So much technical skill devoted to the construction of simple subterranean conduits makes us particularly regret that the deplorable quality of the material did not allow the vaults and domes of the palaces to exist till our day. However, there were not only vaulted halls in the Ninevite buildings; a certain number of them were covered by flat roofs formed of beams of palm-wood, poplar-wood or cedar-wood, which supported light terraces. The bas-relief at Kouyunjik which we cited above shows us flat roofs side by side with parabolic and spheroidal cupolas. Nevertheless, what we said about the use of stone in the Ninevite structures we can repeat here on the subject of timber. Nineveh, not being too remote from the wooded mountains of Armenia, Kurdistan and Masius, where forests of pines, beeches, and oaks grow, did not deprive herself of the use of these woods in her structures; she had panelled halls in her palaces, and, at the apogee of her power, when thousands and thousands of slaves placed their strength at the service of her monarchs, she had the timber of the Amanus and the Lebanon transported into her buildings. The king Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857) relates in one of his inscriptions that he had an enormous quantity of pines, cedars, and oaks cut down in the Amanus and the Lebanon in order to have them carried to Nineveh, and to employ them in the construction of his palace and the temples of his favourite gods. Other princes, such as Sargon, Sennacherib, Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, make the same boast of having utilised, in the buildings which they erected or repaired, beams brought from the Amanus and the Lebanon. “I caused the tallest cedars of Lebanon,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “to be brought to Babylon; the sanctuary of E-Kua, in which the god Marduk dwells, was freshly covered with beams of cedar-wood.”[30] This is the wood of resinous nature, “the odour of which is good,” add the inscriptions. At the British Museum fragments of a cedar beam, collected among the ruins of Assur-nasir-pal’s palace at Nimroud, are preserved. Who will ever be able to say what efforts and how many human lives were required to transport these gigantic rafters across a rough country without any roads for traffic, from the Lebanon as far as the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates? Accordingly it may be affirmed that the use of wood was always exceptional in the Chaldæo-Assyrian structures; it was never introduced except as an exotic element, of which the monarchs boast on account of its rarity. The climate and the nature of the Mesopotamian soil were better suited by thick vaultings, which, then as at the present day, never ceased to be the rule there.