MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
the New Stone Age man had learned to organize his labor 
and make the best possible use of the mechanical forces 
known to him. With endless patience and a large force of 
workers intelligently employed, he was capable of accom- 
plishing tasks that excite amazement even today. 
It seems to have been the development of brick construc- 
tion-work that led eventually, in certain regions, to the use 
of regularly squared stones for the erection of walls and 
buildings. Stone columns were developed from the inspi- 
ration of wooden supporting pillars; and sometimes rafters 
and other architectural features, originally of wood, were 
later imitated in stone. 
Wall decoration of various kinds began early, as far 
back, in all probability, as the New Stone Age, when men 
covered the “‘wattle-and-daub” walls of huts, plastered 
smooth, with designs of various sorts, mostly of a symbolic 
or magical nature, intended to bring good luck or to ward 
off evil. 
The Bronze Age carried this much further, developing 
wall painting into a regular art. When stone walls came 
into use, as in early Egypt, they were covered with carved 
designs, known as reliefs, which almost invariably had 
some connection with religion. Sometimes they repre- 
sented the triumphs of the kings, regarded as themselves 
actually gods, over their enemies. On the walls of the 
tombs of important people, they showed scenes of every- 
day life, intended through magical means to insure to the 
dead man the enjoyment in the next world of the same 
kind of existence he had known in this. Thus we find por- 
trayed on the walls of Egyptian tombs scenes of worship, 
of war, of labor, and of sport. The designers did not at 
all intend these for the eyes of the survivors or of poster- 
ity; unquestionably not, for they sealed them up in the 
darkness of the tomb, as they supposed, forever. 
The great number of new inventions which appeared in 
the Bronze Age found their application to war just as do 
ours today and with comparable results in the develop- 
[ 284 ] 
