metal thresholds sometimes replaced those of
stone or brick. In the British Museum there is a huge bronze sill that was
found in a ruined temple at Borsippa, by Mr. Rassam. Its extreme length is
sixty inches, its width twenty, and its thickness about three and a half
inches. It bears an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar the arrangement of which
proves that the sill when complete had double its present length, or about
ten feet. Its upper surface is decorated with large rosettes within square
borders. We need hardly say that it is a solid casting, and that its weight
is, therefore, by no means trifling. The workmen who put in place and those
who cast it must both have thoroughly understood what they were about. Even
now, we are told, the latter operation would be attended by some
difficulty.[301]

The founders who produced this casting could have no difficulty over the
other parts of the door-case, and we have no reason to doubt the statement
of Herodotus, who thus ends his account of how the walls of Babylon were
built: "The walls had a hundred gates, all of bronze; their jambs and
lintels were of the same material."[302]

These lintels and jambs must have been, like the Borsippa threshold, of
massive bronze, or they would soon have been crushed by the weight they had
to support. On the other hand, had doors themselves been entirely of that
metal it would have been very difficult if not impossible to swing them
upon their hinges, especially in the case of city gates like those just
referred to. It is probable, then, that they were of timber, covered and
concealed by plates of bronze. Herodotus indeed narrates what he saw, like
a truthful and intelligent witness, but he was not an archaeologist, and it
did not occur to him when he entered the famous city which formed the goal
of his travels, to feel the shining metal and find out how much of it was
solid and how much a mere armour for a softer substance behind.

From fragments found at Khorsabad, M. Place had already divined that the
Assyrians covered the planks of their doors with bronze plates, but all
doubts on the point have been removed by a recent discovery, which has
proved once for all that art profited in the end by what at first was
nothing more than a protection against weather and other causes of
deterioration. In 1878 Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, the fellow traveller of Sir
Henry Layard, found in the course of his excavations in Assyria for the
British Museum, some met