bulls and lions to lean over, and the roofs to become shattered and fall in.  The fact that the earlier palaces were to a great extent dismantled by the later kings is perhaps to be attributed, not so much to a barbarous resolve that they would destroy the memorials of a former and a hostile dynasty, as to the circumstance that the more ancient buildings had fallen into decay and ceased to be habitable.  The rapid succession of palaces, the fact that, at any rate from Sargon downwards, each monarch raises a residence, or residences, for himself, is yet more indicative of the rapid deterioration and dilapidation (so to speak) of the great edifices.  Probably a palace began to show unmistakable symptoms of decay and to become an unpleasant residence at the end of some twenty-five or thirty years from the date of its completion; effective repairs were, by the very nature of the case, almost impossible; and it was at once easier and more to the credit of the monarch that he should raise a fresh platform and build himself a fresh dwelling than that he should devote his efforts to keeping in a comfortable condition the crumbling habitation of his predecessor.

It is surprising that, under these circumstances, a new style of architecture did not arise.  The Assyrians were not, like the Babylonians, compelled by the nature of the country in which they lived to use brick as their chief building material.  M. Botta expresses his astonishment at the preference of brick to stone exhibited by the builders of Khorsabad, when the neighborhood abounds in rocky hills capable of furnishing an inexhaustible supply of the better material.  The limestone range of the Jebel Maklub is but a few miles distant, and many out-lying rocky elevations might have been worked with still greater facility.  Even at Nineveh itself, and at Calah or Nimrud, though the hills were further removed, stone was, in reality, plentiful.  The cliffs a little above Koyunjik are composed of a “hard sandstone,” and a part of the moat of the town is carried through “compact silicious conglomerate.”  The town is, in fact, situated on “a spur of rock” thrown off from the Jebel Dlakiub, which, terminates at the edge of the ravine whereby Nineveh was protected on the south.  Calah, too, was built on a number of “rocky undulations,” and its western wall skirts the edge of “conglomerate” cliffs, which have been scarped by the hand of man.  A very tolerable stone was thus procurable on the actual sites of these ancient cities; and if a better material had been wanted, it might have been obtained in any quantity, and of whatever quality was desired, from the Zagros range and its outlying rocky barriers.  Transport could scarcely have caused much difficulty, as the blocks might have been brought from the quarries where they were hewn to the sites selected for the cities by water-carriage—­a mode of transport well known to the Assyrians, as is made evident to us by the bas-reliefs. (See [PLATE LXII.  Fig. 2.])