The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2: Assyria: 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 2: Assyria: The History, Geography, And Antiquities Of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Parthia, And Sassanian or New Persian Empire; With Maps and Illustrations.
actual effect of subdividing his grand room into four apartments of only
moderate size. The halls were paved with sun-burnt brick. They were
ornamented throughout by the elaborate sculptures, now so familiar to
us, carried generally in a single, but sometimes in a double line, round
the four walls of the apartment. The sculptured slabs rested on the
ground, and clothed the walls to the height of 10 or 12 feet. Above, for
a space which we cannot positively fix, but which was certainly not less
than four or five feet, the crude brick wall was continued, faced here
with burnt brick enamelled on the side towards the apartment, pleasingly
and sometimes even brilliantly colored. 10 The whole height of the walls
was probably from 15 to 20 feet.
[Illustration: PLATE 43]
By the side of the halls, or at their ends, and opening into them, or
sometimes collected together into groups, with no hall near, are the
smaller chambers of which mention has been already made. These chambers
are in every case rectangular: in their proportions they vary from
squares to narrow oblongs. 90 feet by 17, 85 by 16, 80 by 15, and the
like. When they are square, the side is never more than about 25 feet.
They are often as richly decorated as the halls, but sometimes are
merely faced with plain slabs or plastered; while occasionally they have
no facing at all, but exhibit throughout the crude brick. This, however,
is unusual.
The number of chambers in a palace is very large. In Sennacherib’s
palace at Koyunjik, where great part of the building remains still
unexplored, the excavated chambers amount to sixty-eight--all, be it
remembered, upon the ground floor. The space covered by them and by
their walls exceeds 40,000 square yards. As Mr. Fergusson observes, “the
imperial palace of Sennacherib is, of all the buildings of antiquity,
surpassed in magnitude only by the great palace-temple of Karnak; and
when we consider the vastness of the mound on which it was raised, and
the richness of the ornaments with which it was adorned, it is by no
means clear that it was not as great, or at least as expensive, a work
as the great palace-temple at Thebes.” Elsewhere the excavated
apartments are less numerous; but in no case is it probable that a
palace contained on its ground floor fewer than forty or fifty chambers.
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