their area falls (he observes) but little short of the area of the
ground-rooms themselves.

This reasoning is sufficiently answered, in the first place, by
observing that we know not whether the Assyrians appreciated the
advantage of a view, or raised their palace platforms for any such
object. They may have constructed them for security only, or for greater
dignity and greater seclusion. They may have looked chiefly for comfort
and have reared them in order to receive the benefit of every breeze,
and at the same time to be above the elevation to which gnats and
mosquitoes commonly rise. Or there may be a fallacy in concluding, from
the very slight data furnished by the excavations of M. Botta, that a
palace platform was, in any case, skirted along its whole length, by a
six-foot parapet. Nothing is more probable than that in places the
Khorsabad parapet may have been very much lower than this; and elsewhere
it is not even ascertained that any parapet at all edged the platform.
On the whole we seem to have no right to conclude, merely on account of
the small portions of parapet wall uncovered by M. Botta, that an upper
story was a necessity to the palaces. If the Assyrians valued a view,
they may easily have made their parapets low in places: if they cared so
little for it as to shut it out from all their halls and terraces, they
may not improbably have dispensed with the advantage altogether.

The two questions of the roofing and lighting of the Assyrian palaces
are so closely connected together that they will most conveniently be
treated in combination. The first conjecture published on the subject of
roofing was that of M. Flandin. who suggested that the chambers
generally--the great halls at any rate--had been ceiled with a brick
vault. He thought that the complete filling up of the apartments to the
height of fifteen or twenty feet was thus best explained; and he