SCULPTURE.
§ 1.--_The principal themes of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture._
The Egyptian notions as to a future life had much to do with the
rapidity with which the art of sculpture was developed during the
early years of their history. There was a close relation between their
religion and the rites it implied, on the one hand, and the peculiar
characteristics of the most ancient Memphite sculptures on the other.
We cannot say the same of Chaldæa. So far as our present knowledge
extends, we have no reason to suppose that the first efforts of the
Mesopotamian sculptor were directed to providing the _umbra_, the
immaterial inhabitant of the tomb, with a material support which should
resemble as closely as possible the body of flesh and bones that,
in spite of every precaution, would sooner or later end in dust and
nothingness. No monument has come down to us in which we can recognize
a portrait image executed for a sepulchre.[100]
And yet the basis of the Chaldæan religion was similar to that of
Egypt. Taken as a whole, the beliefs as to a posthumous life were
the same in both countries. Why then had they such different effects
upon the arts? For this we may give several reasons. The first is the
comparatively small importance forced upon the Chaldæan tomb by the
nature of the soil. In mere coffins of terra-cotta, and even in those
narrow brick vaults that are met with at certain points, at Mugheir
and Warka for instance, there is no room for a single statue, still
less for the crowds of images held by a Gizeh or Sakkarah mastaba. Add
to this that stone was rare and dear, that it had to be brought from
a great distance, and we shall comprehend why funerary rites and the
worship of the dead exercised no appreciable influence over Chaldæan
sculpture.
Here the beginnings of art are more obscure than in Egypt. In the first
place we cannot trace them back nearly so far, in the second both
statues and bas-reliefs are much less numerous. In spite of recent
discoveries, to which we owe much, Egypt still remains unrivalled
both by the prodigious antiquity into whose depths she allows us to
catch a glimpse, and by the ever-increasing multitude of monuments and
tombs that are found in her soil. The night that hides the birth of
civilization is darker in Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley; it does
not allow us to perceive how the plastic faculty was first awakened,
and why it took one direction more than another; we cannot tell why the
modeller of Lower Chaldæa set himself to handle clay, or carve wood
and stone into the shape of some real or fantastic creature. On the
other hand, when we study Chaldæan sculpture in the oldest of those
works that have come down to us, we are struck by the fact that, even
in the remote centuries to which those carvings belong, Chaldæan art
interested itself in all the aspects of nature and in every variety
of living form. It had nevertheless its favourite themes, namely, the
representations of royal and divine personages.
When first called upon to suggest the ideas of divine power and
perfection, art had no other resource but to borrow features and
characteristics from those mortal forms that must always, in one point
or another, seem incomplete and unfinished. Of all undertakings that
could be proposed to it, this was at once the most noble and the most
difficult. To find a real solution of the problem we must turn to the
Greeks. Of all ancient peoples they were the first to perceive the
unrivalled nobility of the human form; they were the first to decide
that the notion of divine superiority, of a divine principle, could
be best suggested in all its infinite varieties, through that form.
We shall see them obtain the results at which they aimed by giving to
man’s body and features a charm, a grandeur, a purity of line--in a
word, a perfection, to which no single living member of the race can
attain. The Chaldæans had no sufficiently clear idea of such a system,
and, more especially, they never acquired enough familiarity with
the nude, to rival the grace and dignity given by the Greeks to their
divine types; but their art was more frankly anthropomorphic than that
of Egypt, and, as we shall have occasion to show, it created many types
that were transmitted to the Mediterranean nations, and soon adopted by
them. These types were perfected, but not invented, by the Greeks.
We have already given more than one example of how the Chaldæan
intellect set about the manifestation of its ideas as to gods and
demons, how it expressed their characteristics by heterogeneous forms
borrowed from various real animals. The powers of evil were first
embodied in this fashion (Vol. I. Figs. 6, 7, 161, 162). The sculptor
went far afield to find the elements of ugliness that he wished to
combine in a single being; this is nowhere to be better seen than in
a bronze statuette belonging to the Louvre (Fig. 32). Here too we are
better informed than usual. An inscription engraved on the back tells
us that this is the demon of the south-west wind, the most scorching
and generally unpleasant of the winds that visit Mesopotamia. The ring
in the head served to hang it up in front of the window or doorway
of a house. Thanks to such a precaution, the inhabitants of that
dwelling would be protected against the ill effects of the parching
breath of the desert. The sculptor has wished to make this tyrant of
the atmosphere as hideous and repulsive as possible, and he has only
succeeded too well. One can hardly imagine anything more frightful
than his grinning, quasi-human countenance, resembling a death’s head
in some of its lines; the great round eyes and goat’s horns with which
it is surrounded add to its deformity. Its meagre body has some hints
at hair on its right side. The hands are large and flat, the fingers
short and blunt, while the feet are a curious combination of human
extremities with the talons of a bird of prey.
On the other hand this mixture of forms is by no means repulsive in the
case of certain personages who appear to belong either to the class
of beneficent genii or to that of the great deities of the Chaldee
pantheon. The combination is especially well managed in the winged
bulls. The head is that of a man, but about the tiara with which it
is crowned several pairs of horns are bent. These horns are among
the attributes of the beast by whose nature this complex being is
dominated. They are part of the offensive armament of the one animal
which enjoys in popular esteem an equal reputation for strength with
the lion. The body and limbs, too, are those of a bull, while the curly
main recalls that of the king of beasts. The whole is completed by a
pair of large wings borrowed from the eagle.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.--The demon of the South-West
Wind. Louvre. Actual size.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
Nothing could be clearer than the governing idea of this conception.
The artist has wished to unite in a single being the highest powers
of life and nature--the bull, the lion, the eagle: these are types of
physical force differently applied. Patient and tenacious in the bull,
who drags the plough and transports the heaviest burdens; violent
and impetuous in the lion, while in the king of birds the formidable
strength of beak and talons add to the fear inspired by his lightning
flight. Finally, the head and countenance are those of a man, the
impersonation of intelligent force, of will governed by reflection,
before which every living thing has to bow.
The root of this conception is the same as that by which the Egyptian
sphinx was suggested. The chief differences lie in the greater
complexity of the winged bull and in its less quiescent attitude. The
sphinx combines but two elements, the man and the lion; its pose is
easier and perhaps more natural than that of the Assyrian animal. It is
extended on the ground, its paws stretched idly before it, an attitude
that could be preserved without fatigue for an indefinite time, and
therefore in complete accordance with its governing idea, and with the
function it had to fill at the gates of a palace or temple. That idea,
for the bull as well as the sphinx, was force in repose. But the bull
stands upright, and, when looked at from one side, seems to walk. We
feel that if he did complete his stride he would bring the structure
that stands on his loins down about our ears.
Here, as in most cases where comparison is possible, the advantage
remains with Egypt. But yet the Assyrian type is by no means without
a certain nobility and beauty of its own. In spite of their colossal
dimensions, in spite of the supernatural vigour of their limbs and
the exaggerated energy and salience of their muscles, there is a kind
of robust grace in the leading lines and proportions of these figures
to which we cannot be indifferent, and their effect is increased by
the wings that lie along their backs and furnish so happily the upper
part of the huge alabaster slabs, above which nothing rises but the
horned tiara. Finally, the face with its strongly marked features, with
its frame of closely curled hair and beard arranged in the strictest
symmetry, is still more remarkable than all the rest (Fig. 33). The
expression is grave and proud, and sometimes almost smiling. It is in
fine harmony with the general idea that led the Chaldæans to create
these mysterious but kindly beings, and to endow them with their mighty
frames of stone.[101]
[Illustration: FIG. 33.--Head of a winged bull of
Assurbanipal. British Museum. Height 38 inches.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
These bulls have only been actually found in Assyria, but numerous and
precise texts have been deciphered by which their existence at the
gateways of Chaldæan temples and palaces has been proved.[102] They are
not now to be met with in the country of their origin, because their
material was too rare in the lower part of the great basin to escape
the attacks of spoilers. Soft or hard, volcanic or calcareous, stone
was there precious and difficult to find. Sooner or later such objects
as these would be dragged from their ancient sites and broken up to be
used anew. If chance had not so willed that the Assyrian palaces were
preserved for us by entombment in their own ruins, we should now have
known nothing of a type that played a great part in the decoration
of Mesopotamian buildings, and, by its originality, made a great
impression upon neighbouring peoples; or at least we should only know
it by reproductions on a very small scale, like those we meet with on
the cylinders, or by imitations vastly inferior to the originals, like
those of the palaces at Persepolis.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Cone of chalcedony. In the
National Library at Paris. Actual size.]
