t. "Such measurements are
those of exceptionally vast openings, especially when we remember that most
of them gave access, not to state apartments, but to rooms used for the
most ordinary purposes, store-rooms, ante-rooms, kitchens, serving-rooms of
all kinds, and bedrooms. When we find architects who were so reluctant as
those of Assyria to cut openings of any kind in their outer walls, using
doorways of these extravagant dimensions, we may surely conclude that they
were meant to light and ventilate the rooms as well as to facilitate the
circulation of their inhabitants."[229]

Even in halls, which were lighted at once by a number of circular eyes like
those described and by a wide doorway, there would be no excess of
illumination, and the rooms of Assyria must, on the whole, have been darker
than ours. When we remember the difference in the climates this fact ceases
to surprise us. With our often-clouded skies we seldom have too much light,
and we give it as wide and as frequent passages as are consistent with the
stability of our buildings. The farther north we go the more strongly
marked does this tendency become. In Holland, the proportion of voids to
solids is much greater than it is on the facade of a Parisian house, and
the same tendency may be traced from one end of Europe to the other. But
even in Central Europe, as soon as the temperature rises above a certain
point, curtains are drawn and jalousies closed, that is, the window is
suppressed as far as possible. And is not that enough to suggest a probable
reason for the want of windows characteristic of an Oriental dwelling? An
explanation has been sometimes sought in the life of the harem and in the
desire of eastern sovereigns to withdraw themselves from the eyes of their
subjects. The idleness, almost amounting to lethargy, of the present
masters of the East has also been much insisted on. What, it is asked, do
these men want with light? They neither read nor work, they care nothing
for those games of skill or chance which form so large a part of western
activity; absolute repose, the repose of sleep or stupefaction, is their
ideal of existence.[230]

These observations have hardly the force that has been ascribed to them.
The harem is not the whole palace, and even in the modern East the
_selamlik_, or public part of the house, is very differently arranged from
the rooms set apart for the women. The hunting and conquering kings of
Assyria lived much in pub