All these large rooms opening from a single court made up a combination in which everything was calculated for show. Their size alone made such rooms uninhabitable, and, as life has everywhere much the same requirements, M. Place found to the south of these state apartments a collection of smaller and less richly ornamented chambers in which the king could sleep, eat, and receive in private audience, and in which the officers of his chancellery and his personal attendants could be lodged within easy call. These are the rooms about the courts marked M, M´, N, O, P in our plan. They contain a few sculptures. The walls as a rule are coated with a coloured stucco, and sometimes decorated with fresco paintings. There are in all forty-nine of these rooms, covering, with their courts, about 6,000 square yards. A short study of the plan is enough to make its presiding idea clear to us. “Each court, taken by itself and with the chambers radiating from it, forms a distinct group of apartments communicating with other groups only on one side and often only by a single door.”[20] Each of these groups must have afforded lodgings for the personnel of one department of the king’s household. Ctesias says that fifteen thousand officers and domestics found board and lodging in the palace of the King of Persia, and although he may be here guilty, as in so many other instances, of some exaggeration, we are willing to accept this figure as being comparatively near the truth. Travellers who visited Constantinople in the days of the Solimans and Amurats, tell us that the walls of the old seraglio crave shelter to thousands of individuals who were fed from the kitchens of the sultan. Before quitting this part of the palace we must point out several other buildings that belong to it both by position and character. In the first place, our readers will see that the northern angle is occupied by a group of chambers abutting on one corner of the seraglio but not communicating directly with it. This group opens on the state quadrangle and upon the external platform. “This building was decorated in the most splendid fashion. It contained eight vast halls and a few smaller chambers. It was like a second seraglio attached to the first and rivalling it in magnificence. What could have been its destination? We can hardly answer that question with certainty, but we may hazard the suggestion that, in the lifetime of Sargon, his son Sennacherib was already a great personage and must have had his own particular palace, or suite of apartments, in the house of the king, his father.”[21]