Babylon, there is nothing between
the bricks but earth that must have been placed there in the condition of
mud.[176] These bricks may be detached almost without effort. It is quite
otherwise