In the great banqueting scene at Khorsabad, from which the above description is chiefly taken, it is shown that the Assyrians, like the Egyptians and the Greeks in the heroic times, had the entertainment of music at their grand feasts and drinking bouts.  At one end of the long series of figures representing guests and attendants was a band of performers, at least three in number, two of whom certainly played upon the lyre.  The lyres were ten-stringed, of a square shape, and hung round the player’s neck by a string or ribbon.

The Assyrians also resembled the Greeks and Romans in introducing flowers into their feasts.  We have no evidence that they wore garlands, or crowned themselves with chaplets of flowers, or scattered roses over their rooms; but still they appreciated the delightful adornment which flowers furnish.  In the long train of attendance represented at Koyunjik as bringing the materials of a banquet into the palace of the king, a considerable number bear vases of flowers. [PLATE CXXXVIII., Fig. 3.] These were probably placed on stands, like those which are often seen supporting jars, and dispersed about the apartment in which the feast was held, but not put upon the tables.

We have no knowledge of the ordinary houses of the Assyrians other than that which we derive from the single representation which the sculptures furnish of a village certainly Assyrian.  It appears from this specimen that the houses were small, isolated from one another, and either flat-roofed, or else covered in with a dome or a high cone.  They had no windows, but must have been lighted from the top, where, in some of the roofs, an aperture is discernible.  The doorway was generally placed towards one end of the house; it was sometimes arched, but more often square-headed.

The doors in Assyrian houses were either single, as commonly with ourselves, or folding (fores or valvoe), as with the Greeks and Romans, and with the modern French and Italians.  Folding-doors were the most common in palaces.  They were not hung upon hinges, like modern doors, but, like those of the classical nations, turned upon pivots.  At Khorsabad the pavement slabs in the doorways showed everywhere the holes in which these pivots had worked, while in no instance did the wall at the side present any trace of the insertion of a hinge.  Hinges, however, in the proper sense of the term, were not unknown to the Assyrians; for two massive bronze sockets found at Nimrud, which weighed more than six pounds each, and had a diameter of about five inches, must have been designed to receive the hinges of a door or gate, hung exactly as gates are now hung among ourselves. [PLATE CXXXVIII., Fig. 4.] The folding-doors were fastened by bolts, which were shot into the pavement at the point where the two doors met; but in the case of single doors a lock seems to have been used, which was placed about four feet from the ground, and projected from the door itself, so that a recess had to be made in the wall behind the door to receive the lock when the door stood open.  The bolt of the lock was of an oblong square shape and was shot into the wall against which the door closed.