make fine sculptured slabs, such as
are found at Nineveh and in other Assyrian ruins. But the Babylonians had
a fine clay, and they learned how to use it to the best advantage. The
city of Babylon shone with richly colored tiles, and one traveller writes:
"By the side of Assyria, her colder and severer sister of the North,
Babylon showed herself a true child of the South,--rich, glowing, careless
of the rules of taste, only desiring to awaken admiration by the dazzling
brilliance of her appearance."

Many of the Babylonish tiles are in regular, set patterns in rich tints;
some are simply in solid colors. These last are found in the famous
terrace-temple of Borsippe, near Babylon. We know from ancient writings
that there were decorative paintings in Babylon which represented hunting
scenes and like subjects, and, according to the prophet Ezekiel, chap.
xxiii., verse 14, there were "men portrayed upon the wall, the images of
the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion, girded with girdles upon their
loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to
look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their
nativity." Some writers assume that this must have been a description of
tapestries; but most authorities believe them to have been glazed
tile-paintings.

A whole cargo of fragments of Babylonish tile-paintings was once collected
for the gallery of the Louvre at Paris, and, when on board a ship and
ready to be sent away, by some accident the whole was sunk. From the
descriptions of them which were written, we find that there were portions
of pictures of human faces and other parts of the body, of animals,
mountains, and forests, of water, walls, and trees.

Judging from what still remains, the art of painting was far less
important and much less advanced among the Eastern or Oriental nations
than were those of architecture and sculpture. It is very strange that
these peoples, who seem to have observed nature closely, and to have
mastered the mathematical sciences, made no steps toward the discovery of
the laws of perspective; neither did they know how to give any expression
of thought or feeling to the human face. In truth, their pictures were
a mere repetition of set figures, and were only valuable as pieces of
colored decorations for walls, adding a pleasing richness and variety by
their different tints, but almost worthless as works of art.

ANCIENT GREECE AND ITALY.

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