Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/400

362 A History of Art in Ciialrka and Assyria. very last years of the Chaldaean 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 Chaldaean character was very strongly marked. Without this assurance we should be tempted to think their date no more remote than that of the Seleucidae. 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 eold. 1 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 ; 2 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 Chaldaean and Assyrian ruins to those great store- houses of ancient art, has 1 Layard, Discoveries, p. 597. The oldest mention of the pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf is to be found in those fragments of Nearchus that have been preserved in the pages of Arrian (Jndica, xxxviii. 7) ; but it is probable that the search for pearl oysters began in those waters many centuries before. The Assyrians, as we have seen, made use both of pearl and mother-of-pearl. 2 J. Oppert, J A mbre jaune chez les Assyriens (in the~J?ecueil des Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l' Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes, vol. ii, pp. 34 et seq. M. Oppert's rendering of the paraphrase which he believes to specify amber is not accepted by all Assyriologists.