ll, but exhibit throughout the crude brick. This, however,
is unusual.

The number of chambers in a palace is very large. In Sennacherib's
palace at Koyunjik, where great part of the building remains still
unexplored, the excavated chambers amount to sixty-eight--all, be it
remembered, upon the ground floor. The space covered by them and by
their walls exceeds 40,000 square yards. As Mr. Fergusson observes, "the
imperial palace of Sennacherib is, of all the buildings of antiquity,
surpassed in magnitude only by the great palace-temple of Karnak; and
when we consider the vastness of the mound on which it was raised, and
the richness of the ornaments with which it was adorned, it is by no
means clear that it was not as great, or at least as expensive, a work
as the great palace-temple at Thebes." Elsewhere the excavated
apartments are less numerous; but in no case is it probable that a
palace contained on its ground floor fewer than forty or fifty chambers.

The most striking peculiarity which the ground-plans of the palaces
disclose is the uniform adoption throughout of straight and parallel
lines. No plan exhibits a curve of any kind, or any angle but a right
angle. Courts, chambers, and halls are, in most cases, exact rectangles;
and even where any variety occurs, it is only by the introduction of
squared recesses or projections, which are moreover shallow and
infrequent. When a palace has its own special platform, the lines of the
building are further exactly parallel with those of the mound on which
it is placed; and the parallelism extends to any other detached
buildings that there may be anywhere upon the platform. When a mound is
occupied by more palaces than one, sometimes this law still obtains, as
at Nimrud, where it seems to embrace at any rate the greater number of
the palaces; sometimes, as at Koyunjik, the rule ceases to be observed,
and the ground-plan of each palace seems formed separately and
independently, with no reference to any neighboring edifice.

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