David provided an immense quantity of copper for the use of the Temple. Of this substance all sorts of vessels were made for the Temple, as they had been for the Tabernacle; and to these may be added weapons, more especially helmets, armor, shields, and spears. Hiram of Tyre was celebrated as a worker in brass. The larger vessels, and the pillars for architectural ornaments, were moulded in foundries; but it appears that this art, even in the time of Solomon, was little known among the Jews, and was peculiar to foreigners, particularly the Phœnicians. Mines of copper occur in the mountains of Kourdistan, which appear to have been worked from remote antiquity. They formed the chief source from which copper, iron, and lead were obtained by the ancient Assyrians. A disused copper-mine, nearly blocked up with earth and rubbish, and only known to a few mountaineers, was visited by Mr. Layard. He found the metal in various states. Inscriptions on copper, various utensils, and figures of lions in solid metal, have been exhumed from the ruins of Nineveh. Tools, daggers, arrow-heads and armor, were formed from the ore, as was commonly the case among Asiatic nations, while the metal in powder was used to color the bricks and ornaments in the Assyrian palaces. The general style of building in the East, with which our modern travelers are so familiar, accords with that which is traceable to the remotest ages. Fronting the street, which is usually narrow, as providing a better defense from the sun, and sometimes with a range of shops on one or both sides, dead walls appear, here and there only broken by a window, to which a grotesque frame of lattice-work serves as a guard. The house is entered by a porch or gateway, which conducts into a quadrangular court paved with stone or marble, and is generally surrounded by a cloister; over which, when the house has a number of stories, a gallery, having a balustrade, or else a piece of carved or latticed work, is erected of the same dimensions as the cloister. The apartments are approached by doors from the quadrangular court. When houses are built close together, the staircase is placed in the porch, or at the entrance into the court, and continued through one corner of the gallery or another to the top of the house; but when the houses are not contiguous, the staircase appears to have been conducted along the outside of the building. The roof is always flat; it is often composed of branches of wood laid across rude beams, and is covered with a strong plaster of terrace, to defend it from injury in the rainy season. It is surrounded by a parapet or a wall breast high, serving as a protection to those who go on the roof for various purposes, and also as a means of separation from the adjacent houses. Such a battlement was expressly required by the law of Moses, intimating probably, that terraced houses were at that time less common in Syria than they were in Egypt.