For it is remarkable that this first school of art of the Old Empire is thoroughly naturalistic, and knows very little of the ideal or supernatural. And the tombs tell the same story. The statues and paintings represent natural objects and not theological conventions; the tombs are fac-simile representations of the house in which the deceased lived, with his mummy and those of his family, and pictures of his oxen, geese, and other belongings, but no gods, and few of those quotations from the Todtenbuch which are so universal in later ages. It would seem that at this early period of Egyptian history life was simple and cheerful, and both art and religion less fettered by superstitions and conventions than they were when despotism and priestcraft had been for centuries stereotyped institutions, and originality of any sort was little better than heresy. War also and warlike arms hardly appear on these earliest representations of Egyptian life, and wars were probably confined to frontier skirmishes with Bedouins and Libyans, such as we see commemorated on the tablet of Snefura at Wady Magerah. In Chaldæa the evidence for great antiquity is derived less from architectural monuments and arts, and more from books, than in Egypt, for the obvious reason that stone was wanting and clay abundant in Mesopotamia. Where temples and palaces were built of sun-dried bricks, they rapidly crumbled into mounds of rubbish, and nothing was preserved but the baked clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. In like manner sculpture and wall-painting never flourished in a country devoid of stone, and the religious ideas of Chaldæa never took the Egyptian form of the continuance of ordinary life after death by the Ka or ghost requiring a house, a mummy, and representations of belongings. The bas-relief and fringes sculptured on slabs of alabaster brought home by Layard and others, belong mostly to the later period of the Assyrian Empire.