Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/402

64 A History of Art in Chald.i.a and Assyria. intersecting lines, the stars and garlands woven by the nimble shuttle in the soft substance of the carpets with which the floors of every divan were covered. The images on the royal robes must have been entirely embroidered (Figs. 253 and 254). They cannot have been metal cuirasses engraved with the point, as we might at the first glance be tempted to think. In the relief there is no salience suggesting the attachment of any foreign substance. Neither have we any reason to believe that work of such intricate delicacy could be carried out in metal. It was by the needle and on a woollen surface that these graceful images were built up. The skill of the Babylonian embroiderers was famous until the last days of antiquity. 1 During the Roman period their works were paid for by their weight in gold. 2 Even now the women of every eastern village cover materials often coarse enough in themselves with charming works of the same kind. They decorate thus their long hempen chemises, their aprons and jackets, their scarves, and the small napkins that are used sometimes as towels and sometimes to lay on the floor about the low tables on which their food is served. It is likely that the Assyrian process was embroidery in its strictest sense. In the modern bazaars of Turkey and Persia table-covers of applied work may be bought, in which hundreds of little pieces of cloth have been used to make up a pattern of many colours ; but in the sculptured embroideries the surfaces are cut up by numerous lines which could hardly have been produced, in the original, otherwise than by the needle. This, however, is a minor question. Our attention must be directed to the composition of the pictures and to the taste which inspired and regulated their arrangement. 1 " Pictas vestes apud Homerum fuisse (accipio), uncle triumphales naloe. Acu acere id Phryges invenerunt, ideoque Phrygionise appellate sunt. Aurum intexere in eadem Asia invenit Attalus rex : unde nomen Attalicis. Colores diversos pictural intexere Babylon maxime celebravit et nomen imposuit." Pliny, Nat. Hist.. § 74. Acu pingere, and for short, pingere, here meant to embroider. Picta or picturata vestis was a robe covered with embroideries. 2 See Pliny, 1. c. Lucretius, iv. 1026. Plautus, Stic/ius, Act ii, Scene ii, v. 54. Silius Italicus, xiv. 658. Martial, Epigr. xiv. 150. I borrow these citations from the first chapter of M. Eugène Mùntz's Histoire de la Tapisserie in the Bibliothèque de V Enseignement des Beaux-Aris.