Page - 10 -Scan 20 of 28
Printed: MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Printed: LIBERTÉ · ÉGALITÉ · FRATERNITÉ
Printed: RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE
Printed: PARIS, LE
known bronzes and stones to have been levelled. The ruins of the original gateway have been incorporated into the new construction for which they served as foundations.
Now, the positions foreseen for the bas-reliefs of the original gateway, notably the two piers serving as jambs on the side of the inner courtyard are stripped of their sculptures. The dimensions agree, the bas-reliefs or those of them which had escaped destruction must have been transferred to the Lion Gate erected on the site of the earlier gateway. This explains the character of little homogeneity of the reliefs and sculptures of the so-called Lion Gate, among which, as your former Perpetual Secretary Mr Dussaud was the first to establish, there are several which are indisputably earlier than the Neo-Hittite period.
As one must expect when a monument of this scale has been rebuilt after an interval of more than one century, the movable remains of the original monuments have been almost entirely removed. On the other hand, there was produced then a mixture of materials coming from the original gateway with the contemporary witnesses of the building work. Constant observation was needed and an in situ recording by my architects, aided by instruments of precise levelling of several hundred remains, including the most modest, in order to identify the matching correspondences to the two mixed monuments in many places notably at the site of the foundations.
Nevertheless, with the help of stratigraphic indications and
65 figures hard to readstruck struck outadded written in above” jug ditto, and what it repeatsword reading not certain
