“Painting” in the ordinary sense of the word to-day, was an art never
practised by the dwellers in Mesopotamia: like all Orientals both the
Babylonians and Assyrians were fond of gay colours, and they gratified
their taste for such in various ways, but as a rule no attempt was made
to faithfully represent the objects of nature through the medium of the
brush and the employment of colours alone, and the colours which they
used on their sculptured reliefs, their stuccoed walls, or their
enamelled bricks, were very frequently entirely impossible from the
naturalistic standpoint. Thus the lion of brilliant yellow hue (cf.
frontispiece), the commonest of all pictorial representations in
Babylonia, has no counterpart whatever in real life; the effect is
pleasing, it catches the eye, it awakens a sense of appreciation in the
spectator, but this is due to the general cheerfulness of the colours
themselves, certainly not to their fidelity to nature.
The lion itself bears no comparison with the Babylonian lion represented
in Fig. 46. The action is the same in either case—both lions are
proceeding with sure and deliberate step, roaring as they go, but there
is a vast difference between the artistic merits of each. The Assyrian
lion is not indeed entirely lifeless, but it lacks the freedom and
spontaneity which characterize the highest forms of art; the body is
also somewhat heavy and clumsy compared with the lion of Ishtar’s Gate.
The colours chiefly employed in Babylonian and Assyrian paintings are
blue, yellow and white, while green, red and black are of comparatively
rare occurrence. The background of the picture is generally a shade of
royal blue, the figures, usually animals, being of a brilliant yellow.
In Babylonia, the demand for colours in architectural decoration was
naturally more pressing than in Assyria, for in the latter country,
where alabaster and limestone were easily procurable, the adornment of
the interiors of buildings fell to the sculptor, but in the southern
country the dearth of stone at once precluded the possibility of
covering the walls even of the palaces with the sculptured bas-reliefs
so dear to the heart of apparently all Assyrian monarchs. Thus it was
that colour was largely made to take the place of sculpture in
Babylonian decoration, the sculptor’s chisel being exchanged for the
painter’s brush, though in Assyria sometimes the art of the sculptor and
painter were both invoked to beautify the walls of the king’s palace,
for in some of the halls in the royal residence of Sargon at Khorsabad
the sculptured reliefs on the lower part of the walls were painted;[121]
while Layard, after describing some of the wall-reliefs found in the
north-west palace at Nimrûd, says:[122] “On all these figures paint
could be faintly distinguished, particularly on the hair, beard, eyes
and sandals,” which rather suggests that the earlier Assyrian sculptures
were only partially coloured. Some of the sculptured bas-reliefs from
Ashur-naṣir-pal’s palace at Nimrûd still bear traces of colour, the
sandals of many of the figures even now showing the faded red and black
paint which at one time covered the soles and upper parts of the sandals
respectively, while in one case Ashur-naṣir-pal’s bow still retains
traces of red paint. At Khorsabad, on the other hand, colour was used
more generally, the raiment and head-gear of the king as well as the
harness of the horses, the chariots and the trees, being all painted.
Layard says that he was unable to ascertain whether the ground as well
as the figures, or parts of the figures, were coloured, but Flandin, in
regard to the wall-reliefs at Khorsabad, informs us that he could trace
a tint of yellow ochre on all parts not otherwise coloured, while the
upper parts of the walls upon which the sculptor had lavished none of
his art, were often decorated with frescoes.
But walls plastered with stucco also commanded the attention of the
painter as well as those lined with stone bas-reliefs, and Layard
discovered the remains of paintings on stucco at Nimrûd, specifically in
the upper chambers on the west side of the mound, the rooms of which
were constructed of crude bricks coated with plaster and elaborately
painted.[123] Most of these paintings do not aspire to anything more
than designs, simple or complex as the case may be. In one fresco two
bulls are portrayed facing each other; their bodies are white, the
ground from which the bulls are carefully delineated by a pronounced
black outline, being yellow, while dark blue plays a leading part in the
purely decorative accessories at the top of the fresco. Other evidence
of the extensive use of paint for the ornamentation of interior walls,
was forthcoming in the discovery on the floor of a chamber in the
north-west palace of Nimrûd, of “considerable remains of painted plaster
still adhering to the sun-dried bricks, which had fallen in masses from
the upper part of the wall. The colours, particularly the blues and
reds, were as brilliant and vivid when the earth was removed from them,
as they could have been when first used. On exposure to the air they
faded rapidly. The designs were elegant and elaborate. It was found
almost impossible to preserve any portion of these ornaments, the earth
crumbling to pieces when any attempt was made to raise it.”[124]
The exteriors of buildings were also sometimes decorated with colour, a
notable example being the ziggurat at Khorsabad of which three complete
stages together with a part of the fourth were found still remaining.
