In placing the distinctive features of the individual upon wood or stone, the sculptor did something more than flatter the vanity of the great; he prolonged their existence, he helped them to keep off the assaults of death and to defy annihilation. From Pharaoh to the humblest fellah, every one had to conciliate the man who possessed such a quasi-magic power, and from whom such an all-important service might have to be demanded. The common people bought ready-made figures in a shop, on which they were content to cut their names, but the kings and nobles commissioned their statues from the best artists of the time, and some reflex from the respect and admiration surrounding the sovereign must have fallen upon the man to whom he confided the task of giving perpetuity to his royal features, in those statues that during the whole of his reign would stand on the thresholds and about the courts of the temple, and on the painted walls of that happy abode to whose shadows he would turn when full of years and eager for rest. If, before the advent of the Greeks, there were any people in the ancient world in whom a passion for beauty was innate, they were the people of Egypt. The taste of Chaldæa was narrower, less frank and less unerring; she was unable, at least in the same degree, to ally force with grace; her ideal had less nobility, and her hand less freedom and variety. It is by merits of a different kind that she regains the advantage lost in the arts. If her artists fell short of their rivals, her _savants_ seem to have been superior to those of Egypt. In their easy-going and well-organized life, the Egyptians appear to have allowed the inquiring side of their intellects to go to sleep. Morality seems to have occupied them more than science; they made no great efforts to think. The Chaldæans were the reverse of all this. We have reason to believe that they were the first to ask themselves the question upon which all philosophy is founded, the question as to the true origin of things. Their solution of the problem was embodied in the cosmogonies handed down to us in fragments by the Greek writers, and although their conceptions have only been received through intermediaries by whom their meaning has often been altered and falsified, we are still enabled to grasp their fundamental idea through all the obscurities due to a double and sometimes triple translation, and that idea was that the world was created by natural forces, by the action of causes even now at work. The first dogma of the Babylonian religion was the spontaneous generation of things from the liquid element.[463]