urishing in Mesopotamia whose creations were admired
and copied by all the peoples of Western Asia, the more or less complex
groups and arrangements of the cuneiform writing, to whatever language
applied, had no aim but to represent sometimes whole words, sometimes the
syllables of which those words were composed. Under such conditions it
seems unlikely that the forms of the written characters can have
contributed much to form the style of artists who dealt with the figures of
men and animals. We may say that the sculptors and painters of Chaldaea were
not, like those of Egypt, the scholars of the scribes.

And yet there is a certain analogy between the handling of the inscriptions
and that of the bas-reliefs. It is doubtless in the nature of the materials
employed that we must look for the final explanation of this similarity,
but it is none the less true that writing was a much earlier and a much
more general art than sculpture. The Chaldaean artist must have carried out
his modelling with a play of hand and tool learnt in cutting texts upon
clay, and still more, upon stone. The same chisel-stroke is found in both;
very sure, very deep, and a little harsh.

However this may be, we cannot embark upon the history of Art in Chaldaea
without saying a word upon her graphic system. If there be one proof more
important than another of the great part played by the Chaldaeans in the
ancient world, it is the success of their writing, and its diffusion as far
as the shores of the Euxine and the eastern islands of the Mediterranean.
Some cuneiform texts have lately been discovered in Cappadocia, the
language of which is that of the country,[55] and the most recent
discoveries point to the conclusion that the Cypriots borrowed from
Babylonia the symbols by which the words of the Greek dialect spoken in
their island were noted.[56]

We have yet to visit more than one famous country. In our voyage across
the plains where antique civilization was sketched out and started on its
long journey to maturity, we shall, whenever we cross the frontiers of a
new people, begin by turning our attention for a space to their
inscriptions; and wherever we are met by those characters which are found
in their oldest shapes in the texts from Lower Chaldaea, there we shall
surely find plastic forms and motives whose primitive types are to be
traced in the remains of Chaldaean art. A man's writing will often tell us
where his early days were passed an