The utilitarian purpose was everything with the Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. This is evident in their furniture, especially in their tables, chairs, and footstools. The construction of the frame was taken from plants and trees, whilst wild animals were used as silent and obedient domestic creatures. In supporting their furniture with the legs of the lion, tiger, or leopard, they used these animals for an excellent ornamental purpose. The legs of the brute were made to support, the body was turned into a seat, and the head was conventionally used as a side-ornament for the backs or arms of the throne or chair. We see in the Cis-Himâlâyans, in accordance with their greater activity in life, a further progress in art. Merely geometrical figures do not suffice; not monstrous divinities, but animals and men, are the most important subjects of sculpture. Their architecture was without symmetry and proportion, the material of their buildings in no accordance with the monumental tendencies of their construction, and their efforts did not carry them further than the vague attempts of half-settled nomads. Their walls, which once consisted of textile hangings, retained this character, stretching for thousands of feet without any interruption, except that the doorways had their colossal symbolic guards, which to a certain extent relieved the monotony of the construction. The art of Persia and Assyria is in every sense the transition-link between nomadic and monumental art. CHAPTER VI. EGYPTIAN ART. ‘Anything capable of uniting many souls--is _sacred_,’ says Goethe. The sacredness of religious tenets or monumental buildings is at once explained by this. To unite humanity into one great brotherhood was first attempted by the Babylonians with their huge tower of Belus, Baal, or Babel. Men for the first time left patriarchal particularism, and tried to build a beacon reaching up to the stars, calling humanity together to one spot, by a work produced by their united labour as a visible sign of their union. This first attempt at a really monumental building was made in the plains of the Euphrates. Whilst the people of Asia still struggled to settle down, and changed their habitations and with them their forms of art, we see monuments emerge from the dim past, which reflect man for the first time in his grandeur as wielder of matter. The sphinx in its incomprehensible, mysterious form, half brute, half human being, may be looked upon as the very emblem of Egyptian art.