lic. They appeared too often at the head of their
armies or among the hounds for us to represent them--as the Greek tradition
represented Sardanapalus--shut up within blind walls in distant and almost
inaccessible chambers. We must guard ourselves against the mistake of
seeking analogies too close between the East of to-day and that of the
centuries before the Greek civilization.

The people who now inhabit those countries are in a state of languor and
decay. Life has retired from them; their days are numbered, and the few
they have yet to live are passed in a death-like trance. But it was not
always thus. The East of antiquity, the East in which man's intellect awoke
while it slumbered elsewhere, the East in which that civilization was born
and developed whose rich and varied creations we are engaged in studying,
was another place. Its inhabitants were strangely industrious and
inventive, their intellects were busied with every form of thought, and
their activity was expended upon every art of peace and war. We must not
delude ourselves into thinking that the Chaldaeans, who invented the first
methods of science, that the Assyrians, who carried their conquests as far
as the shores of the Mediterranean, that those Phoenicians who have been
happily called "the English of antiquity," had any great resemblance to the
Turks who now reign at Bagdad, Mossoul, and Beyrout.

But the climate has not changed, and from it we must demand the key to the
characteristic arrangements of Mesopotamian palaces. Even now most of the
buildings of Mossoul are only lighted from the door, which is hardly ever
shut. Some rooms have no direct means either of lighting or ventilation,
and these are the favourite retreats in summer. "I was enabled," says M.
Place, "to convince myself personally of this. In the consul's house there
were, on one side of the court, three rooms one within the other, of which
the first alone was lighted from without, and even this had a covered
gallery in front of it, by which the glare was tempered. In the dog-days,
when the mid-day sun rendered all work a punishment, the innermost of these
three rooms was the only habitable part of the house. The serdabs, or
subterranean chambers, are used under the same conditions. They are
inconvenient in some ways, but the narrowness of the openings, through
which light, and with it heat, can reach their depths, gives them
advantages not to be despised."[231]

The crude brick wall