Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/201

CONSTRUCTION. 1 79 When wooden roofs were used were they upheld by wooden uprights or by columns of any other material ? Botta was at first inclined to say yes to this question, but he did not attempt to conceal that excavation had discovered little to support such an hypothesis. 1 Such pillars, were they of stone, would leave traces among the ruins in the shape of broken columns ; w r ere they of burnt bricks (and there could be no question of the crude material), those bricks would be found on the spot they occupied and would easily be recognized by their shape, which, as we have already shown, would have been specially adapted to the work they had to do. 2 The points of junction with the pavement would also be visible. If we contend that they were of wood, like those of the house figured above, we must admit that, at least in the more carefully built houses, such precautions as even the peasants of the Yezidis do not neglect must have been taken, and the timber columns raised upon stone bases which w r ould protect them from the sometimes damp floors. Neither these bases nor any marks of their existence have been found in any of the ruins ; and we are therefore led to the conclusion that to search for hypostyle halls in the Assyrian palaces, would be to follow the imagination rather than the reason. If w^ admit that architects made no use of columns to afford intermediate support to the heavy roofs, we may at first be inclined to believe that wooden ceilings were only used in very narrow apartments, for we can hardly give a length of more than from twenty-four to twenty-seven feet to beams that were called upon to support a thick covering of beaten earth as well as their own weight. 3 Perhaps, however, the skill of their carpenters was equal to increasing the span and rigidity of the beams used by a few simple contrivances. One of these is shown in our Fig. 60, a diagram composed by M. Chipiez to give an idea of the different methods of construction used by, or, at least, at the command of, the Assyrian builder. All the rooms were surmounted by flat roofs, and our hori- zontal sections show how these roofs were accommodated to the 1 BOTTA, Monument de JVinive, vol. v. p. 70. 2 See above, page 118, note i. 3 Some rooms are as much as thirty feet wide. They would require joists at least thirty-three feet long, a length that can hardly be admitted in view of the very mediocre quality of the wood in common use.