The impression made by these compositions as a whole is intensified when we examine their separate details. The variety of the combinations employed is very striking. Sometimes the ornament is entirely linear and vegetable in its origin. Look, for instance, at the kind of square brooch worn on his breast by one of the winged genii at Nimroud (Fig. 255). The sacred tree surrounded by a square frame of rosettes and wavy lines occupies the centre, the palmette throws out its wide fronds at one end. In another example we find a human-headed lion, mitred and bearded, struggling with an eagle-headed genius. On the right of our woodcut (Fig. 256) a bud or flower like that of the _silene inflata_, hangs over the band of embroidery; it is a pendent from the necklace. Sometimes we find real combined with fictitious animals. In Fig. 257 two griffins have brought down a spotted deer. Elsewhere we see a winged bull perched upon a large rosette in an attitude that is at once unexpected and not ungraceful (Fig. 258). Finally the king himself or a personage resembling him is often represented struggling with fictitious monsters (Fig. 259). In this figure notice the rosettes that are scattered promiscuously over the field. We shall encounter the same prodigality of ornament in the oldest Greek vases, whose decorators seem to have been afraid to leave a corner of their surface unoccupied. * * * * * In his way the weaver was no less skilful than the embroiderer, but he could not give quite so much rein to his fancy as his fellow workmen. The shuttle was less free than the needle. In its passage through the threads of the warp it could hardly do more than trace symmetrical designs and repeat them at regular intervals. We must seek for the patterns of Chaldæo-Assyrian carpets in the sculptured thresholds of the palaces. In these the general principle never varied, but the composition changed just as it does to-day in the carpets and rugs imported from Turkey and Persia. In any case there was a border into which the softest and most delicate colours were introduced. As a rule it must have been decorated with one of those “knop and flower” ornaments originally invented by the Egyptians.[452] The space so inclosed was sometimes divided into coffer-like compartments or panels, sometimes it was filled with a single diaper pattern, as in the threshold from Khorsabad (Vol. I. Fig. 96). No figures of men or animals are to be found here. The simple and perhaps monotonous forms borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, were thoroughly well suited for stuffs destined to be stepped upon by countless feet. If, in our fancy, we clothe the patterns of the carved sills in all the charm of varied colour, we obtain a glowing surface that may be compared, at a respectful distance, with the gorgeous colour harmonies of the Mesopotamian plains, when the spring showers have clothed them in a