Apart from this feature, the buildings do not affect much regularity.  In courts and facades, to a certain extent, there is correspondence; but in the internal arrangements, regularity is decidedly the exception.  The two sides of an edifice never correspond; room never answers to room; doorways are rarely in the middle of walls; where a rooms has several doorways, they are seldom opposite to one another, or in situations at all corresponding.

There is a great awkwardness in the communications.  Very few corridors or passages exist in any of the buildings.  Groups of rooms, often amounting to ten or twelve, open into one another; and we find comparatively few rooms to which there is any access except through some other room.  Again, whole sets of apartments are sometimes found, between which and the rest of the palace all communication is cut off by thick walls.  Another peculiarity in the internal arrangements is the number of doorways in the larger apartments, and their apparently needless multiplication.  We constantly find two or even three doorways leading from a court into a hall, or from one hall into a second.  It is difficult to see what could be gained by such an arrangement.

The disposition of the various parts of a palace will probably be better apprehended from an exact account of a single building than from any further general statements.  For this purpose it is necessary to select a specimen from among the various edifices that have been disentombed by the labors of recent excavators.  The specimen should be, if possible, complete; it should have been accurately surveyed, and the survey should have been scientifically recorded; it should further stand single and separate, that there may be no danger of confusion between its remains and those of adjacent edifices.  These requirements, though nowhere exactly met, are very nearly met by the building at Khorsabad, which stands on a mound of its own, unmixed with other edifices, has been most carefully examined, and most excellently represented and described, and which, though not completely excavated, has been excavated with a nearer approach to completeness than any other edifice in Assyria.  The Khorsabad building—­which is believed to be a palace built by Sargon, the son of Sennacherib—­will therefore be selected for minute description in this place, as the palace most favorably circumstanced, and the one of which we have, on the whole, the most complete and exact knowledge. [PLATE XLIV.]

[Illustration:  PLATE 44]

The situation of the town, whereof the palace of Sargon formed a part, has been already described in a former part of this volume.  The shape, it has been noted, was square, the angles facing the four cardinal points.  Almost exactly in the centre of the north-west wall occurs the palace platform, a huge mass of crude brick, from 20 to 30 feet high, shaped like a T, the upper limb lying within the city walls, and the lower limb