It was in the size and the number of his rooms, in his use of passages, and in certain features of his ornamentation, that Sennacherib chiefly differed from former builders.  He increased the width of the principal state apartments by one-third, which seems to imply the employment of some new mode or material for roofing.  In their length he made less alteration, only advancing from 150 to 180 feet, evidently because he aimed, not merely at increasing the size of his rooms, but at improving their proportions.  In one instance alone—­that of a gallery or passage-room, leading (apparently) from the more public part of the palace to the hareem or private apartments—­did he exceed this length, uniting the two portions of the palace by a noble corridor, 218 feet long by 25 feet wide.  Into this corridor he brought passages from the two public courts, which he also united together by a third passage, thus greatly facilitating communication between the various blocks of buildings which composed his vast palatial edifice.

The most striking characteristic of Sennacherib’s ornamentation is its strong and marked realism.  It was under Sennacherib that the practice first obtained of completing each scene by a background, such as actually existed as the time and place of its occurrence.  Mountains, rocks, trees, roads, rivers, lakes, were regularly portrayed, an attempt being made to represent the locality, whatever it might be, as truthfully as the artist’s skill and the character of his material rendered possible.  Nor was this endeavor limited to the broad and general features of the scene only.  The wish evidently was to include all the little accessories which the observant eye of an artist might have noted if he had made his drawing with the scene before him.  The species of trees is distinguished, in Sennacherib’s bas-reliefs; gardens, fields, ponds, reeds, are carefully represented; wild animals are introduced, as stags, boars, and antelopes; birds fly from tree to tree, or stand over their nests feeding the young who stretch up to them; fish disport themselves in the waters; fishermen ply their craft; boatmen and agricultural laborers pursue their avocations; the scene is, as it were, photographed, with all its features—­the least and the most important—­equally marked, and without any attempt at selection, or any effort after artistic unity.

In the same spirit of realism Sennacherib chooses for artistic representation scenes of a commonplace and everyday character.  The trains of attendants who daily enter his palace with game and locusts for his dinner, and cakes and fruit for his dessert, appear on the walls of his passages, exactly as they walked through his courts, bearing the delicacies in which he delighted.  Elsewhere he puts before us the entire process of carving and transporting a colossal bull, from the first removal of the huge stone in its rough state from the quarry, to its final elevation on a palace mound as part of the great gateway of a