Speaking of the Persians, Professor Rawlinson says that the richer classes seem to have followed the court in their practices. In their costume they wore long purple or flowered robes, with loose-hanging sleeves, flowered tunics reaching to the knee, also sleeved, embroidered trowsers, tiaras, and shoes of a more elegant shape than the ordinary Persian. Under their trowsers they wore drawers, and under their tunics shirts, and under their shoes stockings or socks. In their houses their couches were spread with gorgeous coverlets, and their floors with rich carpets--habits that must have necessitated an immense labor and skill, and indicate great knowledge in the manufacture of textile fabrics. Among the great historic nations of antiquity, the chief consumption of copper and tin was in the manufacture of bronze; and the quantities of these metals necessary for the purpose must have been very great, for bronze seems to have been the principal metallic substance of which articles both of utility and art were formed. Wilkinson, Layard, and others, found bronze articles in abundance amongst the _debris_ of all the ancient civilizations to which their researches extend, proving that the manufacture of this alloy was widely known at a very early period; and strange to say, when we consider the applications of some of the tools found, we are forced to the conclusion that the bronze of which they were made must originally have been in certain important particulars superior to any which we can produce at the present day. In these researches were found carpenters' and masons' tools, such as saws, chisels, hammers, etc., and also knives, daggers, swords, and other instruments which require both a fine hard edge and elasticity. Were we to make such tools now, they would be useless for the purpose to which the ancients applied them. Wilkinson says: "No one who has tried to perforate or cut a block of Egyptian granite will scruple to acknowledge that our best steel tools are turned in a very short time, and require to be re-tempered; and the labor experienced by the French engineers who removed the obelisk of Luxor from Thebes, in cutting a space less than two feet deep along the face of its partially decomposed pedestal, suffices to show that, even with our excellent modern implements, we find considerable difficulty in doing what to the Egyptians would have been one of the least arduous tasks." But Wilkinson believes that bronze chisels were used for cutting granite, as he found one at Thebes, of which he says, "Its point is instantly turned by striking it against the very stone it was used to cut; and yet, when found, the summit was turned over by blows it had received from the mallet, while the point was intact, as if it had recently left the hands of the smith who made it."