Instead of a human head on the body of a beast, we sometimes find the
process reversed, but always with an amount of taste and reserve to
which we are compelled to render due praise. We may, of course, quote
instances in which the head of an eagle is put upon a human body (Vol.
I. Fig. 8), or the shoulders of a man concealed under a fish’s scales
(Vol. I. Fig. 9, and above, Fig. 34); but even then the sculptor has
succeeded in giving to the characteristic lines and attitudes of the
human figure the predominance that belongs to them, and, as it were,
has made them cast an air of nobility over the whole composition.
[Illustration: FIG. 35.--Izdubar and lion. Double the
actual size. From a cylinder in the British Museum.]
It is thus with a curious type to which our reader’s attention should
be drawn; we mean that of the personage called Izdubar by some
Assyriologists, and Hea-bani by others. Whichever name we may choose,
the person in question was “a mighty hunter,” like the Nimrod of
Genesis, a hero distinguished for his valour and for the difficulties
he overcame. So that he might be free in his movements and ready for
every work of activity and vigour, he is naked. Even under the dry
method of the Chaldæan gem engraver we can appreciate the amplitude
of his form and the power of his muscles. He is also distinguished by
the size of his face, which is always fully seen, and seems to be the
result of a compromise between the features of a man and those of a
lion. This deliberately exaggerated head is enframed in long shaggy
hair. Upon some cylinders we see Izdubar in a state of repose, behind
the throne of a god to whom he acts as acolyte or guard of honour (Vol.
I., Fig. 17), elsewhere he is seen in the exercise of his functions,
if we may call them so, accomplishing some such task as those that
made the fame of the Greek Hercules, whose ancestor he may perhaps have
been. We find him on a cylinder in the British Museum carrying off a
slain lion on his shoulders (Fig. 35).
[Illustration: FIG. 36.--Winged genius. Louvre. Height
10 feet. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
We again find the human form predominant in those great winged genii
for which Chaldæan art had so strong a predilection (Figs. 4 and 29).
The two pairs of wings are very happily allied to the body, and both
Greek and modern art has had recourse to the type thus created, the
former for the figures of certain minor divinities, especially for that
of Victory, and Christian art for its angels. In both these instances,
however, we find but a single pair of wings. The artists of Assyria,
especially in their rare attempts to treat the figure from a front
view, have used the two pairs of wings with great felicity to furnish
the background, against which the human form stands out in all the
vigour of its robust muscularity. Our readers may judge of this from
our reproduction of one of the reliefs brought to the Louvre from
Khorsabad (Fig. 36).
These winged men serve as a kind of transition between the complex
beings noticed above, and the sculptures in which the human form is
treated without any supernatural additions. So far as we can guess in
our present uncertainty as to the ranks of the celestial hierarchy
of Chaldæa, it would appear that the forms and features of men and
women were alone thought worthy to represent the greatest of their
divinities. Take the statue of Nebo, figured on page 81 of our last
volume, take the gods introduced into the ceremonies we have already
figured (Vol. I., Figs. 13 and 14), after reliefs from Nimroud and
Kouyundjik (Fig. 37).[103] In this last-named work the god, Raman or
Marduk, holds a flower. At Nimroud there is a god with horned forehead
who grasps an axe in one hand and a thunderbolt in the other. In the
female figure, twice repeated with slightly different attributes, that
precedes the god, Istar has been recognized. See also the statue of
Istar in Vol. I., Fig. 16, and the image of that Chaldæan Venus so
often repeated on the cylinders (Figs. 38 and 39). In form Istar is but
a woman, and the artist would have made her beautiful if he had known
how. She is shown naked, against the general custom of an art that
everywhere else hid the human body under ample draperies. This nudity
must have been intended to suggest those feminine charms by which
desire is awakened and life preserved on the world.
[Illustration: FIG. 37.--Carrying the gods. From the
palace of Sennacherib; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 38.--Istar and the sacrificing
priest.]
[Illustration: FIG. 39.--Istar between two personages.
Hague Museum.]
The supreme gods, the Bels or Lords, were treated in the same way when
all the majesty of their station had to be suggested. Each of these
had his domicile in one of the principal sanctuaries of Chaldæa and
Syria. At Sippara it was Samas, or the sun personified (Vol. I., Fig.
71); upon the seal of Ourkam (Vol. I., Fig. 3), upon another cylinder
on which there are many curious and inexplicable details (Fig. 17),
and upon a last monument of the same kind which dates from the early
centuries of Chaldæan civilization (Fig. 40), it is a Bel whose name
escapes us;[104] but in all the theme is the same, and the type almost
exactly similar. We can hardly be mistaken in recognizing a god in the
personage seated on a richly decorated throne, towards whom two or
three figures, sometimes of smaller size than himself, advance in an
attitude of respectful homage. He is crowned with a lofty tiara, a long
beard flows over his breast, a robe of fine plaited stuff enwraps his
whole body and falls to his feet. He is a man in the prime of life; his
air and costume must have been taken from those of the king. May we not
look upon him as the first sketch for the Greek Zeus, the Zeus of Homer
and Phidias?
This type is never disfigured by any of those attempts, of which the
Chaldæans were so fond, to add to the significance of the human figure
by endowing it with features borrowed from various lower animals.
It should be noticed, however, that on one of the cylinders we have
figured (Vol. I., Fig. 17) there is a personage with two faces, like
the Roman Janus. But this is not the seated god. It is not the great
deity before whom the other actors in the scene stand erect, it is
one of the secondary personages, one of the inferior divinities who
bring offerings or receive instructions, in short, one of those genii
whose numerous and complex attributes first suggested these fantastic
combinations.
[Illustration: FIG. 40.--Lapis-lazuli cylinder. In the
French National Library.]
We find then that when the Chaldæans set themselves to search for the
most suitable way of figuring their gods, they ended by thoroughly
appreciating the excellence of the human form; with a few exceptions,
they abandoned the idea of correcting and perfecting it; they
were content to copy it sincerely and unaffectedly, to render the
characteristic features of the maid and the mother, the youth and the
man of mature age to whom years have lent dignity without taking
away vitality. These forms they covered as a rule with ample drapery,
but for certain types, those, for instance, of the goddess of love
and fecundity, and the demi-god whom we have compared to the Greek
Hercules, they had recourse to all the frankness of nudity. How was
it that under such conditions they never succeeded in endowing their
goddesses with grace, or their gods with nobility of form? Can it be
denied that the few nude figures they have left us are far inferior,
not only to those the Greeks were afterwards to design with so sure
a hand, but even to the hundreds and thousands of human forms with
which the Egyptians had already peopled their bas-reliefs and funerary
pictures?
[Illustration: FIGS. 41, 42.--Fragments of an ivory
statuette. British Museum. Actual size.]
Their first fault lay in an exaggerated striving after fidelity. They
insisted blindly on certain details which are elsewhere suppressed or
dissimulated, in obedience to a compromise which has been so generally
accepted that it must surely be founded on reason. We may judge of this
by two ivory fragments chosen from among those that were found in such
numbers at Nimroud. They are, in all probability, statuettes of Istar
(Figs. 41 and 42). The sculptor had noticed that the female pelvis
was larger than the male, but he exaggerates its size and that of the
bosom. The deep folds of the abdomen indicate an exhausted vitality,
that of a woman who has been many times a mother, and other details of
this region are rendered with a clumsy insistance.[105]
There is no evidence in Chaldæan art of the feeling for proportion
which distinguishes Egyptian sculpture. Its renderings of the human
figure are nearly always too short and thickset; even those works
which by their general facility and justness of movement most strongly
attract our admiration, are not free from this fault. Its effects may
be estimated very clearly from the stele representing Marduk-idin-akhi,
a king of Babylon (Fig. 43), whose date is placed in about the
twelfth century B.C. It is true that the defect in question
is more conspicuous in this relief than, perhaps, in any other work
of the school to which we can point; but in all it is more or less
perceptible. In Assyria, under the later Sargonids, sculptors made an
effort to correct it, but even their comparatively slender figures have
a certain heaviness. Assyrian sculpture has many good points, but it
is never elegant. The Assyrian and Chaldæan sculptors were discouraged
from acquiring a complete knowledge of the human form by the fact that
it was not demanded by their patrons. The public who judged their
works did not perceive their shortcomings in that respect. There was
nothing in their daily life, or in the requirements they laboured to
fulfil, which either assisted them to make good their deficiencies, or
compelled them to do it for themselves. They seldom beheld the nude
form, still more seldom did they have to introduce it into their works.
