Before going into the question of evidence one might, therefore, make up our minds that the Assyrian architect never allowed any such element of failure to be introduced into his work; and the excavations have made that conclusion certain. The Assyrian reliefs were coloured, but they were not coloured all over like those of Egypt; the grain of the stone did not disappear, from one end of the frieze to the other, under a layer of painted stucco. Flandin, the draughtsman attached to the expedition of M. Botta, alone speaks of a coat of ochre spread over the bed of the relief and over the nude portions of the figures;[274] he confesses, however, that the traces were very slight and that they occurred only on a slab here and there. Botta, who saw the same slabs, thought his colleague mistaken.[275] Place is no less decided: “None of us,” he says, “could find any traces of paint upon the undraped portions of the figures, and it would be very extraordinary if among so many bare arms and bare legs, to say nothing of faces, not one should have retained any vestige of colour if they had all once been painted.”[276] We might be inclined to ask whether the traces of pigment that have been noticed here and there upon the alabaster might not have been the remains of a more widespread coloration, the rest of which had disappeared. Strong in his experience, Place thus answers any doubts that might be expressed on this point: “We never found an ornament, a weapon, a shoe or sandal, partially coloured; they were either coloured all over or left bare, while objects in close proximity were without any hue but their own. Sometimes eyes and eyebrows were painted, while hair and beard were left untouched; sometimes the tiara with which a figure was crowned or the fan it carried in its hand was painted while the hand itself and the hair that curled about the head showed not the slightest trace of such an operation; elsewhere colour was only to be found on a baldrick, on sandals, or the fringes of a robe.” Wherever these colours existed at all they were so fresh and brilliant at the time of discovery that no one thought of explaining their absence from certain parts of the work by the destruction of the pigment. “How is it,” continues Place, “that, if robes were painted all over, we only found colour on certain accessories, on fringes and embroideries? How is it that if the winged bulls were coated in paint from head to foot, not one of the deep grooves in their curled beards and hair has preserved the slightest vestige of colour, while the white and black of their eyes, which are salient rather than hollowed, remain intact? Finally, we may mention the following purely accidental, and therefore all the more significant, fact: a smudge of black paint, some two feet long, was still clearly visible on the breast of one of the colossi in the doorway of room 19.[277] How can we account for the persistence of this smudge, which must have fallen upon the monster’s