Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/137

 MATERIALS. 117 their sides showed a plain and uniform surface ; not the slightest sign of joints was to be found. Some might think that the bricks, instead of being actually soft, were first dried in the sun and then, when they carne to be used, that each was dipped in water so as to give it a momentary wetness before being laid in its place. M. Place repels any such hypothesis. He points out that, had the Assyrian bricklayers proceeded in that fashion, each joint would be distinguishable by a rather darker tint than the rest of the wall. There is nothing of the kind in fact. The only things that prove his excavations to have been made through brick and not through a mass of earth beaten solid with the rammer are, in the first place, that the substance cut is very homogeneous and much more dense than it would have been had it not been kneaded and pressed in the moulds ; and, secondly, that the horizontal courses are here and there to be distinguished from each other by their differences of tint. 1 The art of burning brick dates, in the case of Chaldaea, from a very remote epoch. No tradition subsisted of a period when it was not practised. After the deluge, when men wished to build a city and a tower which should reach to heaven, " they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly ; and they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." The Babylonian bricks were, as a rule, one Chaldaean foot (rather more than an English foot) square. Their colour varies in different buildings from a dark red to a light yellow, 3 but they are always well burnt and of excellent quality. Nearly all of them bear an inscription to the following effect : " Nebuchad- nezzar, King of Babylon, restorer of the pyramid and the tower, eldest son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, I." In laying the brick the face bearing this inscription was turned downwards. The characters were impressed on the soft clay with a stamp. More than forty varieties have already been discovered, implying the existence of as many stamps (see Fig. 32). In Assyria these inscriptions were sometimes stamped, sometimes engraved with the hand (Fig. 33). Most of the bricks are regular in shape, with parallel and rectangular faces, but a few wedge-shaped ones have been found, both in Chaldsea and Assyria. These must have been 1 PLACE, Ninive et V Assyrie, vol. i. pp. 211-224. 2 Genesis xi. 3. 3 LAYARD, Discoveries, pp. 506 and 531.