The Greek writers speak of it as a peculiarity of “the barbarians,”
whether Syrians or Chaldæans, Lydians or Persians, that they were
ashamed to be seen naked, the men as much as the women. Such a scruple,
especially in the male, would seem hardly comprehensible to the Greek
accustomed to the nudity of the gymnasium.[106]
The origin of such a notion is to be sought, perhaps, so far as
Mesopotamia is concerned, in a wise hygiene and in the rapid changes
of an uncertain climate. The difference between the extremes of summer
and winter temperature is far greater than in Egypt or on the Ionian
coasts, and precautions had to be taken at one time against a scorching
sun, at another against the cold of the nights. However this may
have been, it is certain that these people, although they lived in
a hot country, went about in a costume that covered their bodies as
completely as that of modern Europe. It consisted of a long tunic, a
_tunica talaria_ (?) as the Romans would call it, and a mantle.
The tunic left nothing exposed but the head and neck, the forearms, and
the feet and ankles. It must have been of linen or hempen cloth;[107]
when worn by a rich man it was embroidered and decorated about the
foot with a sort of gimp fringe. The tunics of the poor were short and
plain, often coming hardly lower than the knee. They were also looser
and better fitted to work in; but they are never wanting altogether,
even to the men of the _corvée_, the slaves and prisoners of war
whom we see employed in the construction of the royal buildings (Vol.
I. Figs. 151 and 152). Women were dressed in chemises coming down to
their feet (Vol. I. Fig. 30), resembling the long robe of coarse blue
cotton which still forms the only garment of the peasant women of Egypt
and Syria. Sometimes we find a sort of cape thrown over the tunic (Vol.
I. Fig. 31, and below, Fig. 44).
[Illustration: FIG. 43.--Merodach or Marduk-idin-akhi.
From a basalt stele in the British Museum. Height 24 inches.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
As for the mantle, it was a fringed shawl, and, like the Greek _peplos_
or the Roman _toga_, could be arranged in many different ways. In
the painting at Beni-Hassan which shows us the arrival in Egypt of a
band of Asiatic emigrants,[108] it leaves one shoulder and both arms
uncovered, and forms a kind of frock round the body, which it entirely
conceals. In the old Chaldæan statues from Sirtella the arrangement
is more graceful (see Plate VI.); the piece of cloth is folded double
and carried obliquely round the body so as to cover the left arm and
shoulder and leave the right bare. The end is simply passed under
the first fold, by which it is tightly held.[109] There is no trace
of a tunic. In Assyria the mantle was variously arranged. It always
left one shoulder free, which was covered, however, by the tunic. As
a rule it reached to the feet (Vol. I. Fig. 22), but sometimes it was
so contrived as to leave one leg exposed from the knee downwards. The
robes of Sargon praying before the sacred tree are thus arranged (Fig.
45).
[Illustration: FIG. 44.--Captives on the march. From the
palace of Sennacherib.]
As for the women’s dress, it was still more impenetrable than that of
the men. In the Assyrian bas-reliefs there are very few figures of
women on any considerable scale. We can hardly point to an instance,
except in the slab where Assurbanipal and his queen are shown feasting
in a garden (Vol. I. Fig. 28). In this carved picture the queen is
robed in a tunic and mantle, over which the embroiderers needle
has thrown a profusion of those rosettes that are so popular in
Mesopotamia!! art. We are allowed to glean no hint of the personal
charms of the favoured sultana, who must have been young and beautiful.
They are entirely masked by the envelope in which she is wrapped.
In all this we are far enough from the semi-nudity of the Egyptian
sculptures, to say nothing of the frank display of the Greeks. On the
banks of the Nile, where the climate had no violent changes and the
air was deliciously dry and limpid, both poor and rich, both the king
and his subjects, were contented with the white drawers, which were
carefully plaited and knotted about the hips. On great occasions,
when, as we should say, they wished to dress themselves, they put on
long, bright-coloured, and elegantly embroidered robes; but those robes
were of a fine linen tissue, every contour of the body could be easily
followed through them, the age and character of every form could be
distinctly appreciated.
The artist, even when he had to represent the wives and daughters of
Pharaoh or the most august of the female deities, showed under their
draperies the contours of their breasts, their hips, and the insertions
of their limbs.[110] Still more transparent were the robes in which
the dancing and singing women who occur so often in the tomb pictures
were draped.[111] The calculated indiscretions of this sort of _coa
vestis_ invited the painter and sculptor to do justice to the
elegance of the female form.
How different and how much less favourable were the conditions under
which the Assyrian sculptor exercised his art! For him the contours
of the body and the attachments of the limbs were hidden behind heavy
tunics covered with embroidery, and shawls often folded double. If by
chance he caught a passing glimpse of the forms beneath, to what use
could he put it? Two or three at the most of the divine types upon
which his skill was most frequently employed involved a very partial
nudity; most of the gods, and nearly all the men, were draped. In a few
very rare instances we find an Assyrian stripped of his clothes and
crossing a river by means of an inflated skin.[112] But these figures,
though fairly well drawn, are very small in scale, and occupy but a
subordinate place in the bas-relief where they occur.[113]
[Illustration: FIG. 45.--Sargon before the sacred tree.
Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
Corpses stripped naked by the victor on the battle-field are of more
frequent occurrence; but these, being the bodies of despised and hated
enemies, are treated in very summary fashion.[114] We may say the same
of the prisoners whom they behead and flay alive.[115] The mutilated
statue of a nude female, rather less than life, which bears a votive
inscription of Assurbilkala, the son of Tiglath-Pileser, and is now
in the British Museum, is a great rarity. It is believed to represent
Istar. The execution is careful, but the forms are clumsy and the
proportions bad; the bust is a great deal too short.[116]
By his failure to appreciate living form for its own sake, for its
beauty of line and harmony of proportion, the Mesopotamian sculptor
put a voluntary limit to his ambition. He renounced, in advance, the
only means within his reach of borrowing from the human figure the
elements for a representation of the deity which should preserve a
character of indefinite existence, of natural and sovereign excellence.
But this abstention, or, if you like, this impotence, did not prevent
Assyrian artists from fulfilling, in the most brilliant fashion, the
other part of the task to which they were called by the habits and
requirements of the society for which they laboured. The sculptors were
mainly employed by the king; their chief business was to multiply his
images; they were charged to commemorate the sovereign in every act of
his life, in every one of the many parts involved by his indefatigable
activity as builder, chief-justice, hunter, commander-in-chief, and
supreme pontiff. From the king himself to the last of his soldiers or
prisoners, every one who had his own marked place in a picture was
draped; the sculptor could reproduce every episode of the royal life
in the truest and most animated fashion, without ever having learnt to
draw the nude. In fact, he was not called upon, like the Greek artist,
to procure for the æsthetic sense the pure joys that are given by
the sight of noble forms or movements well rendered; his duty was to
commemorate by a series of clear and lively images those events that
were celebrated in words in the text inscribed upon the very alabaster
slabs beneath his hand.
Assyrian sculpture had this documentary character in the very highest
degree; its creations, in the intention of those by whom they were
commissioned, were less works of art than records.[117] The long
inscriptions and the endless series of pictures with which the palace
walls were covered were no more than an illustrated book.
And in what class of literature should that book be placed? It has
been called an epic illustrated by sculptors--a description that seems
hardly just. For in every epic worthy of the name the marvellous
occupies an important place, while in these reliefs it scarcely has a
place at all. With few exceptions the belief in a superior and divine
world makes itself felt in Assyrian art only in those effigies of gods
and demons we have already described. And such images have their places
rigidly fixed by tradition; they stand at the palace gates, but are
scarcely ever found within its saloons, and are entirely absent from
the marches, battles, and sieges. Here and there among such pictures,
but at long intervals, we find some feature that reminds us of the aid
that Assur and the other national gods afforded their worshippers;
now it is an eagle floating over the king’s chariot;[118] now the god
himself, surrounded by a winged circle, draws his bow and launches
his formidable shafts against the enemies of his people.[119] He is
thus represented mounted on a galloping bull in the ring by which the
standards of the Assyrian legions were surmounted.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.--Assyrian standard; from Layard.]
All these details were small in scale and unobtrusive. The _rôle_
played by the architect was similar to that of the draughtsmen and
photographers who sometimes accompany princes and generals on a modern
campaign. The programme placed before him was as narrow as it could
well be; he was required to be faithful and precise, not to give proof
of inventive power.
The sculptor was, in a way, the editor of the military bulletins; his
work was the newspaper of the day, explaining the political events
of his time to those who could understand no other writing. There is
complete coherence between his figures and the inscribed texts they
accompany. Look, for instance, at the series of slabs from the Palace
of Sennacherib, in which his Jewish campaign is retraced.[120] The
final scene is thus described in words within a cartouche above the
heads of the figures: “Sennacherib, king of Assyria, seated upon his
throne of state, causes the prisoners taken in the town of Lachish to
pass before him,”[121] In order to show the details of the magnificent
chair upon which the king is seated we have reproduced only the two
principal actors, in the sovereign and his grand vizier (Fig. 47). If
we had been able to place the whole composition before our readers they
would have seen how thoroughly the inscription describes it. Behind
the general who is presenting the vanquished to the king, appear the
prisoners, some prostrate, others kneeling or standing upright, but all
turned towards their conqueror with gestures of supplication.
