The Assyrians not only understood how to defend their own cities, and to destroy those of their foes, they were fully alive to the necessity for good carriage roads, if their armies and military machines were to be transported rapidly from place to place. How far these roads extended we do not know, but Place ascertained the existence of paved causeways debouching from the gates of Dour-Saryoukin,[99] and unless they stretched at least to the frontiers, it is difficult to see how the Assyrians could have made such great use as they did of war chariots. Not one of their series of military pictures can be named in which they do not appear, and they are by no means the heavy and clumsy cars now used in some parts both of European and Asiatic Turkey. Their wheels are far from being those solid disks of timber that are alone capable of resisting the inequalities of a roadless country. They have not the lightness of a modern carriage with its tires of beaten steel, but the felloes of their wheels are light and graceful enough to prove that the roads of those times were better than anything the Mesopotamia of to-day can show. The spokes, which seem to have been fitted with great care and nicety, are, as a rule, eight in number (Figs. 21 and 31). [Illustration: FIG. 30.--An attack by escalade; from Layard.] In the interior of the town--we are still speaking of the town of Sargon--these same causeways formed the principal streets. They were about forty feet wide. Their construction was, of course, far inferior to that of a Roman road. There were no footpaths, either within or without the cities; the stones were small, irregular in shape, and not of a very durable kind. They were placed in a single layer, and the pavement when finished looked like a mere bed of broken stones. All Mesopotamia, however, cannot now show a road that can be compared to these ancient ways. Wherever the traveller goes, his beasts of burden and the wheels of his carts sink either into a bed of dust or into deep and clinging mud, according to the season. It is no better in the towns. Whoever has had the ill luck to be out, in the rainy season, in the sloughs and sewers that the Turks call streets, will be ready to acknowledge that the civilization of Assyria in the time of Sargon was better furnished than that of Turkey in the days of Abdul-Hamid. [Illustration: FIG. 31.--Chariot for three combatants; from the palace of Assurbanipal. Louvre. Height 16 inches. Drawn by Bourgoin.]