The yellow is an antimoniate of lead containing a certain quantity of tin; its composition is the same as that of the pigment now called Naples yellow.[355] White is an oxide of tin, so that the Arabs do not deserve the credit they have long enjoyed of being the first, about the ninth century a.d., to make use of white so composed.[356] The black is perhaps an animal pigment.[357] The green may have been obtained by a mixture of blue and yellow pigments, of ochre with oxide of copper, for instance. As for red, no colour is easier to get. The Nimroud enamellers used, perhaps, a sub-oxide of copper,[358] while those of Khorsabad employed the iron oxide of which our red chalk is composed.[359] We can examine the latter at our ease. The cake of red found by Place weighed some five-and-forty pounds. It dissolves readily in water. The whole palette consisted, then, of some five or six colours, and their composition was so simple that no attempt to produce an appearance of reality by their aid could have been successful. Taken altogether, the painting of Mesopotamia was purely decorative; its ornamental purpose was never for a moment lost sight of, and the forms it borrowed from the organic world always had a peculiar character. When the figures of men and animals were introduced they were never shown engaged in some action which might of itself excite the curiosity of the spectator; their forms are not studied with the religious care that proves the artist to have been impelled by their own beauty and grace of movement to give them a place in his work. There are no shadows marking the succession of planes; in the choice of flat tints the artist has not allowed himself to be tied down to fact. Thus we find that in the kind of frieze of which we give a fragment at the foot of our Plate XIV. there is a blue bull, the hoofs and the end of the tail alone being black. Upon the plinth from the Khorsabad harem, a lion, a bird, a bull, a tree, and a plough are all yellow, without change of tint (Plate XV.) In the glazed brick on which a subject so often treated by the sculptors is represented (Plate XIV., Fig. 1), the painter has tried to compose a kind of picture, but even there the colours are frankly conventional. The flesh and the robes with their ornaments are all carried out in different shades of yellow. He makes no attempt to imitate the real colours of nature; all he cares about is to please the eye and to vary the monotony of the wide surfaces left unbroken by the architect. The winged genii and the fantastic animals could be used for such a purpose no less than the fret and the palmette, but as soon as they were so employed they become pure ornament. In a decoration like that of the archivolts at Khorsabad (Vol. I., Fig. 124), the great rosettes have the same value and brilliancy of tone as the figures by which they are separated; the whiteness of their petals may even give them a greater importance and