The spaces to be covered were vast, but the warlike kings of Assyria
cut out enough work for their sculptors to keep them always busy.
Every campaign, and every battle, every siege or passage of a river,
seemed to them worthy of commemoration by the chisel. Those to whom
the work was given were forced therefore to multiply figures; the task
was complicated and yet had to be finished with extreme rapidity.
The sovereign was in a hurry to enjoy the spectacle he had promised
himself, he wished to inhabit for as many years as possible the
dwelling whose walls, like so many magic mirrors, would reflect his own
prowess and glory. And so the sculptor had to produce much and produce
fast; we can therefore understand how it was that his creations never
lost a certain look of improvisation. They had the good qualities of
such a mode of work; namely, force, vitality, and _abandon_, but
combined with all its defects, inequality, incoherence, and frequent
repetition.
In order to cover the surface abandoned to the sculptor as quickly as
possible, the work had to be divided; every one who was thought to
be capable of wielding a chisel had to be pressed into the service.
Sculptors of established fame who had already helped to decorate more
than one palace, mediocre artists with more age and experience than
talent, young apprentices entering the workshops for the first time,
all were enlisted, and each received his share of the common task.
Under such conditions, and especially when the utmost expedition was
required, the collective work could not help showing signs of the
many and variously skilled hands that had been employed upon it. Even
with the Greeks, and even, which is still more to the point, with the
Athenians of the age of Pericles, something of the same kind is to be
noticed. The frieze of that temple of Pallas, which is, perhaps, the
most carefully wrought creation of human hands, is not all equally fine
in execution. Some parts show the work merely of a skilful carver,
while before others we feel that here has been the hand of the great
master himself, that the play of the chisel has been governed by
the brain that traced the original sketch and thought out the whole
marvellous conception.
And these differences are still more obvious in the great compositions
turned out so rapidly by Assyrian sculptors. Examine at your leisure
the long series of pictures from a single palace that hang on the
walls of the British Museum--the only place where such a comparison
is possible--and you will be astonished at the inequality of their
execution. Among those taken from a single room some are far better
than others. Here and there we find figures that seem to have been
touched upon and corrected by an experienced artist, while their
immediate neighbours are treated in a soft and hesitating fashion.
Curiously enough the figures representing enemies are, as a rule, very
roughly modelled; sometimes they are hardly more than blocked out. It
seems as if they wished, from the beginning, to have no mistake as
to relative dignity between the soldiers of Assur and those men of
inferior race whom they condescended to slay.[122]
[Illustration: FIG. 47.--Sennacherib before Lachish,
British Museum. From an unpublished drawing by Félix Thomas.]
A hurried artist repeats himself deliberately. Repetition spares him
the fatigue of reflection and invention. The Assyrians loved to
represent processions. Sometimes these consist of the king’s servants
carrying the ensign of royalty behind him (Vol. I. Figs. 22, 23, and
24); sometimes of priests carrying the images of the gods (Vol. I.
Figs. 13 and 14); but more often of war chariots, cavalry, and infantry
(Fig. 15), or bands of prisoners conducted by foot soldiers (Fig. 48).
To groups and single individuals progressing in long succession the
sculptor gave a certain rhythm that is not without its dignity, but yet
his treatment of such themes is deficient in variety. The same fault
occurs in Egyptian dealings with similar subjects; the figures seem
all to reproduce a single type, as if they had been stencilled. The
designer has made no real effort to avoid monotony; he has no suspicion
of those skilful combinations by which the Greek sculptor would succeed
in reconciling the unity of the whole with variety of detail; he makes
no attempt to make those slight changes between one group and another
that please and amuse the eye without hurting the general symmetry, or
breaking those great leading lines by which the general character and
movement of the composition is determined.[123]
[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Procession of captives; from
Layard.]
The necessity for haste accounts for another defect of the same art. It
was because he had no time that the sculptor did not choose and select,
like the Greeks. The size of our page prevents us from reproducing
one of those pictures in which the triumphs of Sennacherib are
commemorated,[124] but some idea of that great military chronicle may
be formed from the assault on page 30 (Fig. 30). There is nothing like
a central group in which the episodes and incidents of the conflict
could, as it were, be gathered up and epitomized. The sculptor exhausts
himself in striving after the confused wealth of reality; our eye loses
itself among the groups of combatants who seem to be sown broadcast
over the field of the relief. The historian may find in it many curious
details, but he who looks only for aesthetic enjoyment is soon bored.
The whole composition is as confused as a real hand-to-hand fight.
In spite of all these defects, or perhaps owing to their existence,
the realistic sculpture of Assyria must have had a strong attraction,
not only for the kings, to whom it was a sort of apotheosis, but for
their subjects, their officers, and for the soldiers who fought in the
campaigns and brought off their share of the glory and spoil. We may
well find these battle panoramas not a little wearisome; but if we put
ourselves in the place of those who were actors in the scenes they
portray, of those who could search among their countless, and, to us,
often ambiguous incidents, and find, or think they found, their own
deeds and persons introduced by the sculptor into his crowded pages,
how great will be the change. The fatigue we feel will be changed into
the interest that never palls of fighting one’s battles over again,
and into the natural pride aroused by the pages of a history that
chronicled no defeat, that spoke of nothing but the long sequence of
victories won by the legions of Assyria over every nation that had the
temerity to oppose her arms.
Such a spectacle had its eloquence and could not fail to react strongly
upon those who gazed upon it, to incite them to new triumphs and to the
renewed spoliation of their neighbours. In spite of its shortcomings,
such an art had, then, one great merit; it was, in the highest degree,
national; it was frankly inspired by the most universal passion of the
people among whom it was born, by the ideas it suggested it helped to
keep that passion alive and to add to its force, and so contributed not
a little to develop the habits and sentiments in which the power and
originality of a violent, fanatical, and warlike race consisted.
§ 2. _Materials._
If the national dress and social _régime_, as well as the natural
conditions of the country had their effect upon Mesopotamian art, so
too had the materials employed. In our study of Egyptian sculpture we
endeavoured to show how greatly the artist depended on his material,
and what a strongly modifying effect the latter had upon the nature of
the interpretation he could give to his thought.[125]
The monuments of Assyria especially invite the same remark. The
Chaldæans seem to have made use, as a rule, of very hard rocks for
their sculptures, rocks similar to those used by the later Egyptians
for their more important works. In Chaldæa a stone statue was a rare
object. On the few occasions when a Chaldæan prince, or even private
individual, indulged in such a luxury, he did not spare expense; once
in a way the cost did not matter; it was of far greater moment that
the work should be durable, and blocks were brought from any distance
that might be necessary to ensure that result. Thus it is that nearly
all the monuments that have been recovered in the lower valley of the
Euphrates are of basalt, diorite, or dolerite. The difference between
the styles of the Egyptian and Chaldæan sculptures was not caused,
then, by the materials employed, but by something far less easily
defined--by the peculiar genius of the two peoples. They neither saw
nature with the same eyes nor interpreted it in the same spirit.
The situation was rather different in Assyria. There a plentiful supply
of easily-cut stone, alabaster, and several varieties of limestone
of more or less hardness was to be had. These facilities had a
double consequence: they led the Ninevite artist to make lavish use
of sculpture in the decoration of buildings, and they had no little
influence upon their habits of design and upon the executive processes
they adopted. The most peculiar, the truly characteristic feature of
their bas-reliefs so far as execution is concerned, is the combination
of incisiveness and looseness in their handling. We feel that the
chisel, in spite of the haste with which it worked, has been strongly
driven. It is not so in the case of other countries; as a rule where
work is rapid it is also slight and superficial. This apparent anomaly
is to be explained by the qualities of the material. The alabaster
used at Khorsabad and Kouyundjik is so soft that we can scratch it
with the finger-nail, and even the limestone preferred by the artists
of Assurbanipal is not much harder.[126] How this tempts the hand!
Whether one tries to or not one writes boldly with a goose quill, and
here the docility of the material becomes a danger. The carver’s tool,
when it meets with no real resistance, runs away with the hand, and the
sculptor is insensibly led on to over-accent his intentions, and to
exaggerate his effects.
[Illustration: FIG. 49.--One face of the obelisk of
Shalmaneser II. British Museum. Drawn by Bourgoin.]
