Note 15 — Chapter I · CIVIL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE.

Rawlinson (The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 286), and Lenormant (Historie ancienne, vol. ii. p. 196) make the two parts of the platform—the arms of the T and its shank—different in height. In doing so they have borrowed a mistake from Botta. The mistake is easily understood in the case of Rawlinson, whose fourth edition, although published in 1879, reproduces the plans compiled by Fergusson after Botta. We are more surprised at Lenormant falling into the same error, as he gives an excellent résumé of Place’s discoveries. Botta seems to have thought the two parts of the palace had different levels in consequence of an inequality in the distribution of the fallen materials. In the neighbourhood of the latter buildings, such as the so-called Observatory, and where the open spaces were fewer and less ample, there was, of course, a thicker bed of rubbish than where the buildings were lower and the walls farther apart. But wherever the original surface of the mound was reached, Place ascertained that its level never varied. In none of his plans is there the slightest trace of any slope or staircase leading from one level to the other, so far as the summit of the platform is concerned.