BABYLON AND PERSIA

MEDIA AND THE RISE OF PERSIA. 263become so familiar in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates.In the abundantly wooded mountains andvalleys of Eastern Eran the building material indi¬cated by nature is timber. The nomad's movabletent or hut is imitated in wood, enlarged, and be¬comes the cabin of logs or boards, with porch andgallery resting on roughly hewn trunks of trees.This, again, in constructions destined for public pur¬poses, expands into the hall with aisles of columnssupporting the roof, and with wide pillared porch.The transition is easy to the combination of publicand private apartments which forms the royal dwell¬ing or palace. By devising the plan on a granderscale, by the choice of hard and handsome woods, oftall and stately trees, and by great finish of workmanship,it was possible to produce a building of realbeauty, preserving the original and characteristic fea¬ture profusion of columns, to be distributed inevery possible combination of aisles, porches, por¬ticos surrounding the inner courts, etc. Exactly sucha construction was the palace at Agbatana. Theforests of the Zagros supplied fine timber as bounti¬fully as those of Bactria, and the Medes could pre¬serve their own traditional style of building withoutfalling into the absurdity of the Assyrians, who wenton heaping mountains of bricks, after the manner offlat and marshy Chaldea, when they had quarries offine stone at hand all around them.4- The ancient Greek writers describe the palaceof the Median kings (possibly begun by Deiokes,and enlarged by Kyaxares), as occupying an area offully two thirds of a mile, at the foot of Mt. ORONTES