may be suspected, belonged to the seraglio of the king.  The seraglio seems to have been reached through a single narrow passage, leading out of a long gallery—­218 feet by 25—­which was approached only through two other passages, one leading from each of the two main courts.  The principal halls were immediately within the two chief entrances one on the north-east, the other on the opposite or south-west front of the palace.  Neither of these two rooms has been completely explored:  but the one appears to have been more than 150 and the other was probably 180 feet in length, while the width of each was a little more than 40 feet.  Besides these two great halls and the grand gallery already described, the palace contained about twenty rooms of a considerable size, and at least forty or fifty smaller chambers, mostly square, or nearly so, opening out of some hall or large apartment.  The actual number of the rooms explored is about sixty; but as in many parts the examination of the building is still incomplete, we may fairly conjecture that the entire number was not less than seventy or eighty.

The palace of Sennacherib preserved all the main features of Assyrian architecture.  It was elevated on a platform, eighty or ninety feet above the plain, artificially constructed, and covered with a pavement of bricks.  It had probably three grand facades—­one on the north-east, where it was ordinarily approached from the town, and the two others on the south-east and the south-west, where it was carried nearly to the edge of the platform, and overhung the two streams of the Khosr-su and the Tigris.  Its principal apartment was that which was first entered by the visitor.  All the walls ran in straight lines, and all the angles of the rooms and passages were right angles.  There were more passages in the building than usual but still the apartments very frequently opened into one another; and almost one-half of the rooms were passage-rooms.  The doorways were mostly placed without any regard to regularity, seldom opposite one another, and generally towards the corners of the apartments.  There was the curious feature, common in Assyrian edifices, of a room being entered from a court, or from another room, by two or three doorways, which is best explained by supposing that the rank of the person determined the door by which he might enter.  Squared recesses in the sides of the rooms were common.  The thickness of the walls was great.  The apartments, though wider than in other palaces, were still narrow for their length, never much exceeding forty feet; while the courts were much better proportioned.