For smaller figures and statuettes a softer stone, such as white limestone, alabaster, or onyx, was usually employed, but a few in the harder stone have been recovered. The most remarkable of these is a diorite statuette of a woman, the upper part of which has been preserved. The head and the torso were found separately, but thanks to their hard material they join without leaving a trace of any break. Here, as usual, the hands are crossed upon the breast, and the folds of the garment are only indicated under the arms by a few plain grooves as in the statues of Gudea. But the woman's form is visible beneath the stuff of her garment, and the curves of the back are wonderfully true. Her hair, undulating on the temples, is bound in a head-cloth and falls in the form of a chignon on the neck, the whole being secured by a stiff band, or fillet, around which the cloth is folded with its fringe tucked in. The drawing in Fig. 23 scarcely does justice to the beauty of the face, since it exaggerates the conventional representation of the eyebrows, and reproduces the texture of the stone at the expense of the outline. Moreover, the face is almost more striking in profile.[31] The nose, though perfectly straight, is rather large, but this is clearly a racial characteristic. Even so, the type of female beauty portrayed is singularly striking, and the manner in which the Sumerian sculptor has succeeded in reproducing it was not approached in the work of any later period. Another head from a female statuette, with the hair dressed in a similar fashion, is equally beautiful. The absence of part of the nose tends to give it a rather less marked ethnographic character, and probably increases the resemblance which has been claimed for it to types of classical antiquity.[32] [Illustration: Fig. 24.--Limestone head of a female statuette belonging to the best period of Sumerian art.--_Déc._, pl. 25, Fig. 2.]