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A NINCH away from Egypt on my map, but a thousand miles away on the ground, was another old country called — well, there were several countries there with hard names. Egypt was a One River Country. These other countries, a thousand miles off to the east, had Two Rivers,so let’s bunch them together and call them, for short, the Two River Country. If you want to know the real names of these countries, they were Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria.
This part of the world is where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be. The One River Country and the Two River Country are the two oldest countries in the world. We don’t know which is older.
Here in this Two River Country, once, were the largest and most important cities of the ancient world — cities bigger,perhaps, than New York or London — and here ruled mighty but cruel kings. Yet there isn’t a building of these old cities left. The reason for this is that the buildings weren’t built of stone as the buildings of Egypt were, for there was very little stone in the Two River Country. They were built of bricks made of mud, of which there was plenty, but the bricks were only dried in the sun, not baked by fire as the Egyptian bricks were. You know how mud pies dried in the sun soon crumble to pieces. Well, these buildings made of sun-dried bricks have all crumbled away and where once were magnificent cities,there are now only mounds of brick dust which look like natural hills.
You may wonder why the people of these countries didn’t bake their bricks in fire, for fire-baked bricks last longer than almost anything else. The reason is that they didn’t have much wood or much other fuel to make fire with. On some bricks, however, they painted pictures and decorations and these they covered with a glass-like substance (glaze, we call it), then baked them in the fire so that they became colored tiles. These tiles have lasted and have been found by men digging down in the mounds which once were cities of brick buildings.
In Egypt, as I told you, the artists painted pictures chiefly for the dead to see. In the Two River Country artists didn’t care about the dead people. They painted pictures for live people to see.
The kings didn’t build tombs. They weren’t interested in what was to become of them after they were dead. Instead,they built great palaces for themselves and great temples for their gods. These palaces and temples were built of brick, but a mud palace or temple was not very beautiful, so the artists covered the walls with pictures made on slabs of alabaster and with tiles.
Alabaster is a stone, usually white, so soft that it can be cut easily. So the artists cut pictures on slabs of alabaster and painted them in much the same way as the Egyptians painted their pictures.
Each tile had on it a different part of a picture, and then a great many tiles were put together to form a large picture, as picture puzzles are put together from separate pieces. There is a kind of picture, which you may not have seen, that is made of many tiny pieces of different colored stones. A picture made of colored stones is called a mosaic, and these people who lived in the Two River Country were the first to use a kind of mosaic work.
The Egyptian pictures on the inside walls of the tombs or temples are still there, but those on the mummy cases have been put in museums. The alabaster and tile pictures of the Two River people were dug up from under the mounds that once were buildings and they too have been put in museums.
These alabaster and tile pictures made in the Two River Country told stories about the king and his courtiers doing something. The two chief things the king and his courtiers liked to do, and did, was to hunt wild animals and to fight battles, so there were many pictures of battles and hunting parties.
The pictures found in the Two River Country are like the Egyptian pictures in some ways. As in Egypt, the eye is a front eye in a side face, but the shoulders are drawn side view. When an artist wished to show men back of those in front, he drew the figures above those in front as the Egyptian artists did. But in some of their pictures the Two River artists did try to show the men behind by raising them only a little in the picture and making them smaller, and by partly covering those behind with those in front. This effect,showing distance in a picture, is called perspective.
But the kind of men the Two River artists drew were different from those the Egyptians drew. The Two River artists admired strength and strong men, and they thought all strong men had long hair and beards. So they made the pictures of kings very muscular, with bulging muscles in their arms and legs, and with long hair and long beards every lock of which was carefully curled. The curls were regular corkscrew curls, as if freshly done with a curling iron!
The pictures of animals these people made are much more natural than those the Egyptians drew. The ones they liked best to paint were the lion and the bull, because these animals are so strong.
The Two River people were especially good at making designs and decorations for borders. One was called the rosette. It is a dot with a little wheel-like arrangement around it and we are still using it. Another design they made was called the guilloche — which we pronounce gee-lōsh. We use some of the same designs to-day in tiles for bathroom floors and for the halls of public buildings.
NO.3 THE TREE OF LIFE
One picture the Two River people made has been copied by the artists of many other countries. This was the picture of a peculiar tree called the Tree of Life. It is a tree like no tree that grows. It has many different kinds of leaves and flowers and fruits all on the same tree at the same time. It is often used in designs on rugs and in embroidery. We don’t know what it meant or why it was called the Tree of Life, so you’ll just have to guess why.