The lowest stage was painted white, the second black, the third red, and
the fourth white; doubtless the remaining stages were also painted, the
colours being emblematic of the seven planets, as in the case of the
traditional temple of Belus at Babylon.
The best example of the Babylonian painter’s art is afforded by the city
of Babylon itself. As early as the sixties, the French excavators,
Fresnel and Oppert, had collected a large number of single-coloured and
multi-coloured fragments of relief bricks. The coating of colour, which
was always applied to the narrow sides of the bricks, was sometimes from
one to two millimetres thick. Unfortunately this valuable collection was
lost, but the statements of the explorers are corroborated by the
description of a Babylonian palace wall, contained in the works of
Diodorus the historian (_circ._ 44 B.C.) where he refers to “all manner
of shapes of animals on rough bricks with colouring very like that of
nature”; and he goes on to say that on the towers and walls were
“representations of all kinds of animals, and as far as colouring and
shape went, well done. The whole represented a hunt, where everything
was full of animals of all kinds, and in size more than four yards. In
this was also represented Semiramis, on horseback, in the act of
throwing the spear after a panther, and a short distance off her
husband, Ninus, stabbing a lion with a lance.”[125] Nebuchadnezzar
himself further alludes to the pictures of wild oxen and colossal
serpents, which he caused to be portrayed on blue enamelled bricks as
decorations for the gates. Most of the glazed and coloured tiles found
at Babylon resemble coloured bas-reliefs, the figures of the animals
standing out in relief on a blue background generally, though sometimes
the ground is green. The brick-enameller’s art reaches its climax in the
Lion-frieze which adorned the Procession Street of Marduk, at Babylon.
One of these clay bas-relief lions is seen in Fig. 46.[126] The ground
is dark blue, the monotony of which is varied by the introduction of
yellow stripes and the white rosettes already so familiar from the
enamelled bricks of Khorsabad. The lion itself, the proportions of which
are excellent, stands out in white alabaster clay, and the whole work is
more perfect in technique than the Persian lion frieze at the Louvre,
which it in some ways resembles. What detracts from the artistic merit
of the latter is the disproportion which the body bears to the fore-part
and head, both of them being too small, but the Babylonian lion is
almost entirely free from this defect. The discovery of the Ishtar Gate
at Babylon added another bounteous supply of material for the study of
Babylonian painting: here too the coloured representations on the
enamelled bricks were in relief. The walls of the gate were found
preserved to a height of thirty-nine feet, the whole of the wall being
covered with animals, principally bulls and dragons, of which there were
at least eleven rows.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.—Enamelled brick relief from Babylon. (After
Andrae.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 47.—A (after Andrae); B (after Layard).]
In Fig. 47, A, we have a black and white reproduction of one of the clay
relief bulls which adorned the gate of Ishtar at Babylon. The bull is in
the act of walking, and exhibits both grace and dignity in his
movements, the slightness of his frame only serving to intensify the
agility with which he seems to advance. The proportions are excellent
and contrast very favourably with the Assyrian bull from Nimrûd (cf.
Fig. 47, B). The latter is hard and conventional, while the posture—in
itself a sufficiently natural one—is here rendered in a most wooden and
inanimate fashion. The body of the animal is white, but the painter has
attempted to make his subject stand out upon its pale yellow background,
by edging it with an artificial outline of black. When the bull was
coloured blue and thrown on to a white background this device was of
course unnecessary (cf. Layard. Ser. I, Pl. 87.) The blue bull here
alluded to belongs to the same species as the white one reproduced in
Fig. 47, B, and is in the same kneeling position, but he is furnished
with the wings of an eagle. It will be observed that in the Babylonian
bull, as also in both the Assyrian bulls, the artist has evaded the
difficulty of drawing the two horns in perspective by portraying only
one, the other being theoretically concealed from view by the horn near
the spectator.
