Egypt furnished an inexhaustible supply of the best possible granite; marbles of various kinds, compact sandstone, limestone, and other useful sorts were widely diffused; and basalt was procurable from some of the outlying ranges of Taurus.

In the neighborhood of Nineveh, and in much of the Mesopotamian region, there was abundance of grey alabaster, and a better kind was quarried near Damascus.

A gritty silicious rock on the banks of the Euphrates, a little above Hit, was suitable for mill-stones.
The gems furnished by the various provinces of the Empire are too numerous for mention.

They included, it must be remembered, all the kinds which have already been enumerated among the mineral products of the earlier Monarchies.

Among them, a principal place must, one would think, have been occupied by the turquoise--the gem, par excellence, of modern Persia--although, strange to say, there is no certain mention of it among the literary remains of antiquity.