Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch in Layard.

The main part of these constructions was finished about 700 B.C., but many details were left incomplete, and the work was still proceeding after the court had long been in residence on the spot.  Meanwhile a smaller palace, as well as barracks and a depot for arms and provisions, sprang up elsewhere.  Eighteen aqueducts, carried across the country, brought the water from the Muzri to the Khuzur, and secured an adequate supply to the city; the Ninevites, who had hitherto relied upon rain-water for the replenishing of their cisterns, awoke one day to find themselves released from all anxiety on this score.  An ancient and semi-subterranean canal, which Assur-nazir-pal had constructed nearly two centuries before, but which, owing to the neglect of his successors, had become choked up, was cleaned out, enlarged and repaired, and made capable of bringing water to their doors from the springs of Mount Tas, in the same year as that in which the battle of Khalule took place.* At a later date, magnificent bas-reliefs, carved on the rock by order of Esar-haddon, representing winged bulls, figures of the gods and of the king, with explanatory inscriptions, marked the site of the springs, and formed a kind of monumental facade to the ravine in which they took their rise.**

* Mount Tas is the group of hills enclosing the ravine of Bavian.  These works were described in the Bavian inscription, of which they occupy the whole of the first part.

     ** The Bavian text speaks of six inscriptions and statues
     which the king had engraved on the Mount of Tas, at the
     source of the stream.

It would be hard to account for the rapidity with which these great works were completed, did one not remember that Sargon had previously carried out extensive architectural schemes, in which he must have employed all the available artists in his empire.  The revolutions which had shattered the realm under the last descendants of Assur-nazir-pal, and the consequent impoverishment of the kingdom, had not been without a disastrous effect on the schools of Assyrian sculpture.

[ Illustration:  068.jpg UNKNOWN SUBJECTS FROM THE FIFTH TOMB]

[Illustration:  069.jpg GREAT ASSYRIAN STELE AT BAVIAIT.]

     Drawn by Boudior, from Layard.

Since the royal treasury alone was able to bear the expense of those vast compositions in which the artistic skill of the period could have free play, the closing of the royal workshops, owing to the misfortunes of the time, had the immediate effect of emptying the sculptors’ studios.  Even though the period of depression lasted for the space of two or three generations only, it became difficult to obtain artistic workmen; and those who were not discouraged from the pursuit of art by the uncertainty of employment, no longer possessed the high degree of skill attained by their predecessors, owing to lack of opportunity