with
geometrical figures, as circles, hexagons, octagons, and the like; and
sometimes with a sort of arcade-work, which is curious, if not very
beautiful. [PLATE LXXIX., Fig. 1.] The colors chiefly used in the
patterns are pale green, pale yellow, dark brown, and white. Now and
then an intense blue and a bright red occur, generally together; but
these positive hues are rare, and the taste of the Assyrians seems to
have led them to prefer, for their patterned walls, pale and dull hues.
The same preference appears, even more strikingly, in the bricks on
which designs are represented. There the tints almost exclusively used
are pale yellow, pale greenish blue, olive green, white, and a brownish
black. It is suggested that the colors have faded, but of this there is
no evidence. The Assyrians, when they used the primitive hues, seem,
except in the case of red, to have employed subdued tints of them, and
red they appear to have introduced very sparingly. Olive-green they
affected for grounds, and they occasionally used other half-tints. A
pale orange and a delicate lilac or pale purple were found at Khorsabad,
while brown (as already observed) is far more common on the bricks than
black. Thus the general tone of their coloring is quiet, not to say
sombre. There is no striving after brilliant effects. The Assyrian
artist seeks to please by the elegance of his forms and the harmony of
his hues, not to startle by a display of bright and strongly-contrasted
colors. The tints used in a single composition vary from three to five,
which latter number they seem never to exceed. The following are the
combinations of five hues which occur: brown, green, blue, dark yellow,
and pale yellow; orange, lilac, white, yellow, and olive-green.
Combinations of four hues are much more common: e.q., red, white,
yellow, and black; deep yellow, brown lilac, white, and pale yellow;
lilac, yellow, white, and green; yellow, blue, white, and brown, and
yellow, blue, white, and olive-green. Sometimes the tints are as few as
three, the ground in these cases being generally of a hue used also in
the figures. Thus we have yellow, blue, and white on a blue ground and
again the same colors on a yellow ground. We have also the simple
combinations of white and yellow on a blue ground, and of white and
yellow on an olive-green ground.

In every ease there is at harmony in the coloring. We find no harsh
contrasts. Either the tones are all subdued, or if any are