Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/150

i 30 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. the height of the most famous of these monuments, the temple of Belus at Babylon; 1 Strabo alone talks of a stade (616 feet), and it may be asked on what authority he gives that measurement, which has been freely treated as an exaggeration. In any case we may test it to a certain extent by examining the largest and best preserved of the artificial hills of which we have spoken,- and we must remember that all the writers of antiquity are unanimous in asserting its prodigious height. 3 We run small risk of exaggeration, therefore, in saying that some of these Chalda^an temples were much taller than the highest of the Gizeh Pyramids. Their general physiognomy was the reverse of that of the Mesopotamia:! palaces, but it was no less the result of the natural configuration of the > country. Their architect sought to find his effect in contrast ; he endeavoured to impress the spectator by the strong, not to say violent, opposition between their soaring lines and the infinite horizon of the plain. Such towers erected in a hilly country like Greece would have looked much smaller. There, they would have had for close neighbours sometimes high mountains and always boldly contoured hills and rocks ; however far up into the skies their summits might be carried, they would still be dominated on one side or the other. Involuntarily the eye demands from nature the same scale of proportions as are suggested by the works of man. Where these are chiefly remarkable for their height, much of their effect will be destroyed by the proximity of such hills as Acrocorinthus or Lycabettus, to say nothing of Taygetus or Parnassus. It is quite otherwise when the surface of the country stretches away on every side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days none of the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved more than a half of their original height; 4 all that remains is a formless mass encumbered with heaps of debris at its foot, and yet, as every traveller in the country has 1 See HERODOTUS, i. 181-184; an( i BIODORUS, ii. 9. 2 By such means M. OPPERT arrives at a height of 250 Babylonian feet, or about 262 feet English for the monument now represented by the mound in the neighbourhood of Babylon known as Birs-Nimroud. Expedition Scientifique en Mcsopotamie, vol. i. pp. 205-209, and plate 8. 3 'Oyu.oA.oyeiTat 8' vrr]Qv yeyevi/aQaL KU.@' vTrepfioXr/v.- DlOUORUS, ii. 9, 4. 4 The mound called Babil on the site of Babylon (Plate I. and Fig. 37) is now about 135 feet high, but the Birs-Nimroud, the highest of these ruins, has still an elevation of not less than 220 feet (LAYAKD, Discoveries, p. 495).