Above the dado of sculpture the walls were embellished with glazed tiles, decorated with winged figures of the King, and occasionally with animals, especially lions, framed with borders of rosettes. The usual colours were yellow, blue, green, and black. Coloured tiles also, as well as slabs of alabaster, formed the paving of the floors, which, in the case of smaller rooms, were formed merely of stamped clay, covered, no doubt, while in use, with mats or rugs. Wall paintings of figures and arabesques seem to have been an exceptional form of decoration, found at Khorsabad only in the larger rooms of the harem. Yet for all this brilliance of decoration, the effect of the interiors must have been one of subdued richness. The imagination, indeed, pictures the vast palace with its labyrinth of seven hundred rooms, surrounding three sides of the entrance court, where the glare of sunshine would be pitiless, as a sort of subterranean arrangement of tunnel-like passages and chambers. Their distribution can be studied in the ground plan restoration. There were three groups, each disposed around its own central court. On the left of the main court lay the harem, with its separate provision for four wives, while on the opposite side was accommodation for the service, including kitchen, bakery, wine cellars, and stables. Fronting the main entrance were the King’s suite of rooms and the quarters of his official staff, beyond which were the halls of state. In the open space, adjoining the royal rooms, rose the ziggurat, or terraced temple, the three lower stories of which still exist, connected by a winding ramp. The conception that one gathers of this huge pile is, externally, of a stronghold, somewhat forbidding; internally, of a crypt-like maze, offering perhaps comfort, but little beauty--the lair of the absolute monarch of a race to whom the market-place and fields of battle and hunting represented the chief ideals of existence. CHAPTER V PERSIAN CIVILISATION The name Iran, by which the Persians still call their country, preserves the origin of their race. They were Aryans, as distinguished from the Semitic peoples; a branch of the race which migrated from the country now called Southern Russia and Turkestan into the rich lands of the South. One branch pushed on to the Ganges and became identified with India; the other settled about the Indus, whence they gradually pushed their way westward. This branch comprised many tribes which in time developed into peoples. The most powerful of these at the period when the Aryans first came into conflict with the Semitic race, was the Medes, who occupied the northern part of the west side of what is now Persia, while the Persians, who rose to supremacy later, occupied the southern part. This western division of the country, separated by a desert from the eastern, entirely differs in character from Mesopotamia.