In a word, the Assyrians, like the Chaldæans, not having at their disposal building-stone in great abundance, were obliged to construct their edifices almost exclusively of brick, the capabilities of which they tried to the utmost. The result of this was that they never had those halls of columns which are the triumph of Egyptian architecture. However thick one may suppose pillars of brick, or columns formed of bricks moulded in the shape of segments of a circle, to be, these supports will never offer the same guarantee of solidity as the stone column. Wherever a heavy burden, such as a vault or a terrace, had to be supported, great walls were raised of an extraordinary thickness, which it would have been imprudent to pierce with windows capable of diminishing its resistance. Air and light only penetrated into the apartments by the doors; often, too, an opening was contrived at the summit of the vault or dome, formed of a cylindrical pipe of burnt clay carried through the entire thickness of the structure. § II. PALACES. The town of Dur-Sarrukin (the Fortress of Sargon) stood three leagues north of Nineveh, on the Khaswer, one of the branches of the Tigris, where the Kurdish village of Khorsabad has been built. Discovered in 1843 by E. Botta, French Consul at Mosoul, it was almost completely excavated by this illustrious explorer and his successor, Victor Place, and it is from Khorsabad that most of the Assyrian monuments in the Louvre come. It was the custom that each of the Ninevite monarchs should have a special palace built at some distance from the great Assyrian capital, and this became the royal residence round which stood the dwellings of the court-officers, the guards, the servants, and all persons who depended upon the prince or lived at his expense. Dur-Sarrukin was built by Sargon, the father of Sennacherib, about the year 710 before our era. The palace and the town which was annexed to it formed a group of structures contained within a fortified enclosure (fig. 49) the plan of which was a square of 5905 feet. [Illustration: Fig. 49.--Plan of Dur-Sarrukin (after Place, pl. 2).] The wall of circumvallation, the angles of which pointed to the four quarters of the heavens, as in the Chaldæan buildings, was crowned with battlements and pierced by eight gates protected by towers. The king’s palace (fig. 50) stood almost in the middle of the north-eastern façade, and a part of its structure which projected beyond the ramparts had the appearance of an enormous bastion. The structure of this palace was supported by a platform which formed an acropolis nearly twenty-five acres in area. The mass of clay which had to be brought to raise the terrace and the walls of the palace has been estimated at 48,233,000 cubic feet. The platform overlooked the town, and was reached by staircases, destroyed at the present day, but which must have been analogous to the monumental staircase which formed the ascent to the palace of Sennacherib, and