Figs. 248, 249.—Gold buttons. British Museum.
Fig. 250.—Part of the harness of a chariot-horse.
Personal jewelry and the apparatus of the toilet seem to have been no less elaborate in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar than in the Nineveh of Sennacherib, but we possess very few objects that can be surely referred to that period. To the very last years of the Chaldæan empire, if not to a still later date, must be ascribed two golden earrings now in the British Museum (Figs. 251 and 252). They represent a naked child, with long hair and a head much too large for its body. We are told that they were found in a tomb at Niffer, with other objects whose Chaldæan character was very strongly marked. Without this assurance we should be tempted to think their date no more remote than that of the Seleucidæ.
Among the knobs, or buttons, used so largely by joiners, tailors, and saddlers, some have been found of ivory and of mother-of-pearl. The jewellers, too, must have used these substances, which would give them an opportunity for effective colour harmonies. Thus Layard mentions an ear-pendent that he found at Kouyundjik, which had two pearls let into a roll of gold.[445]
Figs. 251, 252.—Ear-pendents. British Museum.
On the other hand no amber has been found in Mesopotamia. That substance was widely used by the Mediterranean nations as early as the tenth century before our era, but it does not seem to have been carried into the interior of Asia. It has been asserted that one of the cuneiform texts mentions it;[446] that assertion we cannot dispute, but it is certain that neither in the British Museum nor in the Louvre, among the countless objects that have been brought from the Chaldæan and Assyrian ruins to those great store-houses of ancient art, has the smallest fragment of amber been discovered. If it ever entered Mesopotamia, how could it have been more fitly used than in necklaces, to the making of which glass, enamelled earthenware, and every attractive stone within reach, contributed?[447]