s upon the upper parts of walls where they were beyond the reach of
accidental injury that these painted decorations were placed. M. Place had
reason to think that they were also used on the under-sides of vaults. In
rooms in which a richer and more permanent kind of ornament was
unnecessary, paint alone was used for decoration. In several chambers
cleared by George Smith at Nimroud, that explorer found horizontal bands of
colour, alternately red, green, and yellow, and where the stone casing of
the lower walls was not sculptured, these stripes were continued over its
surface.[347]

The artist to whom the execution of this work was intrusted must have
arranged so that his tints were in harmony with those placed by another
brush on many details of the sculptured slabs. We shall discuss the
question of polychromy in Assyrian sculpture at a future opportunity; at
present we are content with observing that the effect of the reliefs was
strengthened here and there by the use of colour.

The beard, the hair, and the eyebrows were tinted black; such things as the
fringes of robes, baldricks, flowers held in the hand, were coloured blue
and red. The gaiety thus given brought a room into harmony, and prevented
the cool grey of the alabaster slabs from presenting a disagreeable
contrast with the brilliant tones spread over the roofs and upper walls.

We might thus restore the interior of an Assyrian apartment and arrive at a
whole, some elements of which would be certainly authentic and others at
least very probable. The efforts hitherto made in this direction leave much
to be desired, and give many an opportunity to the fault-finding critic;
and that because their makers have failed to completely master the spirit
of Mesopotamian architecture as shown in its remaining fragments.[348]

It would be much less easy, it would in fact be foolhardy, to attempt the
restoration of a hall from a Babylonian palace. Our information is quite
insufficient for such a task. We may affirm, however, that where the
architect had no stone to speak of, the decorations must have had a
somewhat different character from those in which that invaluable material
was freely used. The general tendencies of both countries must have been
the same, but between Nineveh and Babylon, still more between the capital
of Assyria and the towns of Lower Chaldaea, there were differences of which
now and then we may succeed in catching a glance. Compelled to trust almos