vation, and horizontal lines
predominated in its general physiognomy. There was here a latent harmony
between the architecture of nature and that of man, between the great
plains of Mesopotamia, with their distant horizons, and the long walls,
broken only by their crenellated summits, of the temples and palaces. There
must, however, have been a certain want of relief, of visibility, in
edifices conceived on such lines and built in such a country.

This latter defect was obvious to the Mesopotamians themselves, who raised
the dwellings of their gods and kings upon an artificial mound with a
carefully paved summit.[148] Upon this summit the structure properly
speaking rested, so that, in Chaldaea, the foundations of a great building
instead of being, as elsewhere, sunk beneath the soil, stand so high above
it that the ground line of the palace or temple to which they belong rises
above the plain to a height that leaves the roofs of ordinary houses and
even the summits of the tallest palms far below. This arrangement gave a
clearer salience and a more imposing mass to structures which would
otherwise, on account of their monotony of line and the vast excess of
their horizontal over their vertical development, have had but little
effect.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Temple; from a Kouyundjik bas-relief. Rawlinson,
vol. i. p. 314.]

Such an arrangement would appear superfluous in the case of those towers in
the shape of stepped pyramids, whose summits could be carried above the
plain to any fanciful height by the simple process of adding story to
story. But the Mesopotamian constructor went upon the same system as in the
case of his palaces. It was well in any case to interpose a dense, firm,
and dry mass between the wet and often shifting soil and the building, and
to afford a base which by its size and solidity should protect the great
accumulation of material that was to be placed upon it from injury through
any settling in the foundations. Moreover, the paved esplanade had its
place in the general economy. It formed a spacious court about the temple,
a sacred _temenos_ as the Greeks would have called it, a _haram_ as a
modern Oriental would say. It could be peopled with statues and decorated
with mystic emblems; religious processions could be marshalled within its
bounds.

[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Tell-Ede, in Lower Chaldaea. From Rawlinson's _Five
Great Monarchies_.]

The general, we may almost say the invariable, rul