The effect of the bas-reliefs was enhanced by the red, black, blue, and white colours with which they were picked out. The practice had come from Babylonia, but whereas the Babylonians delighted in brilliant colouring, their northern neighbours contented themselves with much more sober hues. It was no doubt from the populations of Mesopotamia that the Greeks first learnt to paint and tint their sculptured stone. Unfortunately it is difficult, if not impossible, to find any trace of colouring remaining in the Assyrian bas-reliefs now in Europe. When first disinterred, however, the colours were still bright in many cases, although exposure to the air soon caused them to fade and perish. The bas-reliefs and colossi were moved from the quarries out of which they had been dug, or the workshops in which they had been carved, by the help of sledges and rollers. Hundreds of captives were employed to drag the huge mass along; sometimes it was transported by water, the boat on which it lay being pulled by men on shore; sometimes it was drawn over the land by gangs of slaves, urged to their work by the rod and sword of their task-masters. On the colossus itself stood an overseer holding to his mouth what looks on the monument like a modern speaking-trumpet. Over a sculpture representing the transport of one of these colossi Sennacherib has engraved the words: 'Sennacherib, king of legions, king of Assyria, has caused the winged bull and the colossi, the divinities which were made in the land of the city of the Baladians, to be brought with joy to the palace of his lordship, which is within Nineveh.' We may infer from this epigraph that the images themselves were believed to be in some way the abode of divinity, like the Beth-els or sacred stones to which reference has been made in the last chapter. [Illustration: Fragment now in the British Museum showing primitive Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform Characters side by side.] Like Assyrian art, Assyrian literature was for the most part derived from Babylonia. A large portion of it was translated from Accadian originals. Sometimes the original was lost or forgotten; more frequently it was re-edited from time to time with interlinear or parallel translations in Assyro-Babylonian. This was more especially the case with the sacred texts, in which the old language of Accad was itself accounted sacred, like Latin in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, or Coptic in those of the modern Egyptian Church.