At a considerable distance to the north-east of the palace stands the small building which is known as the Ḥammâm (Plate 5, Fig. 3). Unlike the rest of the palace, it is not oriented. It consists of a long chamber running slightly to the west of north (about 24°), 10·65 metres long by 5·30 wide. It was covered by a vault which has now fallen. The door is on the east side; in the north and south walls there is a deep rectangular niche. A door in the north-east corner leads into a smaller chamber, 4·10 × 3·30 metres. In this building the thrust of the vault over the larger chamber is taken by outer buttresses, the only instance of such construction at Ukhaiḍir. On the east side there is one buttress ·60 metre deep; on the west side three, 1·25 metres deep. A stair leading to the roof ran up over the western buttress. CHAPTER II QṢAIR, MUDJḌAH, AND ‘AṬSHÂN QṢAIR Among gypsum hillocks, about an hour’s ride to the north-east of Ukhaiḍir, lie the ruins of a village known to the Arabs as Qṣair.[33] There have been here a number of small houses, possibly lodgings for the gypsum workers, and I noticed several deep rectangular tanks, though whether they were intended for the storage of water, or were connected with the process of gypsum working, I do not know. Broken pottery was scattered sparsely over the ruin heaps; most of it was unglazed, but there were also fragments of blue glazed ware and a few pieces with a black glaze on the inner side. Such sherds as these are to be found on every site, mediaeval or modern, in Mesopotamia, and do not offer any conclusive evidence as to date. One large building is standing in ruins (Plate 5, Fig. 4). It lies approximately north-east by south-west and has been enclosed by a wall of sun-dried brick, set with towers. On two sides this wall was clearly visible; it lay thirty-two paces from the central edifice on the north-east and one hundred and ten paces from it on the south-west side. The ‘little castle’, from which Qṣair takes its modern name, is a long narrow building 45·15 × 8·95 metres. The walls, 1 metre thick, are constructed of stones and gypsum mortar, but the masonry is slightly different in character from that of Ukhaiḍir. The stones, instead of being broken into thin slabs, are used in thicker blocks, and the binding courses are of the same blocks, whereas at Ukhaiḍir they are almost always composed of particularly thin slabs. There are traces of plaster upon the walls, but window and niche angles are finished with large blocks cut with a certain amount of care, another feature which is not to be observed in the smaller materials of Ukhaiḍir. The north-east end of the building was divided off by a wide archway, of which only the returns in the walls remain. The chamber thus formed (6·30 metres long by 5·95 metres wide) was finished by a niche covered by a shallow ovoid calotte. The niche is rectangular in plan, 1·26 metres deep by 3·25 metres wide. The calotte was carried over the