tate a
natural timber shaft in stone we have a smooth cylindrical column like that
seen in Fig. 74.

Again, the shafts of the columns in the bas-reliefs, appear slender in
comparison with those of Egypt, or with the doric shafts of the oldest
Greek temples (see Fig. 41 and 42). In the fragmentary column from
Khorsabad (Fig. 74) we have only a small part of the shaft but if we may
judge from the feeble salience of the capital, its proportions must have
been slender rather than heavy and massive.

Wherever the stone column has been used in buildings of mediocre size, the
architect seems to have been driven by some optical necessity to make his
angle columns more thickset than the other supports. Thus it was in
Assyria, in the little temple at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), where the outer
columns are sensibly thicker than those between them; at Khorsabad (Fig.
41) the same result was obtained by rather different means. The edifice
represented in this bas-relief bears no little similarity to certain
Egyptian temples and to the Greek temple _in antis_.[261] The strength of
these angular piers contrasts happily with the elegance of the columns
between them. The latter are widely spaced, and, as in some Egyptian
buildings, the architrave is but a horizontal continuation of the corner
piers.

If we analyse the column and examine its three parts separately we shall be
led to similar conclusions. The stone column no doubt bore the architrave
upon its capital wherever it was used, and both in Chaldaea and Assyria we
find the same arrangement in those light structures which we have classed
as belonging to the architecture of the tent (Figs. 70 and 72). The origin
of the forms employed in stone buildings is most clearly shewn by the
frequent occurrence of the volute, a curvilinear element suggested by the
use and peculiar properties of metal.

[Illustration: FIG. 75.--Capital; from a small temple.]

We find these volutes everywhere, upon shafts of stone and wood
indifferently. We are tempted to think, when we examine the details of our
Fig. 67, that the first idea of them was taken from the horns of the ibex
or the wild goat. The column on the right of this cut bears a fir cone
between its volutes, those on the left have small tablets on which are
perched the very animals whose heads are armed with these horns.

However this may be, the form in question, like all others borrowed from
nature by man, was soon modified and developed by a