Sometimes the Assyrians attacked the harder stones, which they obtained
from certain districts of Kurdistan and the neighbourhood of the
extinct volcanoes of the Sinjar, between the valleys of the Tigris
and the Khabour;[127] we shall be content with quoting as examples a
basalt statue found at Kaleh-Shergat and the obelisk of Shalmaneser
II., in the British Museum, which is cut from the same material (Vol.
I. Fig. 111, and below, Fig. 49).[128] It deals with the homage done
and the tribute offered to the king by five conquered nations. Among
the offerings are several strange animals.[129] The small building
at Khorsabad which has been called sometimes a throne-room and
sometimes a temple, was decorated with reliefs in basalt,[130] but the
use of these hard rocks was always very rare in Assyria. The habits
of the northern artists were formed in cutting the softer stones,
and their use of such materials explains not only their prodigious
fecundity but certain qualities and defects of their style.
Both Chaldæa and Assyria made too constant and skilful use of plastic
clay in their architecture for it to have been possible that they
should overlook its capabilities as a material for the sculptor,
especially in the production of small objects like sepulchral
statuettes. Both nations have transmitted to us a vast quantity of such
figures. In both cases they are solid; those of Chaldæa are stamped in
a mould in a single piece; their reverse is flat and roughly smoothed
by the hand; the clay is fine and close-grained, and so hard and well
fired that it cannot be scratched with a metal point (Fig. 50).[131]
The execution of the Assyrian figures is more simple. They are solidly
modelled in clay, and without the use of a mould, although we often
find a series made after one pattern and giving a high idea of the
Assyrian modeller’s skill (Fig. 51). The coarseness of the material
however is surprising; it is a dark grey earth, unequal, knotty,
without any mixture of sand, but marked with cross hatchings left
by the straw with which it seems to have been mixed. The body is so
friable that it crumbles in the hand, but as it resists water it must
have undergone a gentle burning.[132]
Examples are also to be found of objects in earthenware or terra-cotta
coated with a vitreous glaze, like those that the Egyptians
manufactured in such enormous quantities.[133] In these cases the
figure is cast in a mould, and the enamel is either blue or green, as
in Egypt (Fig. 52).[134]
Illustration: FIG. 50.--Statuette of a priest. Louvre;
from Heuzey.]
[Illustration: FIG. 51.--Dagon. British Museum. Actual
size.]
Clay was used for other things besides these small statuettes; it
seems to have been employed in the first sketches from which the
sculptor chiselled the alabaster slabs, at least when he attacked
the more important and complex groups. We can hardly refuse to
recognize such a purpose in a fine fragment brought from the palace of
Assurbanipal to the British Museum. It is all that is left of a relief
in terra-cotta. The grain is much finer and the colour far redder
than in statuettes from the same place. In its present state this
slab is about a foot high, and mutilated as it is, its subject may be
recognized as an incident in the royal hunt, the rest of which helps
to fill the Assyrian basement room. The larger part of the principal
figure is wanting, but enough of him remains to leave no doubt as to
the character of the scene; it represents a king attacked on two sides
by lions, and defending himself with his lance. The firm and precise
execution of the lions’ paws and of the king’s body should be noticed.
According to the scale obtaining in the sculptures preserved this model
was carried out on a half scale. So little of the group is left that
we cannot make sure whether the reliefs now in London contain the
episode of which this is the original sketch or not.[135] So far as
we can tell, however, the exact passage executed after this model is
not in the museum, but we must not forget that a large number of the
sculptures were left in the palace where they were found; Mr. Rassam
only removed the finest and those in the best condition.
[Illustration: FIG. 52.--Head of a lioness. Louvre.
Actual size.]
The small winged bull carved in the finest limestone, which Mr. George
Smith brought from Nimroud, was, no doubt, a model of the same sort
(see Vol. I. Figs. 83 and 84). Its execution is of the most careful
description, and yet it can hardly have had any other use. We may say
the same of the square slab of terra-cotta just mentioned; its figures
are too small for the decoration of palace saloons, and the material
is too common to have formed a part of those rich schemes of ornament
whose existence is attested by the texts as well as by the remains. We
can suggest no more plausible explanation of these little monuments, or
one in more complete accord with the necessities of rapid production.
We have already shown that a vast number of hands were required for the
prompt execution of these great sculptural works, and the provision of
such models, whether in stone or terra-cotta, would do much towards
preventing the evil consequences of employing so many different and
variously gifted journeymen. The master produced the model, and
nothing was required from the carvers who copied it but skill in
enlarging and in the handling of their tools.
* * * * *
From the earliest times of which any remains have come down to us the
Chaldæans understood how to make use of all the different materials
that offer facilities to the artist for the rendering of living form.
Until bronzes dating from the times of the pyramid builders were
found,[136] it was thought that they had anticipated the Egyptians
in the art of making that precious alloy and casting it in earthen
moulds.[137] This conjecture was suggested by the discovery, near
Bagdad, of a metal statuette, which is now in the Louvre (Fig. 53). It
is what the Greeks called a _canephoros_. A young woman carries
a basket on her completely shaven head, keeping it in place with her
hands. From her waist upwards she is nude, but the lower part of her
figure is wrapped in a kind of narrow skirt, on which is engraved a
votive inscription containing the name of a king Kourdourmapouk, who is
believed to have flourished in the sixteenth century before our era.
The casting is solid.
The bronzes inscribed with the name of Gudea (Vol. I. Figs. 146–148)
are perhaps still more ancient. The motive of one is identical with
that of this canephoros. Metal working cannot have begun with such
objects as these; it is pretty certain that forging metals was
everywhere an earlier process than casting them. Before learning to
prepare the mould and to force the liquid copper into its farthest
recesses, men must have commenced by beating it into plates upon the
anvil. When they had gathered sufficient skill to make these plates
very thin and pliant, the next thing they attempted was to ornament
them, which they first did by hammering one of their sides, and so
producing reliefs on the other which could be brought to sufficient
perfection by repeating the process with varying degrees of strength
and delicacy, and by chasing. This is what is called _repoussé_
work.
[Illustration: FIG. 53.--Canephoros. Louvre. Height 10½
inches.]
There is no doubt that these processes were invented in the southern
cities. The oldest of the Warka tombs show that metals were abundant
from a very ancient period, and that their use was well understood;
but we do not possess any important examples of _repoussé_ work
dating from the early days of Chaldæa. It is otherwise with Assyria.
The exploration of her palaces has brought to light numerous fragments
of ornamental sheathing in bronze; plaques and bands, sometimes curved,
sometimes straight, according to the surface to which they were
applied, were covered in some cases with mere ornamental designs, in
others with numerous figures. Only within the last few years have we
learnt to how high a pitch the sculptors of Mesopotamia had carried
this art, and how well they understood that the rough form left by the
hammer should be completed and defined with the burin and chisel. The
most important discovery of the kind was made as recently as 1878, by
Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, who found the bronze gates to which we have already
more than once alluded, in the mound of Balawat.[138] Shalmaneser
II., who built the palace to which these gates belonged, caused his
victorious campaigns and his sacrifices to the gods to be represented
upon them. We have already reproduced many of these curious reliefs
(Vol. I., Figs. 51, 68, 73, 158; and above, Fig. 28); a last example
will help to show the facility of the Assyrian artist and the boldness
of his rendering of animals and men (Fig. 54). He played with bronze as
he did with alabaster; in both his handling was firm and rapid and his
modelling at once broad and strongly felt.[139]
[Illustration: FIG. 54.--Man driving goats and sheep.
From the Balawat gates. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 55.--Lion carved in wood. Louvre.
Length 4 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 56.--Ivory seal. Louvre. Actual
size. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 57.--Ivory tablet in the British
Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
This peculiar handling, at once free and a little hard, is to be found
in all the works of these people. It may be recognized in a wooden
lion, unfortunately much mutilated, which belongs to the Louvre (Fig.
55), and in those carvings upon the shells of pearl oysters that have
been found in such numbers, especially in Lower Chaldæa.[140] The
ivories alone are, sometimes at least, without this peculiar character.
They display a certain harshness in which the distinguishing mark
of Chaldæan origin has been recognized. We may give as an instance
the small object thus described in the catalogue of the Louvre: “Lion
devouring a wild goat, of which only the head and neck are visible.
