tools upon the
one material that gives birth to great sculptors and great architects--a
stone soft enough to yield kindly to the chisel, but hard enough to
preserve to eternity the suggestive forms impressed upon it by the hand of
man.

Our knowledge, therefore, of Chaldaean art will bear no comparison with what
we have discovered as to the art of Egypt and Greece, of Etruria and Rome.
So far as we can form a judgment from the remains that have come down to
us, it was an art much less varied and comprehensive than that of Egypt.
The tombs of Memphis and Thebes, with their pictured walls, reflect, as in
a faithful mirror, the most interesting and most amusing of all spectacles,
the daily life of the oldest of all civilized societies. In Chaldaea there
is nothing of the kind. The Chaldaean tomb gives us, by its arrangement and
furnishing, glimpses of a faith similar at bottom to that of Egypt, but we
find nothing parallel to the representations of daily work and pleasure
which fill the mastabas and the Theban sepulchres; there is nothing that
can be compared to those animated forms and images that play over again on
the tomb walls the long drama of a hundred acts whose first performance
occupied so many centuries and filled a stage stretching from the swamps of
the Delta to the cataracts of Syene. We are more especially grateful to
these funerary scenes for handing down to us, in a safe niche in the temple
of the arts, those poor and humble folk who count for so little in this
world where they bear the heaviest burdens, who depend for remembrance
after death upon the services they render to the great. We shall search in
vain among the scanty remnants of Babylonian sculpture for the attitude,
gestures, and features of the laborious workmen upon whom the prosperity of
the country was built. We shall find neither the tradesmen and artisans of
the towns, nor the agriculturists who cultivated the fields and gave them
the water for which they never ceased to thirst. No hint is given of those
fishermen of the Persian Gulf who lived entirely, according to Herodotus,
upon dried fish ground to powder and made into a kind of cake.[120] The
naive, picturesque, and anecdotic illustrations of common life, which are
so plentiful in Egypt, are almost completely wanting to the art of Chaldaea.

On the other hand, we find, as we might have expected from what we know of
Chaldaean society, continual traces of the sacerdotal spirit, and of th