Quite as little as the Chaldæans, and for the same motives, did the Assyrians make a frequent and regular use of the column as an element of their architecture. Victor Place notices, like the explorers of Lower Chaldæa, several façades in the palace of Sargon adorned with pilasters and half-columns of brick, projecting beyond the plane of the walls, and having no object except to relieve the monotony of the structure. Perhaps, too, these half-columns, which are found in groups of seven, had, like the two famous pillars in the Temple of Solomon, a mystical and symbolical meaning, the number seven playing an essential part among the mythological conceptions of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. Elsewhere a few bases of columns and a few monolithic capitals have been found, which prove that the Assyrians used stone supports for monumental porches, as we ascertained in the palace of Tello. A fragment of a bas-relief preserved at the British Museum, and coming from the palace of Assurbanipal, shows us (fig. 43) the façade of a great building adorned with a projecting roof, supported by four pilasters and four columns. The base of these columns rests on the back of gigantic lions, which seem to advance to meet one another, two and two. On the back of the lion the architect has placed a coussinet, surmounted by a torus and by the stem of the column. In the ruins of the palace of Kouyunjik, four bases of columns were found still in place, and seeming to belong to a covered gallery; there were also two small winged bulls with human heads, crowned with the tiara, and supporting on their back a spheroidal base decorated with geometrical designs in relief. At Nimroud Sir A. H. Layard noticed also two crouching sphinxes bearing bases of columns (fig. 44); according to the same architectural principle the foot of the arches rested upon the gigantic bulls which flanked the chief entrances of the palaces. [Illustration: Fig. 43.--Façade with pilasters (from bas-relief in British Museum representing Babylon).] [Illustration: Fig. 44.--Base of column (after Layard).] The stem of the columns was probably of wood, painted or covered with a metallic envelope. Round the inner courtyards there were, as in the courts of oriental palaces in our own day, porticoes formed of cedar beams resting on bases analogous to those which we have just noticed. Strabo[31] reminds us that in Babylon beams of palm-wood were used in the construction of houses: “They are careful,” he says, “to wrap round each palm-wood pillar with rush-cords, which are then covered with several coats of paint.” Things were not done quite in this way in the houses of the rich and in princely residences. A fragment of a cedar beam of the size of a man was discovered at Khorsabad. It was still overlaid with a plating of bronze decorated with designs in _repoussé_, which imitate the bark of a palm-trunk. [Illustration: Fig. 45.--Assyrian capital (after Place, _Ninive et l’Assyrie_, pl. 35).]