Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/49

The Palace of Sargon. 31 usual in hot countries, with spacious cisterns that could be easily filled during the rainy season ; but neither at Khorsabad, Kouyundjik, nor Nimroud, have the slightest traces of any such tanks been found. With the materials at their disposal it would, perhaps, have been too difficult for the Assyrian builders to make them water-tight. Neither have any wells been discovered. Their depth must have been too great for common use. We must remember that the height of the mound has to be added to the distance below the ordinary surface of the country at which watery strata would be tapped. It is, on the whole, probable that the supply for the palace inmates was carried up in earthen- ware jars, and that the service occupied a string of women, horses, and donkeys, passing and repassing between the river, or rather the canal, that carried the waters of the Khausser to the very foot of the mound, and the palace, from morning until night. 1 We have now concluded our study of the arrangements of an Assyrian palace, and we may safely affirm that those arrangements were not invented, all standing, by the architect of Sargon. They were suggested partly by the nature of the materials used, partly by the necessities to be met. The plan of an Assyrian palace must ha ve grown in scale and consistence with the power of the Assyrian kings. As their resources became greater, and their engineers more skilled, increased convenience and a richer decora- tion was demanded from their architects. We have dwelt at length upon Khorsabad, because it affords the completest and best preserved example of a type often repeated in the course of ten or twelve centuries. In some respects, in its constructive processes and the taste of its decorations, for instance, the Assyrian palace resembled the other buildings of the country ; its by which he attempts to solve it. He suggests that one of the drains of which we have already spoken may have been a conduit or siphon in communication with some subterranean reservoir and provided with pumping apparatus at its summit. We have no evidence whatever that the principle of the suction-pump was known to the Assyrians. 1 Strabo (xvi. i. 5) pretends that the hanging gardens of Babylon were watered by means of the screiv of Archimedes (ko^à/oiç or ko^A-oç). If it be true that this invention was known to the Chaldaeans, it may also have been used to raise water to the platforms of the Assyrian palaces. The discovery, however, is usually attributed to the Sicilian mathematician, and Strabo's evidence is too isolated and too recent to allow us to accept it without question.