We have already explained[201] that in the monuments from Sirtella these symbols were not all wedges, or arrow-heads, whose exclusive use did not commence until afterwards; we have shown how their original ideographic nature is still to be traced in many characters. Compare the inscription here figured with those on our Assyrian monuments. Put it side by side with the narrative that runs across all the reliefs of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud (Vol. I., Fig. 4, and, above, Fig. 64): you will see at once what a profound change has taken place and how many centuries must have intervened between such different ways of employing the same alphabet. At Tello the material was less kindly; it was not, as in Assyria, limestone or gypsum; it was a diorite or dolerite as stubborn as the hardest rocks of Egypt.[202] The widely-spaced characters are none the less distinct; their cutting is, in fact, marvellous in its decision and clearness. We feel that the scribe traced each letter with much the same care and respect as he would have shown in performing a religious rite. In the eyes of the people who saw these complicated symbols grow under the chisel, writing still had a beauty of its own as well as a mysterious prestige; it was only legible by the initiated, and they were few in number; it was admired for itself, for the power it possessed of representing the facts of nature and the thoughts of mankind; it was a precious, almost a magic, secret. By the time that the palaces of the Assyrian monarchs began to be raised on the banks of the Tigris it was no longer so; writing had gone on for so many centuries that people had become thoroughly accustomed to it and to its merits; all that one desired, when he took the chisel in hand, was to be understood. The text in which Assurnazirpal celebrates the erection of his palace and claims for it the protection of the great gods of Assyria, is written in very small, closely-set characters, engraved by a skilful and rapid hand in the soft and kindly stone; the inequalities of the surface, the details of the sculptures and the shadows they cast, make a letter difficult to read here and there. Nowhere, neither here nor in any other of the great Assyrian inscriptions, do we find the signs of care, the look of simple and serious sincerity, that distinguishes the ancient writing of Chaldæa. At Calah and Nineveh we have before us the work of a society already far advanced, a society which lives in the past and makes use, with mere mechanical skill, of the processes created and brought to a first perfection many centuries before.