ef and effect by the screens, the curtains, and the veils which
classical perfect taste would plan so as to carry out the decorator's
intention. Babylonians, Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and
Jews, each adorned their sacred places in similar fashions.[438]
Clemens Alexandrinus says that behind the hangings of the Egyptian
temples were hidden their "foolish images."[439]

The word "hangings" was applied to all large curtains and tapestries,
tent coverings, screens dividing empty spaces, or pendant between
pillars; also sails,[440] banners, and decorations for processional
purposes covering walls or hanging from windows; all these have been
embroidered or woven with pictures and patterns. Carpets, from having
originally the same name, "tapete," are to be added to this list, and,
in fact, their uses are often interchanged. Kosroes' famous hangings
were used as a carpet, and Persian and Babylonian carpets have been
hung on the walls. A Babylonian hanging must have resembled, in its
style (of which we have descriptions), the Persian carpet of to-day.

Semper gives excellent reasons for his theory that, next to dress,
hangings (the clothing of architecture) were the earliest phase of
art.[441] He looks upon the most ancient paintings on architecture as
absolutely representing textile coverings. Some of the earliest
Babylonian decorations show men supporting draperies, which he
believes to be the tradition of the time when the tallest slaves held
up the hangings to their own height; and above them, in tiers, were
men, dwarfs, and even children fastened on brackets, carrying the
hangings up to the roofs. This was an Assyrian custom, and was adopted
by the Romans as a mode of disposing of their prisoners of war.
Woltmann and Woermann appear to lean to the suggestion that permanent
imitations of hangings were carried out in painted or encaustic tiles
covering the masonry of Chaldean buildings at Nimroud and Khorsabad.
The pale ones associated with low reliefs, and really resembling them,
as they were partly raised, and the reliefs in alabaster and stone,
which were partly coloured, were in harmony, and yet in contrast, with
the brilliant tiles of Babylon.[442]

We know exactly what were the purple, scarlet, and white hangings of
the Sanctuary in the wilderness, designed by Bezaleel, and that the
veil of the Temple was blue, purple, crimson or scarlet, and white,
i.e. worked on white linen; and we know from Josephus, t