On one of these monuments, the one we have chosen as the type of the whole series, a double river seems to flow round the stone, and to embrace in its windings the mystic scene we have described. This is the _Caillou Michaux_, now in the French National Library. In Fig. 110 we give a reproduction of it as a whole, and in Figs. 111 and 112 the upper parts of its two faces on a larger scale.[228] The particular value of each symbol here engraved, is still, and perhaps will always remain, an enigma, but the general significance of their introduction into these documents is easily understood. They give a religious character, a sort of divine sanction, to the titles inscribed upon the stone; they act as witnesses and guarantees. The landmark thus prepared, was set, no doubt, like the Athenian ὅροι, at the limits of the field whose ownership it declared. It became a kind of talisman.[229] The workmanship of the upper division is very dry and hard; it is not art. These images were not intended to charm the eye; they were only placed on the stone on account of their supposed power of interesting the gods in the preservation of the rights and titles thereon set out. Their execution was therefore left to mere workmen, who sculptured the symbols and animal forms in the most mechanical and perfunctory fashion. They never dreamt of referring to nature and so giving some variety to the traditional forms. This art, if we may call it so, was hieratic in the fullest sense of the term. [Illustration: FIG. 110.--The Caillou Michaux. Height 19¾ inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.] From our point of view, then, we should gain nothing by multiplying the number of these monuments. They are chiefly interesting to the historian of law and religious beliefs in Chaldæa. The remains for whose recovery we look with the most anxious hope are those of what we have called the classic age of Chaldæan art, an art that must have reached its apogee in the days of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar. Speaking broadly, we can show nothing produced by the sculptors, painters, and ornamentists who were employed on the decoration of those great buildings which even the Jewish prophets could not help admiring, while they abused the princes who built them and the gods to whom they were consecrated. The earliest Greek travellers, such as Herodotus and Ctesias, only saw the ruins of these magnificent structures and of their rich adornment of enamels, frescoes, and sculptured figures; and yet how great was their wonder! We can hardly reflect without emotion upon what we have lost in great works in stone and metal carried out in the style of which certain fragments from Tello and a few terra-cotta statuettes give us some faint idea.[230] [Illustration: FIG. 111.--The Caillou Michaux, obverse. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.] [Illustration: FIG. 112.--The Caillou Michaux, reverse. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]