vres are remarkable for the skill and prodigality with
which human strength was employed; of all the scientific tools invented to
economise effort and to shorten the duration of a task, the only one they
seem ever to have used was the most simple of all, the lever, an instrument
that must have been invented over and over again wherever men tried to lift
masses of stone or wood from the ground. Its discovery must, in fact, have
taken place long before the commencement of what we call civilization,
although its theory was first expounded by the Greek mathematicians.

[Illustration: FIG. 152.--Putting a bull in place; from Layard.]

In a relief in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, there is a pulley
exactly similar to those often seen over a modern well.[414] A cord runs
over it and supports a bucket. There is no evidence that the Assyrians
employed such a contrivance for any purpose but the raising of water. We
cannot say that they used it to lift heavy weights, but the fact that they
understood its principle puts them slightly above the Egyptians as
engineers.

NOTES:

[411] As to the simplicity of Egyptian engineering, see the _History of Art
in Ancient Egypt_, vol. ii. p. 72, and fig. 43.

[412] See LAYARD, _Monuments_, 2nd series, plate ii. The same author gives
a detailed description of this picture in his _Discoveries_, pp. 104-106.

[413] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 112.

[414] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. ii. p. 32.

Sec. 10.--_On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations of
Buildings._

The Chaldaeans and Assyrians knew as little of perspective as they did of
mechanics. When they had to figure a building and its contents, or a
landscape background, they could not resist the temptation of combining
many things which could not be seen from a single standpoint. Like the
painters and sculptors of Thebes they mixed up in the most naive fashion
those graphic processes that we keep carefully apart. All that they cared
about was to be understood. We need not here reproduce the observations we
made on this subject in the corresponding chapter of Egyptian Art;[415] it
will suffice to give a few examples of the simultaneous employment by
Ninevite sculptors of contradictory systems.

[Illustration: FIG. 153.--Chaldaean plan. Louvre.]

It is not difficult to cite examples of things that may, with some little
ingenuity, be brought within the definition of a plan. The most curious and
strongly marked o