This group ornaments one face of a small object, rounded above and
with a flat base. There is an oblong slit in the latter. The object is
apparently a seal” (Fig. 56).[141] On the other hand, although most of
the ivory carvings that were used for the handles of walking-sticks and
daggers and such purposes, show the characteristics we have mentioned,
it must be acknowledged that the ivory tablets from Nimroud are free,
for the most part, from the style we have attempted to define as that
proper to Chaldæa and Assyria. The treatment is lighter and more
elegant, reminding us of Egypt. Must we believe that when the Assyrians
attacked this beautiful material they changed their confirmed habits
and gave a refinement to their touch it had never known before? Such an
idea seems very improbable. We know that their ornamentists borrowed
certain motives from the Egyptians, such as the winged globe, the
lotus-garland, the sphinx; but in doing so they stamped them with
their own personal and independent taste. It seems likely, therefore,
that the more carefully wrought of these ivories were imported from
abroad, either from Egypt itself, or from its imitator, Phœnicia. In
the fragments we have already figured (Vol. I. Figs. 129 and 130) the
features and head-dresses are easily recognized as Egyptian. This
character is still more marked in another tablet from Nimroud, of which
there are several repetitions in the British Museum (Fig. 57). Two
women are seated opposite to each other. They are Egyptian in every
detail. Their attitudes and symmetrical arrangement; their robes and
head coverings; the action of their hands, one raised in adoration,
the other holding the hare-headed staff; the _crux ansata_ under
their chairs, all are continually found in the monuments of the Nile
valley. A still more decisive feature is the oval surmounted by two
ostrich plumes in the centre of the plaque. This is not inscribed with
hieroglyphs taken at random, as in the small objects of Phœnician
origin on which those characters are used merely as decoration, but
with a royal name, Auben, or Auben-Ra.[142] It is true that no such
name has as yet been encountered on any other monument, but it may
very well have been that of one of those petty monarchs who swarmed
in the Delta towards the time of the Ethiopian conquest. Most of them
left very slight traces; not a few are known only by a single text.
This tablet may have been carved, then, either in Egypt, or in Phœnicia
after an Egyptian model. In any case, it seems clear to us that it is
not the work of an Assyrian or Chaldæan. Other objects in the same
material do not, like this, bear an irrefutable mark of their origin,
but they are so like it in treatment that we are tempted to say they
must have been produced under the same influence. Look at this fragment
of a winged sphinx (Fig. 58). Its general physiognomy, the head-dress,
the peculiar rendering of the wing-feathers, are none of them Chaldæan,
but we often find them in Phœnicia and Cyprus. We may say the same of
the fine piece in which two fantastic animals standing upon a peculiar
and elaborate capital are surrounded by gracefully designed flowers and
leafage (Fig. 59).
[Illustration: FIG. 58.--Ivory fragment in the British
Museum. Actual size. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
In attempting to give a clear idea of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture we
must, therefore, put aside the more artistic among the numerous ivory
carvings found in the ruins at Nimroud, and especially in the palace
of Assurbanipal. It would seem that such things were imported from
abroad when something better than the ivory knobs and handles made in
the country was required. When we come to speak of metal cups we shall
have to repeat this remark.
[Illustration: FIG. 59.--Ivory tablet in the British
Museum. Actual size. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 60.--Statue of Assurnazirpal. Height
41 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
It may be said that we should have postponed our notice of these
objects, and, if they had all borne as incontestable a mark of their
origin as the tablet with the royal oval, we should have done so, we
should have reserved both the carved ivories and the engraved cups of
metal until we reached those pages of our history in which the arts of
Phœnicia will be treated. But, unfortunately, when we come to details
it is not always easy to establish the distinction between objects of
foreign manufacture and those productions of the same kind that were
made at home; in many cases it requires the tact and instinct of the
archæologist to know one from the other. Such faculties are always, in
some degree, liable to err, while in many cases it is very difficult
to give reasons for the conclusions arrived at by their exercise. The
simplest way out of the difficulty has seemed to us to describe these
remains at the same time as the main compositions to which they were
formerly attached. But while we do so we keep their doubtful character
in mind; in our definition of the style of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture
we shall only have recourse to them under great reserve, especially as
the style in question is to be amply studied without their help.
§ 3. _The Principal Conventions of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture._
The art of Mesopotamia, like that of Egypt, had its conventions, some
of which were peculiar to itself, while others are common to all
nations that have arrived at sovereign power and maturity of knowledge.
Like all those who attempt plastic figuration by the light of nature,
the artists of Mesopotamia began with profiles. In speaking of Egyptian
sculpture we had occasion to show how this method of representation
is always followed by first beginners,[143] as it is the simplest and
easiest of all. The Chaldæo-Assyrian artists, unlike those of Egypt and
Greece, were unaccustomed to the nude, and were therefore without the
incentive it supplies to fight against nature and to make her live in
all her variety of aspect, a variety which work in the round is alone
able to grasp without the aid of convention. One consequence of this
is that almost exclusive love of the bas-relief in which Mesopotamian
art is unlike that of any other people. In its very beginning it
seems to have made a vigorous and promising effort to rise to the
production of statues in the round, but discouragement appears to
have rapidly followed, and in later years but a very few attempts,
and those attended with no great success, were made. The salience of
figures was increased or diminished according to their place and the
part they played, but the idea of detaching them altogether from the
background and giving them an independent existence of their own, was
soon abandoned. Under the first Chaldæan empire, real statues, round
which we can walk, were modelled (see Plates VI. and VII.). In several
of these, although the forms are not so round as in nature, the back is
as carefully treated as the front. On the other hand, the few Assyrian
statues that have come down to us are all too thin from front to back,
while their backs are hardly more than roughly-dressed stone. You feel
at once that they were made to stand against a wall, and you think of
children and of those whose limbs are so infirm that they cannot stand
without support. Before such things, we are far enough, not only from
the grace, vitality, and freedom of the Greeks, but even from the proud
repose of the Egyptian colossi. Although our figures show, of course,
only the front view, this impression is very striking in the statues of
Nebo (Vol. I. Fig. 15) and Assurnazirpal (Fig. 60), which have migrated
from Nimroud to the British Museum. The latter was found by Layard at
the entrance of one of the temples whose plans we have given (Vol. I.
Fig. 189). It is cut from a very hard and close-grained limestone,
and stands upon a pedestal that is nothing but another block of the
same material. We have been compelled, in order to keep our figure
sufficiently large, to reduce this block to the dimensions of a shallow
plinth. In reality it is a cube thirty-one inches high and twenty-one
and three-quarter inches wide.[144]
[Illustration:
PLATE VI
ROYAL STATUE
Louvre
J. Bourgoin, del. Imp. Ch. Chardon Sulpis, sc.]
The statues of Nebo and Assurnazirpal are standing figures, but,
at Kaleh-Shergat, Layard found a seated figure of Shalmaneser II.
(Fig. 61).[145] It is in black basalt and has no head. It is of
great interest because it recalls the very oldest Chaldæan statues
both in material and attitude. It has suffered so much, however,
and its workmanship seems to have been so sketchy, that even in the
original itself the details of modelling and costume are hardly to be
recognized. We give a slight sketch of it merely to show its pose.
These statues, if they deserve such a name, show the work of the
Assyrians at its feeblest; the plastic genius of the people must not be
judged from them, but from the _genre_ in which they were most at
home, from the long lines of figures that stand out in various salience
from the palace walls. Among the productions of this latter class that
have come down to our time we find every degree of relief, from the
bas-relief strictly speaking, to what is but little removed from the
round.
[Illustration: FIG. 61.--Statue of Shalmaneser II.
Height 58 inches. British Museum.]
Let us begin with the bas-relief. It is with sculptures executed on
this principle that the walls of temples and palaces were covered,
as if with a stone tapestry. The Assyrian process is identical in
principle with that afterwards adopted by the Greeks, as, on the whole,
the most convenient for the purpose in view. We find no examples of
the Egyptian fashion of defining the outlines of figures by a deep
groove cut with the point, nor of those figures that were, so to speak,
let into and modelled within the surface of the wall.[146] In both
Chaldæa and Assyria the figure stands out from the bed of the relief
from two or three millimetres to a centimetre, according to its size.
The bed is nowhere hollowed, it is one even surface, except that where
the figures are very small, and consequently of very slight relief,
the sculptor has reinforced them with an incised outline one or two
millimetres deep. This artifice must be examined on the monuments
themselves; it could hardly be shown in reproductions on a reduced
scale.
Most of the great bas-reliefs have but one plane, and to this they owe
the simplicity that gives them a certain nobility in spite of their
monotonous design (see Vol. I. Figs. 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 23, 24, &c.).
Examples of two planes, in which the figures are grouped in couples,
the nearest to the spectator in each couple covering a large part of
his companion, are by no means rare (see Fig. 62); we may say the
same of those in which a background of trees is introduced beyond the
figures (Fig. 63). This arrangement is especially frequent in the more
complicated pictures, where the figures are small and numerous; but
even in the last century of the Assyrian monarchy, when the sculptor
showed an ever-increasing desire to draw attention and excite interest
by the introduction of these picturesque details, he never quits his
hold of a right instinct for the true conditions of the bas-relief.
