as horses, sheep, doves, ducks, &c.; bronze pins, often with birds on
the heads; baked clay tablets of the fine Kuyunjik type (see XV, Fig.
12; script, Fig. 17); pottery lamps with long protruding curved
nozzles; pottery vases simple and undecorated save by incised lines,
as for many centuries past (for types see XIV, Figs. 9 a b c d);
light-blue glazed ware introduced from Egypt towards end of period;
polychrome glazed ware with designs of rosettes, chevrons) &c.,
somewhat earlier; large pots without feet common for storage of grain
and oil, sometimes for tablets: mouth often closed with a brick.
Stone pithoi are also found. Vertical drains or sinks, made of a
number of pottery cylindrical drums, fitting on top of or into one
another, are found everywhere on town-mounds of this period; visitors
should avoid tumbling into them, as they are often open or only
covered by a very thin crust of earth. Usually they are perforated to
allow of soaking into the surrounding earth, and are, when excavated
whole, generally found capped by, a beehive-shaped perforated cover.
Sometimes these drains were made of old pots with their lower parts
broken off, and fitted into one another. Secular buildings were of
burnt brick; sacred buildings usually of crude brick, from religious
conservatism. Crude bricks nearly always oblong; burnt bricks square
(14 ins.) or oblong (9x6x3 ins.). The burnt brick of Nebuchadnezzar's
time is extraordinarily fine and hard, and the bitumen-mortar so
finely spread as to be almost invisible (Babylon). Walls of this
reign have a rock-like solidity and tenacity that should make them
easily recognizable. Those of immediately preceding reigns show the
bitumen far more clearly, and the bricks are usually not as finely
made as Nebuchadnezzar's; at Babylon the latter's work is thus at
once distinguishable from that of Nabopolassar. A typical brick-
inscription of Nebuchadnezzar is illustrated above, XV, Fig. 11. It
is in the revived archaic script, always used for this purpose by the