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Damanhûr, which the railroad traverses, looks very much as must have looked the ancient cities of Egypt, now buried under the sand or fallen into dust. It is surrounded by sloping walls built of unbaked bricks or of pisé which preserves its earthy colour. The flat-roofed houses rise one above another like a collection of cubes dotted with little black holes.
On the other hand if we assume that vaults of pisé were the chosen coverings, all the rest follows easily. They could support the flat roof with ease, and the whole upper structure could be made of sufficient thickness to exclude both the heat and the rain, while the present appearance of the ruins is naturally accounted for.
Condemned he was to die in that prison, For Royer, which that bishop was of Pise, Had on him made a false suggestion, Through which the people gan on him arise, And put him in prison in such a wise, As ye have heard, and meat and drink he had So little that it hardly might suffice, And therewithal it was full poor and bad.
The way in which these slabs were fixed is hardly worthy of such clever builders, and, in fact, the Assyrians seem to have never succeeded in mastering the difficulties inherent in the association of two heterogeneous materials. The slabs were of gypsum or limestone, the wall of pisé, materials which are not to be easily combined.
In most parts a soft sand overlying hard loam, like work en pise, limestone and coralline; it shows evidences of inundation: water-worn stones of a lime almost as compact as marble, pieces of quartz, selenite, basalt, granite, and syenite in nodules are everywhere sprinkled over the surface.
The crude brick of Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used while damp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pisé. Spread out in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one to another by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with which they were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the courses above.
As to whether they were of pisé, like those of Khorsabad, the Greek writers tell us nothing. From what we know of the habits of the Chaldæan builder we may conclude that they were true arches with voussoirs either of bricks burnt in the kiln, or so well dried that they were almost as hard and durable as those that had passed through the fire.
Thus only can we explain the ease with which the Assyrian builder surmounted difficulties some of which would have puzzled a modern architect, such as the pisé vaults erected over spacious galleries without any kind of centering, and the domes over square chambers, for which some system of pendentives that is, of arches or other intermediate forces by which the base of the cupola could be allied to the top of the supporting wall, must have been contrived.
When some heavy fall of rain by wetting and softening the upper surface of the terrace, gives an opportunity for repairing the ravages of a long drought, the stone is taken backwards and forwards over the yielding pisé. It closes the cracks, kills the weeds that if left to themselves would soon transform the roof into a field, and makes the surface as firm as a threshing-floor.
They are, in fact, bricks, and not pisé. But in Chaldæa, as in Assyria, the mounds upon which the great buildings were raised are not always of crude brick. They are sometimes made by inclosing a large space by four brick walls, and filling it with earth and the various débris left by previous buildings.
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