The principal design on the Cashmere shawls is the cone pattern decorated with a mixture of small flowers, the fillings between the cones being also a diapering of small floral forms. The cone patterns are also found on metal work, enamels, and carvings from Cashmere and its neighbourhood. On the genuine shawls the ornamentation is embroidered in wide borders, centrepieces, and corner groups of flowers. The Cashmere shawls have been imitated in woven shawls by the French and in the Paisley shawls of Scotch manufacture. Some of the costliest Cashmere shawls are embroidered with a “terrestrial paradise” of singing birds, flowers, animals, and figures. Indian ornament or decoration, from its mosaic-like or flattened-out character, is extremely well suited to the decoration of textile fabrics. The native ornament consists of a variety of flat renderings of the daisy (_sventi_), the lotus, the shoe flower (Figs. 91, 92, 261), knop and flower patterns, parrots, peacocks, lions, tigers, elephants, men on horseback, hunting or fighting, &c., and is always rendered in flat tints of alternating colours on flat grounds, in such works as enamels, tiles, pottery, wall paintings, lac-work, and textiles of all kinds. Though at times the vice of Indian ornament is illustrated in a riotous use of small detail, on the whole it is well suited for the decoration of flat surfaces. In the artistic products of the Mohammedan people of India, or descendants of Persian settlers, the ornament invariably consists of Persian or Saracenic types; the former is distinctly seen in the Masulipatam rugs, carpets, and _palampores_, and the latter in the various art work of the Mogul period, as, for instance, in the inlaid marbles and other work of Agra. (Fig. 293.) The Sassanian Persian designs in silk, as we have seen, were derived from the more ancient Assyrian and Babylonian embroideries, the motives of which were invariably the Tree of Life, or “Grove of Ashareh,” with divinities, priests, or royal worshippers on either side, the whole usually enclosed in circles. In the Persian and in the later Mesopotamian Mōsilwork animals took the place of the human figures, and were often placed back to back, divided by a stem or piece of floriated ornament—a reminiscence of the sacred tree—and still enclosed in a circular band. The animals were generally lions, cheetahs, or were griffin forms, all treated as ornamental abstractions, and the intervening spaces between the circles were filled up with forms of parrots or other birds, conventionally treated. The early Saracenic designs were copies of these (Fig. 262). Later Saracenic designs had less of the bird and animal forms, and more of the purely Arabian ornament, with the addition of horizontal bands of Kufic inscriptions such as texts from the Koran, laudatory compliments to and names or titles of Sultans and Khalifs for whom the fabrics were made (Fig. 263).