With wood, with enamel and coloured earths, with stones, both soft and hard, and metals both common, like bronze, and precious, like gold and silver, the sculptor built up statues and statuettes in which the peculiar beauty to be attained by the juxtaposition of such heterogeneous materials, was steadily kept in view. With inferior taste and less feeling for purity of form than the Greeks, this art was identical in principal with the chryselephantine sculpture that created the Olympian Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon. The idea that sculpture is the art in which form is treated to the exclusion of colour is quite a modern one.[292] The sculptor of Assyria was as ready to mix colour with his contours as his _confrère_ of Egypt, but he made use of it in more sober and reserved fashion. How are we to explain the difference? It is easier to prove the fact than to give a reason for it. It may be said that the sunlight is less constant and less blinding in Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley, and that the artist was not called upon to struggle with such determination, by the profusion and brightness of his colours, against the devouring illumination that impoverishes outlines and obliterates modelling. We must also bear in mind the habits formed by work in such materials as basalt and diorite, which did not lend themselves kindly to the use of bright colours. In any case the fact itself seems incontestable. We cannot say of the Ninevite reliefs as we said of those of Thebes, that they resembled a brilliant tapestry stretched over the flat wall-surfaces. If, in most of the buildings, touches of paint freely placed upon the accessories and even upon the figures and faces, lightened and varied the general appearance of the sculptures, still the naked stone was left to show all over the bed and over the greater part of the figures. From this we must not conclude, however, that the Assyrians and Chaldæans did not possess, and possess in a very high degree, the love for bold and brilliant colour-schemes which even now distinguishes their degenerate posterity, the races inhabiting the Euphrates valley and the plateau of Iran. But they gratified their innate and hereditary taste in a different way. It was to their woven stuffs, to their paintings in distemper and their enamelled faïence that the buildings of Mesopotamia owed that gaiety of appearance which has led us to compare them with the mosques of Turkey and Persia. § 8.--_Gems._ “Every Babylonian had a seal,” says Herodotus;[293] this fact seems to have struck him directly he began to explore the streets and bazaars of the great oriental city. These seals, which appear to have attracted the eye of the historian by the open manner in which they were carried and the continual use made of them in every transaction of life, public or private, are now in our museums. They are to be found in hundreds in all the galleries and private collections of Europe.[294]