But the palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself contained a large number of
these coloured reliefs, many pieces of the glazed tiles of which they
were composed having been found by Koldewey. The fragments recovered,
number literally thousands, and Koldewey says that apparently when the
bricks were stolen by later builders, the glazed portions were knocked
off in order to make them more useful for the common purposes for which
they were destined, and we to-day are the beneficiaries of that lack of
appreciation. Amongst the animals portrayed on the palace and temple
walls may be mentioned the bull, a mythical monster compounded of
“parts of a bird of prey,” scorpions, serpents, panthers and steers, as
well as the ubiquitous lion, while some of the fragments recovered show
parts of the human body, and birds are also sometimes encountered. The
lions form the most interesting study: there are two main types, (1)
lions walking to the left, with white skins and yellow manes; and (2)
lions walking to the right (_a_) with white skins and yellow manes, and
(_b_) yellow skins and green manes; while there is a third type
characterized by lions running to right or left. Sometimes the tail is
portrayed standing out straight behind, sometimes it assumes a curved
and less rigid form. Great difficulty has been experienced in fitting
the various fragments together, but the assiduous efforts of the Germans
have not been without success.
The process by which these coloured clay reliefs are supposed to have
been made is as follows: a layer or slab of plastic clay of a fair size
was taken, and on this surface the complete picture was modelled in
relief, the process thus far being the same as that employed in the
ordinary stone bas-reliefs, except that a chisel was in requisition
there while here the hands would suffice, though it seems probable that
moulds were at all events made for some of the lions, many of which are
apparently entirely uniform. However that may be, the slab of clay now
bearing in relief the figure determined, is supposed to have been cut up
into rectangular blocks of the same size as the ordinary bricks, each
rectangle being marked, with a view to simplifying the task of fitting
each into its right place in the picture; after this, each piece was
painted with a coat of coloured varnish, and then thoroughly baked in
the oven—the thoroughness of the baking is attested by the hardness of
the enamel—after which the various parts were fitted together. In the
same way at Nimrûd, Layard found a large number of enamelled bricks,
bearing the figures of animals and flowers as well as cuneiform
characters, lying promiscuously upon the floor of the entrance passages
to the palace, upon the unpainted backs of which rude designs, chiefly
consisting of men and animals, were drawn in black ink or paint, “and
marks having the appearance of numbers.” The marks alluded to must have
presumably served the purpose of guiding the builder in his attempt to
reconstruct the picture on the wall.
Coloured clay reliefs were not however the only species of pictorial
representation adopted in the embellishment of the city of Babylon, or
the palace of Babylon’s most illustrious king. On the southern side of
the Ḳasr, a large number of beautifully glazed tiles stamped with
Nebuchadnezzar’s inscription and adorned with flowers, twigs, and in one
case part of a human figure—some fourteen inches high—were discovered,
together with many sculptured stones bearing similar designs, the
workmanship of which however was more perfect than that of the tiles.
The latter have a flat surface, but they resemble the relief tiles in
general technique. Many other glazed bricks were found on the eastern
side of the Ḳasr, painted with various designs and displaying great
delicacy—on one of them a human figure is portrayed, clad in a rich
garment and holding what appears to be a spear in his left hand—these
however Koldewey assigns to the Persian period.
_PLATE XXX_.
[Illustration: DECORATED ARCH AT KHORSABAD
(_cf. Place, “Ninive,” Plates, 14, 15_)]
But colour was further employed, as the handmaid of humbler forms of
architectural decoration in Babylonia as well as in the northern
country. Thus at Nippur, the walls of many of the rooms were stuccoed
with a plaster consisting of mud and straw, and were coloured, the
colours used being apparently always solid. The ruins of Nin-makh’s
temple at Babylon, excavated by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft,
similarly showed the remains of white decorations on its walls; while
colour played no insignificant part in the decoration of the famous
cone-wall at the Wuswas mound of Erech, the cones of which were coloured
red or black and then arranged in a variety of geometrical patterns upon
a wall consisting of mud and straw.
