distribution of a figure over the bricks by whose apposition it was to be
created. No retouches were possible, because the bricks were painted before
firing. The least negligence would be punished by the interruption of the
contours, or by their malformation through a failure of junction between a
line upon one brick and its continuation on the next. There was but one way
to prevent such mistakes, and that was by preparing in advance what we
should call a cartoon. On this the proposed design would be traced over a
network of squares representing the junctions of the bricks. The bricks
were then shaped, modelled, and numbered; each was painted according to the
cartoon with its due proportion of ground or figure as the case might be,
and marked with the same number as that on the corresponding square in the
drawing.[370] The colour was laid separately on each brick; this is proved
by the existence on their edges of pigment that has overflowed from the
face and been fired at the same time as the rest.

Thus were manufactured those enamelled bricks upon which the modern visitor
to the ruins of Babylon walks at every step. Broken, ground almost to
powder as they are, they suffice to show how far the art of enamelling was
pushed in those remote days, and how great an industry it must have been.
We can have no doubt that colours fixed in the fire must have formed the
chief element in the decoration of the buildings of Nebuchadnezzar, of that
Babylon whose insolent prosperity so impressed the imagination and provoked
the anger of the Jewish prophets. It was to paintings of this kind that
Ezekiel alluded when he reproved Jerusalem under the name of Aholiba for
its infidelity and its adoption of foreign superstitions: "For when she saw
men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldaeans 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 Chaldaea, the land of their nativity."[371]

The "paintings in the temple of Belos," described by Berosus, were in all
probability carried out in the same way. They decorated the walls of the
great temple of Bel Merodach at Babylon, where "all kinds of marvellous
monsters with the greatest variety in their forms" were to be seen.[372]

We see therefore, that both by sacred and profane writers is the important
part played by these paintings in the palaces and temples