Of the use of wood in Assyria, the wall reliefs would alone afford ample evidence, for parts of some of the structures there encountered could only possibly have been made of wood. Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.) in commemorating his reconstruction of the temple of Anu and Adad at Ashur, says that he roofed it over with beams of cedar, and those of the larger rooms of the palaces which were not vaulted must have been roofed with wood, because there is no evidence of the existence of slabs of stone of sufficient size to have effected the purpose, and large flat brick roofs would be out of the question. In like manner Tiglath-Pileser III states that he made a palace of cedar-wood[57] while Esarhaddon says that the doors of one of the palaces which he erected for himself were made of cypress-wood and were covered with silver and copper,[58] while in another passage he states that in his building operations at Babylon he used oaks, terebinths and palms. At Khorsabad, Place further found fragments of cedar-beams which had been clearly used for architectural purposes, and probably formed part of the lintels of the doorways in which they were found; so too Layard in the course of his excavations found the charred remains of wood together with a beam of cedar-wood, all of which are now in the British Museum. The scantiness of the remains of wood thus used is adequately accounted for by the destructibility of that material.
Metal can hardly be said to have been used for purely architectural purposes at all, and when employed seems rather to have been added for the adornment of the more conspicuous parts of the building, than used as an integral part of the structure. There are, however, one or two exceptions to this generalization. The sills were sometimes made of metal in the more luxurious buildings, and a bronze sill measuring 60 × 20 × 3-1/2 inches, with an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar has actually come to light, and is now in the British Museum, while another object of a singularly unique character, consisting of a bronze gate-socket set in lead, has similarly found its way to that famous institution. Herodotus furthermore tells us in his account of Babylon that the walls had a hundred gates “all of bronze; their jambs and lintels were of the same material.” Some of the bas-reliefs also exhibit structures, parts of which must seemingly have been made of metal: the royal pavilion carved on the tablet from Abû Habba (Sippar) for example (cf. Pl. XIV) is provided with a curved back wall which at the same time is bent right over so as to form a roof; this wall and roof may indeed have been constructed of wood, but metal would clearly have adapted itself the more easily to such a form. Of other minor building materials, such as tools, and nails which played a subsidiary part in Mesopotamian architecture, we know comparatively little, though a number of nails have been recovered from different sites.