ents and figures could be
distinguished on some of them. The colours most often found were a very
brilliant blue, red, dark yellow, white, and black.[352]

We have again to look to the Assyrian ruins for information as to the way
in which these enamelled bricks were composed into pictures. No explorer
has found anything in the remains of a Chaldaean city that can be compared
to the archivolt of enamelled bricks discovered by M. Place over one of the
gateways of the city founded by Sargon.[353]

We can hardly doubt however that the art of the enameller was discovered in
Chaldaea and thence transported into Assyria. Everything combines to give us
that assurance, an examination of the ruins in Mesopotamia and of the
objects brought from them as well as the explicit statements of the
ancients.

Every traveller tells that there is not a ruin at Babylon in which hundreds
of these enamelled bricks may not be picked up, and they are to be found
elsewhere in Chaldaea.[354] A certain number of fragments are now in the
British Museum and the Louvre with indications upon them leaving no doubt
as to whence they came.[355] As for the blocks of the same kind coming from
Nineveh and its neighbourhood they are very numerous in our collections. It
is easy therefore to compare the products of Chaldaean workshops with those
of Assyrian origin. The comparison is not to the advantage of the latter.
The enamel on the Babylonian bricks is very thick and solid; it adheres
strongly to the clay, and even when brought to our comparatively humid
climates it preserves its brilliancy. It is not so with bricks from
Khorsabad and Nimroud, which rapidly tarnish and become dull when withdrawn
from the earth that protected them for so many centuries. Their firing does
not seem to have been sufficiently prolonged.[356]

Necessity is the mother of invention, the proverb says. If there be any
country in which clay has been compelled to do all that lay in its power it
must surely be that in which there was no other material for the
construction and decoration of buildings. The results obtained by the
enameller were pretty much the same in Assyria and Chaldaea, and we are
inclined to look upon the older of the two nations as the inventor of the
process, especially as it could hardly have done without it so well as its
younger rival, and in this opinion we are confirmed by the superior quality
of the Babylonian enamel. It is possible that there may be some tr