652 SUMERIAN TECHNOLOGY—BOBULA 
supported by that of James Henry Breasted (1916), late director of 
the Oriental Institute of the Univer- 
sity of Chicago, who wrote, “The early 
Sumerian lapidaries soon became the 
finest craftsmen of the kind in the 
ancient Oriental world and their influ- 
ence has not yet disappeared from our 
own decorative art.” Seton Lloyd, a 
contemporary authority on art and 
archeology writes also (1955) that the 
Sumerian statues are masterpieces 
which rival the work of almost any 
period in the history of art. : : 
The engravers and stone cutters also Figure 23.—Engraved shell plaque 
used shell. <A steatite bowl, artfully fom Ae gaming board. Animals 
: 5 : : : ocked in combat. 
inlaid with shell flowers, is one illus- 
tration of this graceful art, and a gaming board of engraved shell 
squares encased in silver also was found at Ur. Shell was often used 
as inlay in the statues; the eyeballs were carved of shell, which turned 
gold-brown with age. The irises were sometimes made of lapis lazuli 
disks, and the lifelike colors give a powerful charm to these old 
portraits. 
METALLURGY 
Plinius the younger, the Roman scholar, tells us that according to 
Aristoteles, the art of smelting and working copper was invented by 
a Lydian called Scythes. A blurred 
tradition seems to point here in the 
direction of western Asia. Far more 
tenuous speculations have been printed 
in our time about some unknown people 
having developed metallurgy at an un- 
certain date in Asia Minor. Two ex- 
perts of the Metropolitan Museum, 
Bowlin and Farwell, write (1950) that 
“The great discovery [of bronze cast- 
ing] probably came first in southwest 
Asia around 3000 or 2800 B.C. Egypt 
reached a bronze age by 2500 and the 
Greek world by 1500 B.C.” Parts of 
northern Europe did not achieve this 
stage of evolution until many centuries 
later. P. Rousseau (1956) in his “His- 
toire des Techniques” states unequivo-  Ficure 24—Fragment of stone 
cally that bronze was a Sumerian inven- teary Lagash: Divinity with 
tion. It seems probable that the place 
where the firing of clay objects originated and the technique of the 
