g greater solidity to his walls as a whole. His slabs were
not only let into each other at the angles, in some chambers there were
squared angle pieces of a diameter great enough to allow them to sink more
deeply into the crude brick behind, and thus to offer steady points of
support in each corner. Finally the separate slabs were held together at
the top by leaden dovetails like the metal clamps used to attach coping
stones to each other.

Such precautions were rendered comparatively useless by the fact that the
whole work was faulty at the base. Halls and chambers had no solid
foundation or pavement, so that the heavy slabs of their decoration rested
upon a shifting soil, quite incapable of carrying them without flinching.
In many places they sank some inches into the ground, the soft earth behind
pushing them forward, and in their fall the row to which they belonged was
inevitably involved. The excavators have again and again found whole lines
of bas-reliefs that appeared to have fallen together. Such an accident is a
thing for posterity to rejoice over. Prone upon a soft and yielding soil
the works of the sculptor are better protected than when standing erect,
their upper parts clear, perhaps, of the ruin that covers their feet, and
exposed to the weather at least, and, too often, to the brutality of an
ignorant population.

Such defects are sufficient to prove that these slabs were never meant to
carry any great weight; far from affording a support to the wall behind,
they required one to help them in maintaining their own equilibrium. On the
other hand they protected it, as we have said above, from too rapid
deterioration.

At Khorsabad this stone casing is in very bad condition at many points, in
the halls and passages of the outbuildings and in the courtyards adjoining
the city gates for instance.[332] There the stones are only smoothed down,
and their obvious purpose is merely to protect the crude brick within. The
purely architectural origin of this system of casing is thus clearly shown.

But the presence of these slabs set upright against the wall offered a
temptation to the ambitious architect that he was not likely to resist. The
limestone and alabaster of which they were composed afforded both a kindly
surface for the chisel, and a certain guarantee of duration for the forms
it struck out. In every Assyrian palace we may see that the king, its
builder, had a double object in view, the glorification of t