Excerpt from The Ninevah Court in the Crystal PalaceThis entire disappearance of Nineveh, whilst the other great capitals of the ancient world had left some visible traces of their principal monuments, by which their site could be determined, is chiey to be attributed to the materials of which it was constructed. The Assyrians did not, like the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, build their palaces and temples either of granite, precious marbles, or durable stone, but even their public edifices, as well as their humblest habitations, were of bricks made of clay mixed with chopmd straw, and merely dried in the sun. Without the chopped straw the clay would not have been bound together, or have had sufficient consistency for use hence the meaning of the passage in the book of Exodus (chap. V. Which describes the hardships of the Jews when the Egyptians refused to supply them with straw to make their bricks. Other materials, such as marble, alabaster, stone, and kiln-burnt bricks, generally painted or glazed, were used by the Assyrians in their principal edifices, but to a com putatively limited extent, and only by way of ornament. Hence, when the buildings were once deserted, the upper walls and stories soon fell in and buried the lower. The bricks of clay became earth again, and the ruins would assume the appearance of more natural heaps and mounds rising in the plain, upon which the grass grew and corn might be sown.

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