This use of gates has not been abandoned in the East. At Mossoul, for instance, the entrances to the city are buildings with several rooms in them, and in the gate opening upon the Tigris M. Place often saw the governor of the province seated among his officers in an upper chamber and dispensing justice.[96] In the same town the doorways of a few great private houses are frequented in the same fashion by the inhabitants of the quarter. This was the case with the French Consulate, which was established in a large house that had been the ancestral home of a family of independent beys, now extinct. At the entrance there was a chamber covered with a depressed cupola and surrounded by stone benches. Right and left were four lodges for porters, and on one side a staircase leading to four upper rooms built over the vault. One of these served as a divan. All this was separated by a large courtyard from the dwelling place proper, and even after the building had become a part of France, the neighbours kept up their habit of coming to sit and gossip under its dome.[97] The word _porte_ has thus acquired a significance in every European language that could hardly be understood but for the light thrown upon it by such customs as those illustrated by the remains of Assyrian architecture, and alluded to so often in the sacred writings. Every one who has visited Stamboul, has seen in the first court of the Old Seraglio, that arched doorway (_Bab-i-Houmaioun_) in whose niches the heads of great criminals and rebellious vassals used once to be placed; it formerly led to the saloons in which the Ottoman sultans presided at the great council, listened to the reports of their officers, and received foreign ambassadors. The doorway through which the august presence was reached ended by representing in the imagination of those who passed through it; first, the whole of the building to which it belonged, and secondly, the sovereign enthroned behind it. The decrees in which the successors of Mohammed II. made known their will ended with these words: “_Given at our Sublime Gate, at our Gate of Happiness_.” In later years the Old Seraglio was abandoned. The different public departments were removed into a huge edifice more like a barracks than an eastern palace, but the established formula was retained. In the Constantinople of to-day “to go to the Porte” means to go to the government offices, and even the government itself, the sultan, that is, and his ministers, are known in all the chancelleries of Europe as _the Porte_, _the Sublime Porte_, _the Ottoman Porte_. It was, no doubt, by a metonomy of the same kind that the capital of ancient Chaldæa, the town into which the principal sanctuaries of the national gods were gathered, was called _Bab-ilou_, the _Gate of God_, which was turned by the Greeks into Βαβυλών, or Babylon.