Ruin had overtaken many of the provincial towns; and it would require a vast outlay to restore their public buildings.

But the treasury was wellnigh empty, and did not allow the new monarch to adopt in his buildings the grand and magnificent style of former kings.

Still Saracus attempted something.

At Calah he began the construction of a building which apparently was intended for a palace, but which contrasts most painfully with the palatial erections of former kings.

The waning glory of the monarchy was made patent both to the nation and to strangers by an edifice where coarse slabs of common limestone, unsculptured and uninscribed, replaced the alabaster bas-reliefs of former times; and where a simple plaster above the slabs was the substitute for the richly-patterned enamelled bricks of Sargon, Sennacherib, and Asshur-bani-pal.