As might be expected, the material used for most of the Babylonian as well as the later Assyrian bas-reliefs was a species of limestone and alabaster, as this kind of stone lends itself readily to the impress of the chisel, but the harder stones were also sometimes utilized for the purpose.[92] Thus in Fig. 28, F, we have a sketch of what remains of a black steatite relief belonging to this period. The fragmentary inscription gives us the name of the goddess Ningal, who is here portrayed in a singularly attractive manner, and with an extraordinary amount of detail. An elaborate robe covers the whole of her body, and a necklace adorns her throat; her hair hangs over her shoulders, while the crown of her head is encircled by a fillet. The general technique of this little sculpture is surprising in its fidelity to nature; the attitude of the goddess, her body half turned and her left arm resting negligently on the back of her chair is life-like, and the face itself is not without a beauty of its own. The difficulty involved in the portrayal of a human eye in profile, so painfully manifest on the Vulture Stele and other earlier Sumerian monuments, where the eye is portrayed full-face, the rest of the head being done in profile, has here been surmounted, and we have before us a perfectly naturally conceived and executed face and head. Some few centuries after the time of Gudea the city of Babylon became the centre of the chief power in Southern Mesopotamia. Unfortunately the excavations have not yielded us a rich harvest for the study of the artistic development of sculpture during this period, but the material at hand would tend to show that there was far less development in the interval between the later dynasty of Lagash, the age in which Gudea lived, and the establishment of the first Semitic dynasty of the city of Babylon, than there was in the period separating the first dynasty of Lagash from the epoch of Sargon and Narâm-Sin, the Semitic kings of Agade. _PLATE XIV_ [Illustration: _Photo. Mansell_ _Musée du Louvre_ STELE ENGRAVED WITH KHAMMURABI’S CODE OF LAWS] [Illustration: _Photo. Mansell_ _British Museum_ THE SUN-GOD TABLET]