Unlike the Roman sculptors, and even those of the Renaissance, he shows
no hankering after those effects that seem to get rid of the bed; he
never destroys the clarity of his conception by unduly multiplying the
planes. He did not understand how to put objects in perspective or
manage foreshortening, and this ignorance served him well; it preserved
him from the temptation into which more skilful artists are so prone to
fall; it prevented him from forgetting “that the design best suited to
the bas-relief is purely geometrical in its essentials.”[147]
The relief, of course, becomes higher as the size of the figures
increases. It is as much as from eight to ten inches in the winged
genii (Figs. 27 and 34) that accompany and divide the bulls on the
decorated façades and in the gateways. Even when it is highest the
salience does not go beyond what is called _mezzo-relievo_; that
is to say, no part of the principal or accessory figure, of the genius
himself or of the lion, stands out from the wall in the round, as, for
instance, do the heads and limbs in the metopes of the Parthenon.
[Illustration:
TWO CHALDÆAN HEADS
J. Bourgoin, del. Ramus sc.
Imp. Ch. Chardon
[Illustration: FIG. 62.--Pair of warriors. Louvre. Drawn
by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
The same remark holds good of the colossal figures of lions (Plate
VIII.) and winged bulls (Plate IX.) which acted as guardians of the
palace. We have already explained the ideas attached to these monsters
by the Assyrians,[148] we shall here dwell upon some peculiarities of
their execution. In these images there is a compromise between “the
round” and the bas-relief of a very original and peculiar character.
Looked at from in front these lions and bulls seem to be independent
statues; the head, the chest, the legs stand out with as much freedom
and amplitude of development as in nature; but step a little to one
side, to the right or the left as the case may be, and their aspect
will change. You will then see that only the fore-part of the animal
is disengaged from the block of alabaster or limestone in which it is
cut, the rest of the body remains imprisoned in its substance. The
contours alone are indicated, in low relief, on the two sides of the
ponderous slab. Thus we have half, or rather a quarter, of the statue
standing out from sixteen to twenty inches in front of the slab on
which the sides are shown in silhouette. It looks as if the image had
made an effort to shake itself clear of the mass of stone and had only
partially succeeded. We find ourselves wondering whether, if Nineveh
had not perished and the development of her art had gone on without
interruption, these great beasts would not have ended by conquering
their liberty and winning for themselves an existence independent of
the walls to which they were attached. But the nature of the material
employed says no--alabaster is too soft, and the legs of the lions and
bulls could not support their massive bodies without assistance.
[Illustration: FIG. 63.--Prisoners. From the palace of
Sennacherib; from Layard.]
[Illustration:
LION FROM THE PALACE OF ASSURNAZIRPAL, NIMROUD
British Museum
Saint-Elme Gautier del etsc Imp. Ch. Chardon]
There are other peculiarities in these images. Looked at from in front
they appear stationary, their two fore-feet being on the same plane and
close together; any other arrangement would have been awkward. But
if we look at them from the side they appear to be walking, in which
attitude alone would all the four legs be visible and clear of each
other. In most cases the bulls were not parallel to the façades they
decorated, but perpendicular to them;[149] they faced the visitor as he
approached the gate, and it was not until he entered the passage that
he got a side view of their bodies stretching along its walls (Figs.
26 and 27). Some contrivance was sought by which their figures should
appear complete from both points of view, and the following expedient
was hit upon. As soon as you had entered the passage between the bulls,
you could, of course, no longer see more than the fore-leg nearest
you; the other was hidden by it. The latter was then repeated by the
sculptor and thrown back under the body of the animal, which, in the
result, had five legs.
The idea is a better one than we are at first inclined to believe.
More than once, perhaps, at the Louvre or the British Museum, you have
paused before these colossal images, you have measured their height
with your eye and admired their tranquil majesty. But have you ever
noticed the artifice I have just described? To see it clearly you must
choose a standpoint on the right or left front, as our draughtsman
has done (Plates VIII. and IX.). If no chance has led you to such a
standpoint in the first instance, if you have, as is most likely,
looked at the figure first in front and then from the side, you have
probably never suspected the sort of trick that the sculptor has played
upon you. This contrivance is one of the distinguishing marks of
Ninevite art;[150] it occurs nowhere else, unless in monuments such as
those of Cappadocia, which are more or less feeble copies of Assyrian
models.[151]
The conventions that remain to be noticed will not detain us so long.
They are such as have been practised in all imperfect schools of
art,--in all, in fact, that preceded the art of the Greeks.
Even in the greatest and most perfect schools of sculpture, the
bas-relief, as if influenced by a souvenir of its origin, prefers
figures in profile to those in full face. In those exceptional
instances in which the Assyrians abandoned this preference, as, for
example, in the decoration of entrances, they were visibly embarrassed.
They did not understand how to foreshorten the feet, therefore they put
the lower part of the figure in profile while the upper part faced the
spectator (see Fig. 34).[152] This puts the figure in a painful and
awkward attitude which could not be imitated by a living man without
a violent effort, or retained for more than a second or two. It is
the same when they wish to make a figure turn; the movement of the
shoulders and neck is so clumsily rendered that the sculptor seems to
have put on the head the wrong side foremost.[153] In general, however,
the ample draperies help the artist out of his difficulties. Thanks to
the veil which hides his ignorance of the attachment of limbs and the
play of muscles, he succeeds in avoiding those dislocations that are so
frequent in the Egyptian bas-reliefs and sometimes result in obvious
deformity.[154]
When he had to render the human countenance the sculptor of Babylon or
Nineveh fell into the same fault as he of Memphis; he placed a full, or
nearly a full, eye in his profiles, and for the same reason.[155] This
defect is not always so conspicuous as in a bas-relief from Nimroud
representing a tributary of Assurnazirpal bringing two apes, one of
which stands on his master’s shoulders while the other leaps before his
feet (Fig. 64); but it is never absent altogether.
[Illustration: FIG. 64.--Vassal bringing monkeys. Height
8 feet. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
If in its fidelity to habits that we may call childish the sculpture
of Mesopotamia bears a strong resemblance to that of Egypt, it is
nevertheless far inferior to it in other respects. The artist never
seems to have looked closely enough or with a sufficiently awakened eye
to perceive the differences that distinguish one individual or even
one race from another; at least if he saw them he did not understand
how to reproduce them; he did not even try to do so. From the very
beginning--so far as we know it--the art of the Nile valley turned
out portraits both of Pharaoh and of private individuals that are
astonishing in their truth and life.[156] Even in those executed in a
more summary fashion and not in any way to be classed as masterpieces,
we find a singular aptitude in seizing and noting those peculiarities
which make of every human face an unique creation, a medal of which
but one example has been struck. Ethnic characteristics are given with
no less truth; we have seen elsewhere how many faithful portraits they
have left of the races with whom they entertained long and unbroken
relations.[157]
Very few traces of this talent or disposition are to be found in the
monuments of Mesopotamia. Of course in a draped school of sculpture
we could hardly expect to find any great preoccupation with the
various beauties of the human body. Given the Assyrian costume, it was
impossible that the Assyrian artist should aspire to bring out those
beauties. In many works from the Nile valley the influence of the sex,
the age, and even the profession upon the development of the muscles,
upon, if we may be allowed the expression, the physiognomy of the
flesh, is skilfully shown in the modelling.[158] But faces were not
concealed by the Assyrian draperies; why then were their distinctive
marks of individuality so consistently ignored? The sculptor should
have concentrated his attention upon them all the more, and so arrived
at a faithful portrait. He did not do so however. Neither Assyrian
nor Chaldæan had any such ambition. By a process of selection and
abstraction they arrived at a kind of mean, at a certain ideal of manly
beauty which served them to the end. That ideal is characterized by
the abundance and symmetrical arrangement of the hair and beard, by a
low forehead, heavy and strongly-arched eyebrows, a hooked and rounded
nose, a small mouth with full but not too heavy lips, a strong, rounded
chin, and limbs whose muscular development betrayed their vigour.
[Illustration: FIG. 65.--Head of a eunuch; from Layard.]
The universal acceptance of this type is proved chiefly by the
Assyrian sculpture. The fact is that among all the thousands of figures
it produced there are but two heads, the one with, the other without, a
beard. We have already encountered the first in all the scenes in which
the king, his ministers, his officers or his soldiers appear. It is
also used for the gods (Vol. I. Figs. 13 and 15) and the winged bulls,
whose heads, perhaps, like the Egyptian sphinxes, were supposed to be
reproductions of the royal features. The beardless variety seems, in
the royal processions, to be confined to those eunuchs who have always
played such an important part at Oriental courts (Vol. I. Figs. 23 and
24, and Vol. II. Plate X.); the fleshy heaviness of their cheeks and
necks (Fig. 65) has been thought to confirm this idea. But we should be
mistaken if we recognized these miserable beings in all the beardless
figures. The latter are so numerous in some compositions that no such
explanation is admissible. In many instances they seem to represent
people of the lowest class, peasants, labourers, and slaves (see Vol.
