Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/70

52 A History of Art in Cuald.ka and Assyria. transport of the materials and colossal bulls for his own palace to be figured. We there see two very different types of edifice, one covered with hemispherical or elliptical domes, the other with Mat roofs supporting a kind of belvedere 1 (Vol. I., Fig. 43). This latter type may be found several times repeated in a relief representing a city of Susiana (Vol. I ., Fig. 157). Here nearly every house has a tower at one end of its flat roof. Was this a defence, like the towers in the old Italian towns and in the Greek villages of Crete and Magnesia ? We do not think so. The social conditions were very different from those of the turbulent republics of Italy, where the populace was divided into hostile fac- tions, or of those mountainous districts whose Greek inhabitants live in constant fear of attack from the Turks who dwell in the plains. The all-powerful despots of Assyria would allow no intestine quarrels, and for the repulse of a foreign enemy, the cities relied upon their high and solid lines of circumvallation. We think that the towers upon the roofs were true belvederes, contrivances to get more air and a wider view ; also, perhaps, to allow the inhabitants to escape the mosquitoes by rising well above the highest level reached by the flight of those tiny pests. It was, then, between these two types, as Strabo tells us, that the civil buildings of Mesopotamia were divided. They all had thick terraced roofs but some were domical and others flat. 2 At Mugheir Mr. Taylor cleared the remains of a small house planned on the lines of an irregular cross ; it was built of burnt brick and paved with the same material. In the interior the faces of the bricks were covered with a thin and not very adhesive glaze. Two of the doors were roundheaded ; the arches being composed of bricks specially moulded in the shape of voussoirs ; but the numerous fragments of carbonized palm-wood beams which were found upon the floors of each room, showed that the building had been covered with a flat timber roof and a thick bed of earth. Strabo justly observes that the earth was necessary to protect the inmates of the house against the heats of summer. As a rule houses must have been very low. It 1 See page 145. 2 We have noticed at pages 176 and 177 of our first volume the two passages in which Strabo discusses the houses of Susiana and Chaldaea. As to the villages in the Euphrates valley, in which domes are still used, see Oppert, Expédition scie?itifique, vol. i. p. 46.