We find these volutes everywhere, upon shafts of stone and wood indifferently. We are tempted to think, when we examine the details of our Fig. 67, that the first idea of them was taken from the horns of the ibex or the wild goat. The column on the right of this cut bears a fir cone between its volutes, those on the left have small tablets on which are perched the very animals whose heads are armed with these horns. However this may be, the form in question, like all others borrowed from nature by man, was soon modified and developed by art. The curve was prolonged and turned in upon itself. In one of the capitals of the little temple represented at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), two pairs of these horns may be recognized one above the other (Fig. 75), but nowhere else do we find such an arrangement. Whether the column be of wood, as in the Sippara tablet (Fig. 71), or of stone, as in those buildings in which the weight and solidity of the entablature points decisively to that material (Figs. 41 and 42), we find a volute in universal use that differs but slightly in its general physiognomy from the familiar ornament of the Ionic capital. [Illustration: FIG. 76.--View of a palace; from Layard.] Let us revert for a moment to the country house or palace of which we gave a general view in Fig. 39. We shall there find on the highest part of the building an open loggia supported by small columns many times repeated. We reproduce this part of the relief on a larger scale (Fig. 76), so that its details may be more clearly seen. A very slight familiarity with the graphic processes of the Assyrians is sufficient to inform the reader that the kind of trellis work with which the bed of the relief is covered is significant of a mountainous country. The palace rises on the banks of a river, which is indicated by the sinuous lines in the right lower corner. The buildings themselves--which are dominated here and there by the round tops of trees, planted, we may suppose, in the inner courts--stand upon mounds at various heights above the plain. The lowest of these look like isolated structures, such as the advanced works of a fortress. Next comes a line of towers, and then the artificial hill crowned by the palace properly speaking. The facade of the latter is flanked by tall and salient towers, across whose summits runs the open gallery to which we have referred.[262] This is supported by numerous columns which must by their general arrangement and spacing, have been of wood. The gallery consisted, in all probability, of a platform upheld by trunks of trees, either squared or left in the rough and surmounted by capitals sheathed in beaten bronze.