The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1: Chaldaea: The History, Geography, And Antiquities Of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, And Sassanian or New Persian Empire; With Maps and Illustrations.Rawlinson, George
History
The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1: Chaldaea: The History, Geography, And Antiquities Of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, And Sassanian or New Persian Empire; With Maps and Illustrations.
It is impossible to reconstruct the Bowariyeh ruin from the facts and
measurements hitherto supplied to us even the height of the first story
is at present uncertain; and we have no means of so much as conjecturing
the height of the second. The exact emplacement of the second upon the
first is also doubtful, while the original mode of access is
undiscovered; and thus the plan of the building is in many respects still
defective. We only know that it was a square; that it had two stories at
the least; and that its entire height above the plain considerably
exceeded 100 feet. The temple at Mugheir has been more accurately
examined. [PLATE VIII., Fig. 2.] On a mound or platform of some size,
raised about twenty feet above the level of the plain, there stands a
rectangular edifice, consisting at present of two stories, both of them
ruined in parts, and buried to a considerable extent in piles of rubbish
composed of their debris. The angles of the building exactly face the
four cardinal points. It is not a square, but a parallelogram, having
two longer and two shorter sides. [PLATE IX., Fig. 1.] The longer sides
front to the north-east and south-west respectively, and measure 198
feet; while the shorter sides, which face the north-west and south-east,
measure 133 feet. The present height of the basement story is 27 feet;
but, allowing for the concealment of the lower part by the rubbish, and
the destruction of the upper part by the hand of time, we may presume
that the original height was little, if at all, short of 40 feet. The
interior of this story is built of crude or sun-dried bricks of small
size, laid in bitumen; but it is faced through out with a wall, ten feet
in thickness, composed of red kiln dried bricks, likewise cemented with
bitumen. This external wall is at once strengthened and diversified to
the eye by a number of shallow buttresses or pilasters in the same
material; of these there are nine, including the corner ones, on the
longer, and six on the shorter sides. The width of the buttresses is
eight feet, and their projection a little more than a foot. The walls
and buttresses alike slope inwards at an angle of nine degrees. On the
north-eastern side of the building there is a staircase nine feet wide,
with sides or balustrades three feet wide, which leads up from the
platform to the top of the first story. It has also been conjectured
that there was a second or grand staircase on the south-east face, equal
in width to the second story of the building, and thus occupying nearly
the whole breadth of the structure on that side. A number of narrow
slits or air-holes are carried through the building from side to side;
they penetrate alike the walls and buttresses, and must have tended to
preserve the dryness of the structure. The second story is, like the
first, a parallelogram, and not of very different proportions. Its
longer sides measure 119 feet, and its shorter ones 75 feet at the base.
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