A garden was planted by the side of the house. The Babylonians were an agricultural people, and even the cities were full of the gardens attached to the houses of all who could afford to have them. Originally the garden was little more than a grove of palms. But herbs and vegetables soon began to be grown in it, and as habits of luxury increased, exotic trees and shrubs were transplanted to it and flowers were cultivated for the sake of their scent. Tiglath-pileser I. of Assyria tells us how he had “taken and planted in the gardens of his country cedars” and other trees “from the lands he had conquered, which none of the kings his predecessors had ever planted before,” and how he had “brought rare vines which did not exist in Assyria and had cultivated them in the land of Assyria.” At a later date Sennacherib laid out a pleasure-garden or “paradise” by the side of the palace he erected, filling it with cypresses and other trees as well as fragrant plants, and digging a lake in the midst of it by means of which it could be watered. One of the bas-reliefs in the palace of Assur-bani-pal represents the King and Queen dining in the royal garden under the shadow of its palms, while an attendant drives away the insects with a fan. The Assyrians did but imitate their Babylonian neighbors, and in the gardens of Nineveh we must see many copies of the gardens that had been laid out in Babylonia long ages before. The very word “paradise,” which in the Persian age came to signify a pleasure-park, was of Babylonian origin. It is given in the exercise-book of a Babylonian school-boy as the name of a mythical locality, and an etymological pun attempts to derive it from the name of the god Esu. It was, of course, only the houses of the rich and noble which were artistically furnished or provided with a garden. The poorer classes lived in mud huts of conical form, which seldom contained more than one or two rooms. Air and light were admitted through the door or through small apertures in the walls. In the better class of houses, on the other hand, the windows were of large size, and were placed near the ceiling. The air was excluded by means of curtains which were drawn across them when the weather was cold or when it was necessary to keep out the sunlight. The houses, moreover, consisted of more than one story, the upper stories being approached by a flight of steps which were open to the air. They were usually built against one of the sides of a central court, around which the rooms were ranged, the rooms on the upper floors communicating with one another by means of a covered corridor, or else by doors leading from one chamber to the other. The apartments of the women were separate from those of the men, and the servants slept either on the ground-floor or in an outbuilding of their own.