t, 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.])

If the best possible building material was thus plentiful in Assyria,
and its conveyance thus easy to manage, to what are we to ascribe the
decided preference shown for so inferior a substance as brick? No
considerable difficulty can have been experienced in quarrying the stone
of the country, which is seldom very hard, and which was, in fact, cut
by the Assyrians, whenever they had any sufficient motive for removing
or making use of it. One answer only can be reasonably given to the
question. The Assyrians had learnt a certain style of architecture in
the alluvial Babylonia, and having brought it with them into A country
far less fitted for it, maintained it from habit, not withstanding its
unsuitableness. In some few respects, indeed, they m