WESTERN ASIA. The use of crude brick has made impossible any detailed knowledge of the methods of fortification used in Babylonian cities. though they are known to have been pro tected by walls of immense thickness and height. The plan of placing the royal palace on one side and using it as a citadel. of shape, was followed by the Assyrians, as shown in the city of Sargon, near Nineveh. But it was in the more mountainous countries of Western Asia, es pecially in Syria and Armenia, that the earliest really scientific types of military engineering were thought out. The rectangular type was abandoned in favor of the circular or ovoidal, by which the weak angles were entirely avoided. In place of a single wall with an advance-wall or scarp, there were usually three concentric lines of increasing heights, each w•itlr towers and battlements and chemins-de-rondc. The Dittite
cities were the most famous of such fortifications, from which both the Egyptians and Assyrians learned much of the art of building, of attack ing, and of defending fortresses. The mountain ous races of Western Asia thus created a type dial was to remain the highest known to military architecture, and to he perpetuated by the successors of Alexander, by the Byzantine Emperors, and by the Crusaders.
..EllEAN PEOPLES. The Pelasgians and other ..Egean peoples built also in stone, often with Cyclopean and polygonal masonry. There were many types: first, the groups of defensive forts on the outskirts, or constituting a citadel: then later, the walls encircling the entire city. This wall sometimes rises sixty or seventy feet ; the citadel as much more.