Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/210

1 88 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALU.KA AND ASSYRIA. between the East of to-day and that of the centuries before the Greek civilization. The people who now inhabit those countries are in a state of languor and decay. Life has retired from them ; their clays are numbered, and the few they have yet to live are passed in a death-like trance. But it was not always thus. The East of antiquity, the East in which man's intellect awoke while it slumbered elsewhere, the East in which that civilization was born and developed whose rich and varied creations we are engaged in studying, was another place. Its inhabitants w r ere strangely industrious and inventive, their intellects were busied with every form of thought, and their activity was expended upon every art of peace and war. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that the Chaldaeans, who invented the first methods of science, that the Assyrians, who carried their conquests as far as the shores of the Mediterranean, that those Phoenicians who have been happily called " the English of antiquity," had any great resemblance to the Turks who now rei^n at Bagdad, Mossoul. c5 O and Beyrout. But the climate has not changed, and from it we must demand the key to the characteristic arrangements of Mesopotamian palaces. Even now most of the buildings of Mossoul are only lighted from the door, which is hardly ever shut. Some rooms have no direct means either of lighting or ventilation, and these are the favourite retreats in summer. " I was enabled," says M. Place, "to convince myself personally of this. In the consul's house there were, on one side of the court, three rooms one within the other, of which the first alone was lighted from without, o and even this had a covered gallery in front of it, by which the glare was tempered. In the dog-days, when the mid-clay sun rendered all work a punishment, the innermost of these three rooms was the only habitable part of the- house. The serdabs, or subterranean chambers, are used under the same conditions. They are inconvenient in some ways, but the narrowness of the openings, through which light, and with it heat, can reach their depths, gives them advantages not to be despised." l The crude brick walls of ancient Assyria were far thicker than the rubble and plaster ones of modern Mossoul, so that more light could be admitted to the rooms without compromising their 1 PL ICE, J'//rrr, vol. i. p. 311.