The Babylonians made up for this national lack of monumental works of sculpture, due, as has been seen, to the difficulty of obtaining suitable material, by the development of another branch of decorative art. Favored by the clayey earth of the Chaldæan alluvion, they did not content themselves with the manufacture of admirable bricks, or with exact and durable masonry of this material, but developed a glazed decoration of their outer surfaces. The walls of chambers seem generally to have been prepared with a coating of plaster and then painted. Naturally, no traces of this process exist, but passages in the books of the Biblical prophets indicate it to have been customary. Exterior walls, which, on account of climatic influences, could not thus be treated, were ornamented with enamelled and variously colored tiles. Upon the steps of temple terraces this was effected by glazing the outer sides of all the bricks with a single color, but for palace walls entire compositions were so formed that each separate tile was drawn and colored in reference to the entire representation. (Fig. 64.) Remains show the glazing to have been quite thick; the colors, chiefly bright blue, red, dark yellow, white, and black, have been perfectly preserved. A French traveller of the last century relates that a chamber with walls of colored tiles, representing, among other objects, the sun, moon, and a cow, was unearthed from the hill of Mudjelibeh, one of the mounds of ruins formed by the overthrow of the Babylonian palaces. An account given by Diodoros, who describes a great hunting scene upon the innermost city wall, shows how extended this enamel painting must have been. Among many figures the queen, Semiramis, took a prominent part in the action, throwing a spear at a panther from her position on horseback, while the lance of the king transfixed a lion. The general character of the composition can be understood from the analogy of similar scenes represented upon reliefs from Nineveh.
The palace decorations naturally developed in an entirely different manner in Northern Mesopotamia—Assyria. The spurs of neighboring mountains advanced from all sides close upon Nineveh, and good building-stones, notably the most beautiful alabaster, are found in the plain, under the shallow strata of alluvial earth. The flat colored decoration of the walls with glazed bricks was superseded by a carved revetment of lavish richness, which so generally covered the lower half of larger palace chambers with reliefs that an almost inexhaustible material is presented for elucidation of the style by the fragments discovered during the short period of twenty years.
