p. 118). The clay figures or statuettes of the earlier period were either fashioned by hand, or else stamped in a mould, but in either case they were solid, in contradistinction to the Babylonian terra-cottas of the later Greek and Roman times which were generally hollow in the interior, their outside being coated with a kind of paste by means of which the artist endeavoured to work out the details of hair, clothing, and other externalities, while they were not infrequently covered with a vitreous glaze, the colours used being blue and green. But a consideration of this later work lies beyond the scope of our volume, which is confined to a consideration of the Babylonian and Assyrian period. CHAPTER XII—STONEWARE AND POTTERY Stone and clay were the two materials from which the Babylonians and Assyrians as a rule manufactured their vases, pots and bowls, though, as we have seen (cf. Fig. 45), metal was occasionally used for the purpose. Unfortunately the study of Babylonian and Assyrian pottery has never received the attention which it deserves, while in the earlier excavations carried on in Mesopotamia the importance of these uninscribed relics of the past was not realized, and the omission to observe the particular strata of the mounds in which they were respectively discovered, as well as in some cases the failure to note even the sites where they were unearthed, has made anything like a systematic study of Babylonian and Assyrian pottery a virtual impossibility. Various kinds of stone were used as materials for making bowls and vases from the earliest periods of Mesopotamian civilization. Thus at Nippur the American excavators unearthed a vase made of sandstone, bearing an inscription of Utug, patesi or priest-king of Kish, the writing of which was even more archaic than that on the mace-head of Mesilim, king of Kish (cf. p. 185, Fig. 26) and, therefore, presumably of an earlier date; it seems to have been dedicated to En-lil as a thank-offering, an incidental testimony to the important place which the god of Nippur must have occupied even at this extremely remote period. So, too, a vase of white calcite stalagmite, bearing an inscription of Urzage, a king of Kish belonging to about the same period, was dedicated to En-lil and his spouse Nin-lil.