Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/31

The Palace of Sargon. i3 Thomas's plate, has been corrected. Our view is supposed to be taken at some sixteen hundred feet above the ground and at a con- siderable distance south-east of the platform. We shall here confine ourselves to showing how the Assyrians understood the plan and general arrangement of a royal palace. The buildings of which it was composed were grouped upon a platform shaped like a T. 1 Each of the two parts of this platform was a rectangle. The larger of the two — that within the town walls — had a super- ficial measurement of about 68,500 square yards, the smaller one of about 40,000 square yards ; so that the palace as 1 Rawlinson {The Fiik Great Mon- archies, vol. i. p. 286), and Lenormant {Historié ancienne^ vol. ii. p. 196) make the two parts of the platform — the arms of the T and its shank — different in height. In doing so they have borrowed a mistake from Botta. The mistake is easily under- stood in the case of Rawlinson, whose fourth edition, although published in 1879, reproduces the plans compiled byFergusson after Botta. We are more surprised at Lenormant falling into the same error, as he gives an excellent rhume of Place's discoveries. Botta seems to have thought the two parts of the palace had different levels in con- sequence of an inequality in the distribu- tion of the fallen materials. In the neighbourhood of the latter buildings, such as the so-called Observatory, and where the open spaces were fewer and less ample, there was, of course, a thicker bed of rubbish than where the buildings were lower and the walls farther apart. But wherever the original surface of the mound was reached, Place ascertained that its level never varied. In none of his plans is there the slightest trace of any slope or staircase leading from one level to the other, so far as the summit of the platform is concerned.