Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/793

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MUD AS A BUILDING MATERIAL.
773

we are so familiar with on the Assyrian sculptures. There is the same repetition of crenelated wall and tower, and constructed of the same material. I said to myself, "These men, in the present

Fig. 1.—Stone Door, Lasgird.

day, are building an old Assyrian wall of fortification." Such defenses must have begun at a very early date in Mesopotamia, long before the sculptures were produced from which we know what they were in appearance, and their construction