As we have already seen, enamelled bricks were used for the purposes of
architectural decoration in Assyria as well as in Babylonia, though the
enamel used is generally inferior in quality, and is more thinly
applied, in consequence of which it does not adhere so well to the clay,
and it fades sooner. To Place and Botta we are indebted for the finest
and largest specimens of the Assyrian enameller’s art as yet discovered.
The principal gateways of Dûr-Sharrukîn (Khorsabad) (the town built by
Sargon, 722-705 B.C.), which are formed of arches resting on the backs
of projecting winged bulls, seem to have been the object of the
painter’s peculiar attention. These arches were decorated with a
semicircle of enamelled bricks (cf. Pl. XXX), the enamel being laid upon
one edge of the bricks, the average length of which is about three and a
half inches. The ground is blue and the composite winged figures are
yellow, while a line of green edges the lower part of the head-gear. The
rosettes which form a supplemental decoration are white. These figures
which extend over the entire round of the arch are all uniform: they are
engaged in some act of worship, or in the performance of some religious
ceremony, and at once recall the scenes depicted on the palace wall
reliefs, with which they are practically identical. In contradistinction
to the method usually employed in Babylonia, these coloured
representations are not in relief, the colour being applied to the flat
surface of the bricks, the only exception being the central bosses of
the rosettes which are slightly raised. Another good example of coloured
tile-work was found on a plinth in the doorway of what Place regarded as
the harem in Sargon’s palace. The plinth in question is twenty-three
feet long and over three feet high. The figures portrayed are the king,
standing on one side of the plinth with bare head, while on the other
side he wears the usual head-gear, a lion, a bull, an eagle, a tree and
a plough, all done in yellow on a blue background, the borders of the
whole plinth being decorated with the inevitable rosettes. The leaves of
the tree are green, a colour apparently somewhat seldom used by the
enamellers of Mesopotamia. Another painted fragment from Khorsabad,
interesting for the extreme brilliancy of its colouring (cf. Place,
_Nineve_, Pl. 32), is reproduced in Pl. XXXI. The faces of the two human
beings are white, the background being green; the frieze at the top is
yellow, the circular decorations consisting of an inner circle of green
or yellow, while the outer circle is composed of trapezoidal figures of
red and white in the case of those with a green inner circle, and red
and green in those with yellow centres, arranged in either case
alternately.
Layard also succeeded in recovering many glazed and coloured bricks from
Nimrûd (Calah) of even greater interest as regards the composition of
the scenes depicted than as regards the colours used, which in their
present state in no way compare with those from Khorsabad in brilliancy.
The most interesting of these (cf. Pl. XXXI) is one in which the king,
followed by the chief eunuch, is seen receiving his chief officer,[127]
a scene so often portrayed on the Assyrian bas-reliefs. Above his head
there is a “kind of fringed pavilion” and the sole remaining sign of a
cuneiform inscription, while beneath him is a spiral design seen more
frequently on the so-called Hittite works of art, though it is also
found as a decorative accessory on some of the earliest sculptures in
Babylonia (cf. Fig. 27). The predominating colours are black and yellow:
the hair and beard of the king and his followers, their sandals, as well
as the circular balls found within each link of the spiral chain are
black, the background is light yellow, the dress of the various figures
being of a deeper shade of yellow, and the royal head-dress white. As
Layard says: “This is an unique specimen of an entire Assyrian
painting.”
Of the remainder, the most interesting are briefly described by Layard
in _Discoveries_, pp. 166 and 167, and illustrated in colours in his
_Monuments_, Series II, Pls. 53-55. One of these (Pl. 54, 7) contains a
picture of four hairless and clean-shaven captives, whose four necks are
bound together by means of a rope, the end of which is held by the
prisoner in front. Two of the prisoners wear white loin-cloths, while
the other two are clad in long white shirts opening in front. As
regards the colours, the ground is a pale blue, and the figures are
yellow. Another fragment of great interest is that reproduced in
_Monuments_, Pl. 54, 12, on which are portrayed two horses, an Assyrian
warrior, and a man holding a dagger. The latter, who is naked with the
exception of a blue loin-cloth, has apparently been wounded or killed in
battle. The background here is olive-green, while the horses are blue.
