We shall here confine ourselves to showing how the Assyrians understood the plan and general arrangement of a royal palace. The buildings of which it was composed were grouped upon a platform shaped like a T.[15] Each of the two parts of this platform was a rectangle. The larger of the two--that within the town walls--had a superficial measurement of about 68,500 square yards, the smaller one of about 40,000 square yards; so that the palace as a whole covered between twenty-four and twenty-five acres of ground, and the brick employed in building it may be put at about 1,750,642 cubic yards. The imagination is oppressed by such figures, especially when we remember that all this mass of material was carried to its place in baskets on men’s shoulders. This we know from those reliefs in which the construction of a palace is figured.[16] At the first glance the labyrinth of chambers, corridors and courts presented by the above plan seems to offer a hopeless task to one anxious to grasp the principle of its arrangements and to assign its right use to each apartment. Place and Thomas tell us that such was their feeling when they first began to open up the palace, but as the work advanced they grew to understand its combinations. In certain parts of the building objects were found that cast a flood of light upon the original purposes of the rooms in which they occurred; the character and richness of the decoration varied greatly between one part of the palace and another. The arrangement of the side entrances, the rarity or multiplicity of passages, also had their significance. Thanks to the observations made on all these points during the progress of the work we can now understand the economy of the building with some completeness. Its general arrangements were suggested to the architect by those conditions of life in the east which have changed so little during so many centuries. From this point of view it was soon perceived that the palace was divided into three distinct groups of apartments, groups corresponding exactly to the three great divisions into which every palatial residence of modern India, Persia, or Turkey may be divided. There is the Seraglio, or palace properly speaking, the rooms inhabited by the men, and the sélamlik, in which visitors are received. Then comes the Harem containing the private apartments of the prince with those of his wives and children, who are guarded by eunuchs and waited on by a crowd of female slaves and domestics. Finally there is the Khan, a collection of service chambers that we should call _offices_. The analogy is so absolute that in our ignorance of the Assyrian names for the three divisions of the palace, we are tempted to make use of those employed throughout the Levant, to designate the different parts of such houses, as, thanks to the wealth of their masters, are provided with all their organs.