No doubt the luxury of the Assyrian women in these and other respects was great and excessive. They are not likely to have fallen short of their Jewish sisters either in the refinements or in the corruptions of civilization. When then we hear of the “tinkling ornaments” of the Jewish women in Isaiah’s time, “their combs, and round tires like the moon,” their “chains and bracelets and mufflers,” their “bonnets, and ornaments of the legs, and head-bands, and tablets and ear-rings,” their “rings and nose-jewels,” their “changeable suits of apparel, and mantles, and wimples, and crisping-pins,” their “glasses, and fine linen, and hoods, and veils,” their “sweet smells, and girdles, and well-set hair, and stomachers,” we may be sure that in Assyria too these various refinements, or others similar to them, were in use, and consequently that the art of the toilet was tolerably well advanced under the second great Asiatic Empire. That the monuments contain little evidence on the point need not cause any surprise; since it is the natural consequence of the spirit of jealous reserve common to the Oriental nations, which makes them rarely either represent women in their mimetic art or speak of them in their public documents. If various kinds of grain were cultivated in Assyria, such as wheat, barley, sesame, and millet, we may assume that the food of the inhabitants, like that of other agricultural nations, consisted in part of bread. Sesame was no doubt used, as it is at the present day, principally for making oil; while wheat, barley, and millet were employed for food, and were made into cakes or loaves. The grain used, whatever it was, would be ground between two stones, according to the universal Oriental practice even at the present day. It would then he moistened with water, kneaded in a dish or bowl, and either rolled into thin cakes, or pressed by the hand into smalls balls or loaves. Bread and cakes made in this way still form the chief food of the Arabs of these parts, who retain the habits of antiquity. Wheaten bread is generally eaten by preference; but the poorer sort are compelled to be content with the coarse millet or _durra_ flour, which is made into cakes, and then eaten with milk, butter, oil, or the fat of animals. Dates, the principal support of the inhabitants of Chaldaea, or Babylonia, both in ancient and in modern times, were no doubt also an article of food in Assyria, though scarcely to any great extent. The date-palm does not bear well above the alluvium, and such fruit as it produces in the upper country is very little esteemed. Olives were certainly cultivated under the Empire, and the oil extracted from them was in great request. Honey was abundant, and wine plentiful. Sennacherib called his land “a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of oil olive and of honey;” and the products here enumerated were probably those which formed the chief sustenance of the bulk of the people.