Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/19

The Mesopotamian Palace. be preserved, and, before many years were over, the degradation of its substance would make it a shapeless heap of clay. The palace, of course, burnt in the first place and then abandoned to the slow action of time, can have met the forces of destruction with no better effect than buildings of marble and granite did elsewhere ; but it inclosed great empty spaces, wide quadrangles, long galleries, and spacious chambers. In their fall ceilings and the heads of walls filled up these voids and buried their in- closing walls to a considerable height in a deep bed of protecting rubbish. This had only to be taken away to lay bare the whole plan of the building and much of its ornamentation. We can thus become much more intimately acquainted with the palace than with the temple, but we have no right thence to conclude that the former was the favourite work of the Chaldaean architects, or that it contained the last word of their talent and taste. In any case it was the Assyrian palace that, about forty years ago, began to reveal to us an early civilization to which modern research is now awarding its proper place in the history of the ancient world. About the commencement of the present century criticism had succeeded in fixing approximate dates for the few kings of Assyria and Chaldaea mentioned in the Bible and by classic authors. It was suspected that the tales of Ctesias in- cluded many a fable, and painful efforts were made to disentangle what was true from what was false, but the language, the literature, and the arts of those peoples were as yet entirely unknown. The sites of Babylon and Nineveh had been ascertained with some degree of certainty ; it was known that ruins existed in the plains of Mesopotomia which had been used by the natives as open quarries for century after century, and that the towns and villages that now stud the country were built from the materials thus obtained ; but nothing had been learnt as to the form and arrangement of the buildings hidden under those heaps of debris. Travellers spoke of seeing statues and bas-reliefs among the ruins, but they could not bring them away, and they made no drawings which could be depended on for accuracy. Euro- pean museums could boast of nothing beyond small objects, fragments of pottery, stones and terra-cotta slabs covered with strange symbols and undecipherable inscriptions. Most of these were cones and cylinders which proved that the Mesopotamians understood how to cut and engrave the hardest stones. Such