Nor could there well be any view at all from the ground chambers, which had no windows, at any rate within fifteen feet of the floor.

To enjoy a view of anything but the dead wall skirting the mound, it was necessary (Mr.Fergusson thinks) to mount to a second story, which he ingeniously places, not over the ground rooms, but on the top of the outer and party walls, whose structure is so massive that their area falls (he observes) but little short of the area of the ground-rooms themselves.
This reasoning is sufficiently answered, in the first place, by observing that we know not whether the Assyrians appreciated the advantage of a view, or raised their palace platforms for any such object.

They may have constructed them for security only, or for greater dignity and greater seclusion.

They may have looked chiefly for comfort and have reared them in order to receive the benefit of every breeze, and at the same time to be above the elevation to which gnats and mosquitoes commonly rise.

Or there may be a fallacy in concluding, from the very slight data furnished by the excavations of M.Botta, that a palace platform was, in any case, skirted along its whole length, by a six-foot parapet.