Before examining our chief witnesses, the men who dug up Khorsabad, and Nimroud, and Kouyundjik, we may, to some extent, foretell their answers. We have already explained how the Mesopotamian architect made use of colour to mask the poverty of his construction and to furnish the great bare walls of his clay buildings. Both inside and outside, the Assyrian palaces had the upper parts of their walls and the archivolts of their doors decorated with enamelled bricks or paintings in distemper. Is it to be supposed that where the reliefs began all artificial tinting left off, and that the eye had nothing but the dull grey of gypsum and limestone to wander to from the rich dyes of the carpets with which the floors were strewn? Nothing could well be more disagreeable than such a contrast. In our own day, and over the whole of the vast continent that stretches from China to Asia Minor, there is not a stuff, however humble, that is woven on the loom or embroidered by the needle, but betrays an instinctive feeling for harmony so true and subtle that every artist wonders at it, and the most tasteful of our art workmen despair of reaching its perfection, and yet many of these faultless harmonies were conceived and realized in the tent of the nomad shepherd. We can hardly believe that in the palace where official art lavished all its resources in honour of its master, there could be any part from which the gaiety that colour gives was entirely excluded, especially if it was exactly the part to which the eye of every visitor would be most surely attracted.