The quadrangular chamber of Chehâr Qapû, viewed impartially, does not offer any serious difficulty. If the audience hall in the palace of Khusrau were standing, its aspect would be much the same, for it too was a large square chamber with a dome rising above and dominating the rest of the palace. At Sarvistân a parallel structure exists to this day. But it is the surrounding buildings which are different, and the question is further complicated by the circumstance that the rooms in the immediate vicinity of the domed hall are so much ruined that their exact arrangement cannot be decided without some excavation--it is provoking to think how little excavation would be needed. So far as can be observed at present Chehâr Qapû is a rectangular complex with the main entrance to the east; the gateway is flanked to the south by two courts, to the north by one, each court being furnished with small rectangular rooms. I conjecture that these were guard-rooms, and they may be compared with the rooms under the ramps in the palace of Khusrau. The main entrance opened into a long quadrangular court with a monumental gate at the further end. To the north of this court, and communicating with it by a door at the eastern end, there is an almost quadrangular area, formed by rooms set round the courtyard numbered E on the plan. The rooms are latitudinal, and they bear no resemblance to the lîwâns of the palace of Khusrau. To the west lies another court, F, with latitudinal rooms on two sides and an independent communication with the entrance court; still further west are two smaller courts, G and H, with rooms on two sides; and finally, to the north of the domed hall, there seems to have been a fifth court or open space with rooms on two sides. The south wing is not symmetrical with the north wing and it is considerably wider. There are three large courts here. Court I has chambers on three sides; those on the south side resembling a lîwân group with a ṭarmah. Court J has on the south side a latitudinal chamber, with a ṭarmah on the north side, and a passage communicating with the entrance court, A. Court K has a lîwân group with a ṭarmah on the south side; the north and west sides are ruined. Beyond this lies a totally ruined area, to the west of which stand two rooms, apparently with a ṭarmah, and at the south-west end of the palace there is a series of four rooms. With the exception of the small courts on either side of the main gate, all the courts seem to have had some direct intercommunication; this was probably the case in the palace of Khusrau also. The grouping of the rooms in the court is, however, almost entirely unlike that which has been described in the larger palace at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, at Ukhaiḍir, or at Sâmarrâ. Courts I and K alone, with their lîwâns and ṭarmahs, offer shadowy resemblances to the others. The arrangement of the rooms, the irregularity of the areas covered by the