Mas’ûdi’s account of the Nu’mânid palace was coloured by a lively recollection of the glories of Balkuwârâ, which in his day was beginning to fall into ruin. Sâmarrâ was finally abandoned by the khalifs in 892, and Mas’ûdi wrote in 943. But if Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn fulfils the requirements of the tenth-century writer, so does Ukhaiḍir, and Ukhaiḍir, standing within two days’ journey of Ḥîrah, may well be taken to be the closest representation of the Lakhmid ḥîrahs until Khawarnaq itself is excavated. [Illustration: FIG. 14. Scheme of Pompeiian house. (From Mau’s _Pompeii_, by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan.)] The genesis of the lîwân house as it appears in the palace of Khusrau, at Ukhaiḍir and at Balkuwârâ has emerged from the analysis of a long series of more ancient buildings. The baits adhere severely, I might almost say implacably, to a type which was derived ultimately from the khilâni. It is, however, possible that in their later form another influence may have been at work. We know that, to a certain extent at any rate, the Parthians adopted the Hellenistic house. The Greek peristyle is found in Parthian houses at Babylon and at Niffer (Fig. 9); but, on the other hand, in the Parthian palace at Tellôh, ‘in spite of the penetration into the heart of Asia of the elements of Greek civilization, the constructors, contemporaries of the Seleucids, have remained in all points faithful to the traditions of ancient Asiatic civilization,’[159] and at Hatra no Hellenistic house has yet been recorded. The plan of the Hellenistic house is well known from excavation, principally at Delos and at Priene. As early as the second century B.C. it is found in combination with the Roman atrium house at Pompeii (Fig. 14). In the ordinary private house, which was too small to admit of a complete peristyle, the oecus gives into the courtyard through a prostas with an open colonnaded façade, while other less important rooms are set round the remaining sides of the court (Fig. 15). This has already something of the appearance of a lîwân group with a ṭarmah, and the resemblance is increased if oecus and prostas are reduplicated and two rooms placed in the centre (Fig. 16). The genesis of this house is totally different from that of the lîwân-ṭarmah house; the house of Priene is an abridgement of the peristyle house, the lîwân-ṭarmah house is a development of the khilâni, but it is nevertheless possible that the Hellenistic peristyle house, in its abridged form, may have given the initial impulse which led to the adding of the ṭarmah to the lîwân. We may be sure that no columned façade could have come into existence in Mesopotamia before the close of the second Babylonian empire, and indeed at Ukhaiḍir the columned façade is not applied to the ṭarmah house, though it is found in arcaded galleries--for instance in No. 20. Moreover, the rooms in courts B and H are structurally more closely related to the simple lîwân of Hatra than