The walls of the Pompeian houses were richly decorated in strong colouring, where vermilion, black, green, and orange predominated. The subjects were figure groups, animals, birds, and grotesques of all kinds, encased in fantastic architectural framings (Fig. 323). Sometimes a dead wall of the yard would be painted elaborately to represent a garden. Sculpture also decorated the apartments, the floors were in mosaic, and the ceiling richly panelled and decorated. Roman, Greek, and Pompeian ornament will again be noticed in the second volume under the minor arts of these countries. [Illustration: Fig. 323.—Mural Painting from Pompeii.] CHAPTER XV. INDIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE. An Aryan race of people came into India about B.C. 2000 across the Upper Indus. They settled in the first instance in the Punjab, in the watershed of the Sutlej and the Jumna, and finally in Oude and the east. After one thousand years they lost their purity of race by mixing with the aboriginal natives. About this time the prophet Sakya Muni, or Buddha, arose, and apparently succeeded in converting nearly the whole of Northern India to Buddhism. He died in B.C. 543, and three hundred years after his death, or about B.C. 250, King Asoka proclaimed Buddhism as the state religion, and for about one thousand years after it continued as the state religion of India, although at the present day there are said to be no native Buddhists in India. Historic art in India began in Asoka’s reign. The earlier rock-tombs and other architecture of Asoka’s time are evidently stone copies of still earlier wooden constructions. Monuments consisting of edict columns or _lats_, peculiar to this period, have been found in isolated positions erected to the honour of Buddha in the neighbourhood of Allahabad and Delhi; they are above thirty-three feet in height, and have a curved, inverted, bell-shaped capital on which probably stood a wheel, the emblem, or a lion, the symbol, of Buddha. This capital is similar in form to the base of a Persian column, and some of the ornamentation around the neck of the column is composed of Greek and Assyrian forms, all of which proves that the early Indian art owes something to Assyria, Persia, and Greece (Fig. 324). Probably this came about by the subjugation of Persia by Alexander the Great, who is said to have pushed his conquests as far as the banks of the Indus. [Illustration: Fig. 324.—Ornament from Asoka’s Pillar, Allahabad. (B.)]