Among people who looked upon nudity as shameful, the robe and its decorations were of no little importance. Both in Chaldæa and Assyria it was carried to a great pitch of luxury by the noble and wealthy. They were not content with fine tissues, with those delicate and snowy muslins for which the kings of Persia and their wives were, in later years, to ransack the bazaars of Babylon.[448] They required their stuffs to be embroidered with rich and graceful ornament, in which brilliant colour and elegant design should go hand in hand.[449] The Chaldæans were the first to set this example, as we know from the most ancient cylinders, from the Tello monuments and from the stele of Merodach-idin-akhi (Fig. 233). But it would seem that the Assyrians soon left their teachers behind, and in any case the bas-reliefs enable us to become far better acquainted with the costume of the northern people than with that of their southern neighbours. Helped and tempted by the facilities of a material that offered but a very slight resistance to his chisel, the Assyrian sculptor amused himself now by producing a faithful copy of the royal robes in every detail of their patient embroidery, now by imitating in the broad thresholds, the intersecting lines, the stars and garlands woven by the nimble shuttle in the soft substance of the carpets with which the floors of every divan were covered. The images on the royal robes must have been entirely embroidered (Figs. 253 and 254). They cannot have been metal cuirasses engraved with the point, as we might at the first glance be tempted to think. In the relief there is no salience suggesting the attachment of any foreign substance. Neither have we any reason to believe that work of such intricate delicacy could be carried out in metal. It was by the needle and on a woollen surface that these graceful images were built up. The skill of the Babylonian embroiderers was famous until the last days of antiquity.[450] During the Roman period their works were paid for by their weight in gold.[451] Even now the women of every eastern village cover materials often coarse enough in themselves with charming works of the same kind. They decorate thus their long hempen chemises, their aprons and jackets, their scarves, and the small napkins that are used sometimes as towels and sometimes to lay on the floor about the low tables on which their food is served.