At Khorsabad, where the main streets must, like those of Babylon, have intersected each other at right angles, how were the buildings, public and private, arranged? We might have had an answer to this interesting question had M. Place been in command of enough time and means to clear the whole interior of the _enceinte_. Even as it was he found enough to justify him in asserting that the great inclosure of some eight hundred acres was not, as we might be tempted to imagine at first sight, a royal park attached to the palace, but a city. He sunk trenches at three points where low mounds suggested the presence of ruins, and all his doubts soon disappeared. Several yards below the present level of the ground he found the original surface, with the pavements of streets, courtyards and rooms; doorways with their thresholds and jambs; walls covered with stucco, cut stone and even alabaster slabs; potsherds, fragments of brick and utensils of various kinds--decisive evidence, in fact, that one of those agglomerations of civilized human beings that we call towns, had formerly occupied the site. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. SCULPTURE. § 1.--_The principal themes of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture._ The Egyptian notions as to a future life had much to do with the rapidity with which the art of sculpture was developed during the early years of their history. There was a close relation between their religion and the rites it implied, on the one hand, and the peculiar characteristics of the most ancient Memphite sculptures on the other. We cannot say the same of Chaldæa. So far as our present knowledge extends, we have no reason to suppose that the first efforts of the Mesopotamian sculptor were directed to providing the _umbra_, the immaterial inhabitant of the tomb, with a material support which should resemble as closely as possible the body of flesh and bones that, in spite of every precaution, would sooner or later end in dust and nothingness. No monument has come down to us in which we can recognize a portrait image executed for a sepulchre.[100] And yet the basis of the Chaldæan religion was similar to that of Egypt. Taken as a whole, the beliefs as to a posthumous life were the same in both countries. Why then had they such different effects upon the arts? For this we may give several reasons. The first is the comparatively small importance forced upon the Chaldæan tomb by the nature of the soil. In mere coffins of terra-cotta, and even in those narrow brick vaults that are met with at certain points, at Mugheir and Warka for instance, there is no room for a single statue, still less for the crowds of images held by a Gizeh or Sakkarah mastaba. Add to this that stone was rare and dear, that it had to be brought from a great distance, and we shall comprehend why funerary rites and the worship of the dead exercised no appreciable influence over Chaldæan sculpture.