Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/315

 DECORATION. 293 by the wheel of a chariot. Above his head are the remains of an inscription which must have been continued on the next brick. The word warriors may still be deciphered. 1 This figure may have formed part of some attempt on the part of the decorator to narrate in colour some of the exploits of the king for whom the palace was built. There is a difference between such fragments as this and the glazed tiles of the Khorsabad gates. In the latter the enamelled edges of several bricks were required to make a single figure. In the bricks from Nimroud on the other hand, whole figures are FIG. 125. Enamelled brick in the British Museum. painted on their surface, and in fact a single brick had several figures upon it which were, therefore, on a much smaller scale. A decoration in which figures were some two and three feet high, was well suited for use in lofty situations where those restricted to the surface of a single brick would have been hardly visible. The latter must, then, have been fixed on the lower parts of the wall, but as none of them have yet been found in place we cannot say positively that it was so. Such representations were, moreover, quite exceptional. Most 1 GEO. SMITH, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 79.