Generally speaking the bricks bear the name of the king who caused the structure to be made, thus the majority of the bricks of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (604-561 B.C.) are inscribed:—“Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, restorer of the pyramid and tower, eldest son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, am I.” It is interesting to note that though the tiles on the western side of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace at Babylon bear the ordinary stamp of that king, those on the eastern side are stamped with a lion and an Aramaic inscription. Koldewey indeed says that there is no doubt that this part of the building was also erected by Nebuchadnezzar, as wall-tiles bearing the regular palace-inscription of the king have been found there. Prof. Euting however, from the forms of the Aramaic characters, would assign these Aramaic-inscribed bricks to the middle of the seventh century, i.e. about 650 B.C. None of the bricks found on the Kasr mound bear the stamp of any Assyrian kings, the latter apparently only having left their marks on the floor-bricks of E-sagila, the temple of Marduk. The characters were generally impressed with a stamp, though on both Assyrian and Babylonian bricks the inscription was sometimes engraved by hand. The stamps used were made of terra-cotta; a well-preserved specimen of a terra-cotta brick-stamp is that of Narâm-Sin referred to above (cf. Fig. 4), while a terra-cotta brick-stamp of Shar-Gâni-sharri, the father of Narâm-Sin, was discovered at Nippur, and one of the minor results of the expedition to Bismâya, directed by Harper, was the discovery of a number of clay brick-stamps. Many Assyrian and Babylonian bricks are glazed or enamelled and coloured in the most ornate fashion, and with the most striking pictures and designs, but an examination of these will naturally find its place in the chapter devoted to “Painting.”
Sometimes the architects of Babylonia contrived to adapt the clay employed in their building operations to decorative devices. Such was the case at Warka (Erech) where Loftus discovered a wall some thirty feet long, composed entirely of clay cones fixed in a cement made of mud and straw, and laid horizontally with their bases outwards. Some of these cones had been coloured red or black and were arranged to form various geometrical designs. They were sometimes inscribed, sometimes not. But clay cones were apparently not the only kind of cone used for architectural decoration, for in the course of his excavations at Abû Shahrein, Taylor[50] discovered cones of limestone and marble, some of which had a “rim round the edge filled with copper”; these cones vary from four to ten inches in length, their diameter measuring from one to three inches.