This, however, is unusual.
The number of chambers in a palace is very large.

In Sennacherib's palace at Koyunjik, where great part of the building remains still unexplored, the excavated chambers amount to sixty-eight--all, be it remembered, upon the ground floor.

The space covered by them and by their walls exceeds 40,000 square yards.

As Mr.Fergusson observes, "the imperial palace of Sennacherib is, of all the buildings of antiquity, surpassed in magnitude only by the great palace-temple of Karnak; and when we consider the vastness of the mound on which it was raised, and the richness of the ornaments with which it was adorned, it is by no means clear that it was not as great, or at least as expensive, a work as the great palace-temple at Thebes." Elsewhere the excavated apartments are less numerous; but in no case is it probable that a palace contained on its ground floor fewer than forty or fifty chambers.
The most striking peculiarity which the ground-plans of the palaces disclose is the uniform adoption throughout of straight and parallel lines.

No plan exhibits a curve of any kind, or any angle but a right angle.