ence,
but he failed to guess its real character, which, indeed, was only divined
by Place when his explorations were far advanced. As soon as all doubt was
removed as to the real character of the monument, M. Place took every care
to preserve all that might yet exist of it, and our Fig. 184 shows the
state of the building after the excavations were complete. Three whole
stages and part of a fourth (to say nothing of the plinth) were still in
existence. The face of each stage was ornamented with vertical grooves,
repeating horizontally the elevation of the Assyrian stepped battlements
(Fig. 102); the coloured stucco, varying in hue from one stage to another,
was still in place, and confirmed the assertions of Herodotus as to the
traditional sequence of tints.[480] The external ramp, with its pavement of
burnt brick and its crenellated parapet, was also found.[481] At its base
the first stage described upon the soil a square of about 143 feet each
way. Each of the three complete stages was twenty feet three inches high.

Upon such data M. Thomas had no difficulty in restoring the whole building.
Evidently the fourth story could not have been the original apex, as it
would have been strange indeed, if, when all the rest of the Khorsabad
palace had lost its upper works, the sun-dried bricks of the _Observatory_
alone had resisted the agents of destruction. Moreover the materials of the
higher stories still exist in the 40,000 cubic yards of rubbish which cover
the surrounding platform to an average depth of about ten feet.

[Illustration: FIG. 185.--The _Observatory_ restored. Elevation.]

How many stages were there? Struck by the importance of the number seven in
Assyrian architecture, M. Thomas fixed upon that number. Even at Khorsabad
itself the figure continually crops up. The city walls had seven gates. One
of the commonest of the ornamental motives found upon the external and
internal walls of the Harem is the band of seven half columns illustrated
on page 247. Herodotus tells us of the seven different colours used on the
concentric walls of Ecbatana. Finally, in assigning seven stories to the
building we get a total elevation of 140 feet, which corresponds so closely
to the 143 feet of the base that we may take the two as identical, and
account for the slight difference between them, amounting only to about
three inches for each story, by the difficulty in taking correct
measurements on a ruined structure of sun-drie