On another glazed tile (Pl. 54, 13), we see a picture of Assyrian
cavalry, again on a ground of olive-green, but in this case the horses
are yellow, while the trappings are blue. One of these painted bricks
(Pl. 53, 1) presents us with a picture of a blue fish on a yellow
background; the scales of the fish however are coloured white, while on
the same tile there is a man transfixed by two arrows and girded with a
white loin-cloth. On another fragment (Pl. 53, 3), a chariot to which
horses are yoked is being dragged over a naked figure, whose neck has
been pierced by an arrow. A fillet to which is attached a feather,
encircles the man’s head. The horses are blue, their trappings being
white, and the wheels of the chariot are yellow. Below are seen the
heads together with a portion of the shields of two Assyrian soldiers.
The helmets are yellow, but the faces are “merely outlined in white on
the olive-green ground,” while the shields are blue, but are edged with
alternate squares of yellow and blue. All these belong to the same
period, but another fragment was found by Layard (Pl. 53, 6) which
appears to be of earlier date: the background is yellow, but the outline
is black instead of white, while the figures, the heads of which have
been destroyed, are dressed in the same way as the tribute-bearers
bringing a monkey and other offerings to Ashur-naṣir-pal, as portrayed
on bas-reliefs which were taken from the same building. The outer mantle
is blue, the inner being yellow, and the fringes white.
But pottery was also sometimes decorated with colours; thus Captain
Cros, De Sarzec’s successor at Tellô, discovered black pottery with
incised lines filled in with white paste on this site, a style of
pottery well known in Egypt and elsewhere, but not hitherto found in
Babylonia. At Nippur on the other hand pottery painted with green and
yellow stripes was found, while other vases decorated with black and
white discs were also brought to light.
_PLATE XXXIa_
[Illustration: GLAZED BRICK
_(cf. Place, “Ninive,” Pl. 32)_]
_PLATE XXXIb_
[Illustration: _Photo Mansel. British Museum_
GLAZED BRICK, WITH FIGURE OF AN ASSYRIAN
KING POURING OUT A LIBATION ON HIS RETURN
FROM A HUNT]
Painted pottery has been similarly found in Assyria: at Nimrûd Sir Henry
Layard’s men discovered various fragments of pottery which apparently
belonged to the covers of jars; they were decorated with the spiral
design, also honeysuckles, cones and tulips, in black on a pale yellow
ground. Prehistoric pottery has moreover been found in the course of the
recent excavations at Ashur, the clay vessels in question being
decorated with red and black geometrical designs. Clay slipper-shaped
coffins were also sometimes coloured; many of the sarcophagi discovered
at Nippur were covered with a blue glaze, but they belonged apparently
to the Parthian period. Glazed sarcophagi were likewise found at Warka
(i.e. the ancient Erech) as well as at the city of Babylon, though they
also were the products of a late period. Various other terra-cotta
objects were not infrequently coated with a vitreous glaze, the colour
of the enamel being usually blue or green. Colour was not only used in
Babylonia however for decorating buildings, pots and figures, but also
apparently for the adornment of the human body, for the German
excavations at Fâra revealed the presence of alabaster colour-dishes in
the graves, traces of the colour in some cases still remaining. The
colours are black, yellow, light green and light red. According to the
analysis of the colours of the Babylonian bricks conducted by Sir Henry
De la Becke and Dr. Percy, quoted by Layard,[128] “the yellow is an
antimoniate of lead, from which tin has also been extracted, called
Naples yellow, supposed to be comparatively a modern discovery, though
also used by the Egyptians. The white is an enamel or glaze of oxide of
tin, an invention attributed to the Arabs of Northern Africa in the
eighth or ninth century. The blue glaze is a copper, contains no cobalt,
but some lead; a curious fact, as this mineral was not added as a
colouring material, but to facilitate the fusion of the glaze, to which
use, it was believed, lead had only been turned in comparatively modern
times. The red is a sub-oxide of copper.”