The stones shaped, bored, and engraved by Babylonian artisans were not merely the softer and more easily worked kinds, as alabaster, serpentine, and lapis-lazuli, but also the harder sorts-cornelian, agate, quartz, jasper, sienite, loadstone, and green felspar or amazon-stone.  These can certainly not have been cut without emery, and scarcely without such devices as rapidly revolving points, or discs, of the kind used by modern lapidaries.  Though the devices are in general rude, the work is sometimes exceedingly delicate, and implies a complete mastery over tools and materials, as well as a good deal of artistic power.  As far as the mechanical part of the art goes, the Babylonians may challenge comparison with the most advanced of the nations of antiquity; they decidedly excel the Egyptians, and fall little, if at all, short of the Greeks and Romans.

The extreme minuteness of the work in some of the Babylonian seals and gems raises a suspicion that they must have been engraved by the help of a powerful magnifying-glass.  A lens has been found in Assyria; and there is much reason to believe that the convenience was at least as well known in the lower country.  Glass was certainly in use, and was cut into such shapes as were required.  It is at any rate exceedingly likely that magnifying-glasses, which were undoubtedly known to the Greeks in the time of Aristophanes, were employed by the artisans of Babylon during the most flourishing period of the Empire.

Of Babylonian metal-work we have scarcely any direct means of judging.  The accounts of ancient authors imply that the Babylonians dealt freely with the material, using gold and silver for statues, furniture, and utensils, bronze for gates and images, and iron sometimes for the latter.  We may assume that they likewise employed bronze and iron for tools and weapons, since those metals were certainly so used by the Assyrians.  Lead was made of service in building; where iron was also employed, if great strength was needed.  The golden images are said to have been sometimes solid, in which case we must suppose them to have been cast in a mold; but undoubtedly in most cases the gold was a mere external covering, and was applied in plates, which were hammered into shape upon some cheaper substance below.  Silver was no doubt used also in plates, more especially when applied externally to walls, or internally to the woodwork of palaces; but the silver images, ornamental figures, and utensils of which we hear, were most probably solid.  The bronze works must have been remarkable.  We are told that both the town and the palace gates were of this material, and it is implied that the latter were too heavy to be opened in the ordinary manner.  Castings on an enormous scale would be requisite for such purposes; and the Babylonians must thus have possessed the art of running into a single mold vast masses of metal.  Probably the gates here mentioned were solid; but occasionally, it would seem, the Babylonians had gates of a different kind, composed of a number of perpendicular bars, united by horizontal ones above and below [as in PLATE XIX., Fig. 2.].  They had also, it would appear, metal gateways of a similar character.