The palace itself was composed of three main elements, courts, grand halls, and small private apartments.  A palace has usually from two to four courts, which are either square or oblong, and vary in size according to the general scale of the building.  In the north-west palace at Nimrud, the most ancient of the edifices yet explored, one court only has been found, the dimensions of which are 120 feet by 90.  At Khorsabad, the palace of Sargon has four courts. [PLATE XLII., Fig. 2.] Three of them are nearly square, the largest of these measuring 180 feet each Way, and the smallest about 120 feet; the fourth is oblong, and must have been at least 250 feet long and 150 feet wide.  The palace of Sennacherib at Koyunjik, a much larger edifice than the palace of Sargon, has also three courts, which are respectively 93 feet by 84, 124 feet by 90, and 154 feet by 125.  Esarhaddon’s palace at Nimrud has a court 220 feet long and 100 wide.  These courts were all paved either with baked bricks of large size, or with stone slabs, which were frequently patterned.  Sometimes the courts were surrounded with buildings; sometimes they abutted upon the edge of the platform:  in this latter case they were protected by a stone parapet, which (at least in places) was six feet high.

The grand halls of the Assyrian palaces constitute their most remarkable feature.  Each palace has commonly several.  They are apartments narrow for their length, measuring from three to five times their own width, and thus having always somewhat the appearance of galleries.  The scale upon which they are built is, commonly, magnificent.  In the palace of Asshur-izir-pal at Nimrud, the earliest of the discovered edifices, the great hall was 160 feet long by nearly 40 broad.  In Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad the size of no single room was so great; but the number of halls was remarkable, there being no fewer than five of nearly equal dimensions.  The largest was 116 feet long, and 33 wide; the smallest 87 feet long, and 25 wide.  The palace of Sennacherib at Koyuhjik contained the most spacious apartment yet exhumed.  It was immediately inside the great portal, and extended in length 180 feet, with a uniform width of forty feet.  In one instance only, so far as appears, was an attempt made to exceed this width.  In the palace of Esarhaddon, the son of Sennacherib, a hall was designed intended to surpass all former ones. [PLATE XLIII., Fig. 2.] Its length was to be 165 feet, and its width 62; consequently it would have been nearly one-third larger than the great hall of Sennacherib, its area exceeding 10,000 square feet.  But the builder who had designed this grand structure appears to have been unable to overcome the difficulty of carrying a roof over so vast an expanse.  He was therefore obliged to divide his hall by a wall down the middle; which, though he broke it in an unusual way into portions, and kept it at some distance from both ends of the apartment, still had the actual effect of subdividing