Vast labor and skill,
exquisite finish, the most extraordinary elaboration, were bestowed on
edifices so essentially fragile and perishable that no care could have
preserved them for manly centuries. Sun-dried brick, a material but
little superior to the natural clay of which it was composed,
constituted everywhere the actual fabric, which was then covered thinly
and just screened from view by a facing, seldom more than a few inches
in depth, of a more enduring and handsomer substance. The tendency of
the platform mounds, as soon as formed, must have been to settle down,
to bulge at the sides and become uneven at the top, to burst their stone
or brick facings and precipitated them into the ditch below, at the same
time disarranging and breaking up the brick pavements which covered
their surface. The weight of the buildings raised upon the monads must
have tended to hasten these catastrophes, while the unsteadiness of
their foundations and the character of their composition must have soon
had the effect of throwing the buildings themselves into disorder, of
loosening the slabs from the walls, causing the enamelled bricks to
start from their places, the colossal 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 no