rt. The curve was
prolonged and turned in upon itself. In one of the capitals of the little
temple represented at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), two pairs of these horns may be
recognized one above the other (Fig. 75), but nowhere else do we find such
an arrangement. Whether the column be of wood, as in the Sippara tablet
(Fig. 71), or of stone, as in those buildings in which the weight and
solidity of the entablature points decisively to that material (Figs. 41
and 42), we find a volute in universal use that differs but slightly in its
general physiognomy from the familiar ornament of the Ionic capital.

[Illustration: FIG. 76.--View of a palace; from Layard.]

Let us revert for a moment to the country house or palace of which we gave
a general view in Fig. 39. We shall there find on the highest part of the
building an open loggia supported by small columns many times repeated. We
reproduce this part of the relief on a larger scale (Fig. 76), so that its
details may be more clearly seen. A very slight familiarity with the
graphic processes of the Assyrians is sufficient to inform the reader that
the kind of trellis work with which the bed of the relief is covered is
significant of a mountainous country. The palace rises on the banks of a
river, which is indicated by the sinuous lines in the right lower corner.
The buildings themselves--which are dominated here and there by the round
tops of trees, planted, we may suppose, in the inner courts--stand upon
mounds at various heights above the plain. The lowest of these look like
isolated structures, such as the advanced works of a fortress. Next comes a
line of towers, and then the artificial hill crowned by the palace properly
speaking. The facade of the latter is flanked by tall and salient towers,
across whose summits runs the open gallery to which we have referred.[262]
This is supported by numerous columns which must by their general
arrangement and spacing, have been of wood. The gallery consisted, in all
probability, of a platform upheld by trunks of trees, either squared or
left in the rough and surmounted by capitals sheathed in beaten bronze.

The volute is here quite simple in shape; elsewhere we find it doubled, as
it were, so that four volutes occur between the astragali and the abacus
(Figs. 42 and 77).[263] In other examples, again, it is elongated upwards
until it takes a shape differing but little from the acanthus leaves of the
Corinthian capital (Fig. 78).[264]