“Painting” in the ordinary sense of the word to-day, was an art never practised by the dwellers in Mesopotamia: like all Orientals both the Babylonians and Assyrians were fond of gay colours, and they gratified their taste for such in various ways, but as a rule no attempt was made to faithfully represent the objects of nature through the medium of the brush and the employment of colours alone, and the colours which they used on their sculptured reliefs, their stuccoed walls, or their enamelled bricks, were very frequently entirely impossible from the naturalistic standpoint. Thus the lion of brilliant yellow hue (cf. frontispiece), the commonest of all pictorial representations in Babylonia, has no counterpart whatever in real life; the effect is pleasing, it catches the eye, it awakens a sense of appreciation in the spectator, but this is due to the general cheerfulness of the colours themselves, certainly not to their fidelity to nature. The lion itself bears no comparison with the Babylonian lion represented in Fig. 46. The action is the same in either case—both lions are proceeding with sure and deliberate step, roaring as they go, but there is a vast difference between the artistic merits of each. The Assyrian lion is not indeed entirely lifeless, but it lacks the freedom and spontaneity which characterize the highest forms of art; the body is also somewhat heavy and clumsy compared with the lion of Ishtar’s Gate. The colours chiefly employed in Babylonian and Assyrian paintings are blue, yellow and white, while green, red and black are of comparatively rare occurrence. The background of the picture is generally a shade of royal blue, the figures, usually animals, being of a brilliant yellow. In Babylonia, the demand for colours in architectural decoration was naturally more pressing than in Assyria, for in the latter country, where alabaster and limestone were easily procurable, the adornment of the interiors of buildings fell to the sculptor, but in the southern country the dearth of stone at once precluded the possibility of covering the walls even of the palaces with the sculptured bas-reliefs so dear to the heart of apparently all Assyrian monarchs. Thus it was that colour was largely made to take the place of sculpture in Babylonian decoration, the sculptor’s chisel being exchanged for the painter’s brush, though in Assyria sometimes the art of the sculptor and painter were both invoked to beautify the walls of the king’s palace, for in some of the halls in the royal residence of Sargon at Khorsabad the sculptured reliefs on the lower part of the walls were painted;[121] while Layard, after describing some of the wall-reliefs found in the north-west palace at Nimrûd, says:[122] “On all these figures paint could be faintly distinguished, particularly on the hair, beard, eyes and sandals,” which rather suggests that the earlier Assyrian sculptures were only partially coloured. Some of the sculptured bas-reliefs from