The lion hunt slabs from Ashurbanipal's North Palace are carved barely a few millimetres proud of the gypsum. Everything you read in them — a mane, a bowstring, the grooves of a forearm — is a hairline of shadow on a chalky pale surface, not a mass in space.

This system works the same way. The page is quarried stone. Structure comes from ruled horizontal registers and one-pixel edges, never from lift or glow. Egyptian blue and red ochre survive only as pigment traces: small, fragmentary, never a field.