I. Figs. 45, 151, 152, and Vol. II. Figs. 44 and 48). As the oldest
sculptures of Chaldæa suffice to prove, the habit of wearing the hair
and beard long did not date from the earlier years of that country. In
those sculptures we find heads completely shaved. It is possible that
the ancient custom was changed when the formidable army to which
Assyria owed its power and fortune was created. The beard may then have
become, as the moustache used to be with us, a sign of the military
caste. We never find soldiers or their officers without it;[159] but
their hair and beards are shorter than those of the king and his
ministers (Fig. 66); they do not fall upon the chest and shoulders
in several rows of curls carefully arranged.[160] In the reliefs the
amplitude and length of the beard are always a sign of the highest rank.
[Illustration: WINGED BULL
FROM KHORSABAD
Louvre]
[Illustration: FIG. 66.--Assyrian soldier; from the
Louvre. Height of slab 2 feet.]
The temples, the forehead, and the nape of the neck were lost under
this abundant hair, while the beard covered all below the cheek-bones
and the tiara the top of the head. Beyond the nose and eyes there was
hardly anything left by which one individual could be distinguished
from another. Now the Assyrian race was a race in the proper sense of
the word; it was homogeneous and pure-blooded. Between one member and
another of the aristocracy that reigned and fought, these two features
would vary little. All their noses were more or less aquiline, all or
nearly all their eyes large and black. The national fashion of wearing
the hair would suppress many of the characteristics by which we know
one man from another. From all this it results that the crowd of
kings and nobles who furnished the sculptor with his favourite theme
are vastly like each other. This similarity or rather uniformity was
ill calculated to awaken the sense of portraiture in the artist. The
features that distinguished one king from another are slurred over by
the sculptor simply because they were in reality so lightly marked that
he hardly perceived their existence.
[Illustration:
PLATE V
J.Bourgoin del. Imp.Ch.Chardon. J.Sulpis.sc.
ASSURBANIPAL IN HIS CHARIOT
FROM KOUYUNDJIK
Louvre]
We know that this opinion is not shared by all those who have busied
themselves with the Assyrian monuments. It has been said and, in the
belief of some, proof has been given, that we possess the elements of
an Assyrian iconography, that the images of the kings, in the steles
and on the palace walls, are true and faithful portraits.[161] We
believe this to be a mistake. No doubt the proportions of the body,
the expression of the face, and the general lines of the profile, are
not the same for Assurnazirpal, Sargon, and the sons and grandsons of
that prince. But what must we conclude from that? Only that Assyria
did not escape, any more than Egypt, from the action of that law of
change which is the very condition of life; that from one century and
one reign to another the taste and execution of the Assyrian sculptors
were modified, though in a very feeble degree. Thus figures are
shorter and more thickset in the north-western palace at Nimroud than
at Khorsabad or Kouyundjik; they are finer in their proportions, more
graceful, and altogether better in their art under Assurbanipal than
under his grandfather, the founder of the dynasty. Art, as we shall
bring abundant evidence to prove, followed the same path at Nineveh as
everywhere else. This is not to be denied; but before the hypothesis
against which we contend can be accepted, its advocates must show
that, in each series of monuments, the king is to be distinguished
by his personal features from the people about him. You must not take
the evidence of drawings or even of photographs; you must examine
the originals themselves. This I have done with the most scrupulous
attention both in the British Museum and the Louvre. I have carefully
examined and compared the four great series of royal bas-reliefs that
have come down to us, belonging respectively to Assurnazirpal, Sargon,
Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. If such an examination be made without
prejudice, I am satisfied that only one conclusion can be come to. In
all the pictures dating from one reign the king himself differs not at
all from his officers and nobles; he is only to be recognized by his
lofty tiara, an ornament that he alone had the right to wear, by his
sceptre or some other attribute of the kind, by his richer costume,
and, finally, by his greater stature. The sculptor always makes him
taller than his subjects, still more than his enemies and captives
(Vol. I. Fig. 22, and Fig. 15 above). This latter proceeding seems
childish, but it is so natural, and is found in so many countries,
that it is not at all astonishing. The sculptor has counted upon all
these attributes to show, at a glance, which is the king; and they are,
in fact, of a nature to prevent any chance of a mistake. He has not
troubled himself to seek in his royal features for something by which
he might be distinguished from the people about him. Winged genii, king
and viziers, all have the same eye, the same nose and the same mouth.
One would say that for each group of bas-reliefs the original designer
only drew one head, which was repeated by tracing or some other process
as often as there might be heads in the composition, and that it was
afterwards carved and modelled in the alabaster by the chisel of the
journeyman.
No, in spite of all that has been said, the Assyrians made no
portraits. They did not even attempt to mark in any precise fashion,
those physical characteristics by which they themselves were so
sharply divided from many of the races by whom they were surrounded.
Among the numerous peoples that figure in the sieges and battles that
cover the palace walls, although some, like the Chaldæans, the Jews,
and the Syrians, were near relations of their own, others belonged
either to the Aryan or Turanian family; but any one who will examine
the reliefs as we have done, will see that all the prisoners of
war and other vanquished enemies have the same features as their
conquerors.[162] The only exception to which we can point is in the
case of certain bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal in which the episodes of
an expedition into Susiana are retraced. There we can perceive in some
of the figures--by no means in all--an endeavour on the part of the
sculptor to mark the difference of race otherwise than by details of
costume and head-dress. Here and there we find a head that suggests a
negro;[163] but his characteristics are never as clearly marked as in
Egypt. This may be merely the result of caprice on the part of some
individual artist who has amused himself by reproducing with the edge
of the chisel some head which had struck his fancy; but even here we
only find one profile several times repeated. The modelling is far from
searching, but wherever the work is in fair condition and the scale not
too small the character we have described may be easily distinguished.
The only differences over which the Assyrian sculptors naturally
troubled themselves were those of costume and equipment; thus we find
them recording that the people subdued in one of the expeditions of
Sennacherib wore a crown or wreath of feathers about their heads (Fig.
48).[164] So, too, in the relief of a man with apes, the foot-covering,
a kind of buskin with upturned toes (Fig. 64), should be noticed. But
the lines of his profile remain unchanged; and yet there can be no
doubt that the sculptor here meant to represent a man of negro race,
because, as Layard, who dug up the monument, tells us, traces of black
paint might be distinctly perceived upon the faces of this man and his
companions.[165] On a Babylonian stele that we have already figured
(Fig. 43), some have attempted to recognize a Mongol type, and thence
to confirm the hypothesis that would make a Turanian race the founders
of the Chaldæan civilization. This, too, we think a mistake.[166]
At first sight this curious monument surprises those who are accustomed
to Assyrian art, but the nature of the material has not a little to do
with that. The hardness and darkness of basalt affect the treatment
of the sculptor in quite a different way from a gypseous stone like
alabaster. Add to this that the proportions are quite unlike those of
the Ninevite reliefs. This Marduk-idin-akhi is a work of the ancient
school, which made its figures far shorter than those of such Assyrian
reliefs as have come down to us. Finally the head-dress should be
noticed. In place of being conical it is cylindrical, a form which
overweights the figure and shortens its apparent proportions. On the
whole, any one looking at this stele without bias on one side or the
other, will, we think, acknowledge that the type it presents is the
same as the figures at Nimroud, Khorsabad, and Kouyundjik. It is,
moreover, identical with that we see in monuments even older than this
royal Babylonian stele, such as the fragmentary relief found by M. de
Sarzec at Sirtella (Fig. 67).
[Illustration: FIG. 67.--Fragment of a Chaldæan
bas-relief. Louvre. Limestone. Height 3¾ inches.]
The type which crops up so often in the pages of this history was
fixed, in all its main features, in the earliest attempts at plastic
art made by the Chaldæans. By them it was transmitted to their
scholars, the Assyrians, and during long centuries, until the fall of
Nineveh and Babylon, the painters and sculptors of Mesopotamia, from
the shores of the Persian Gulf to the foot of the mountains of Armenia,
did not cease to reproduce and perpetuate it, I might say to satiety;
they reproduced it with infinite patience, and, so far as we can see,
without once suspecting that the human visage might sometimes vary its
lines and present another aspect.
§ 4. _On the Representations of Animals._
In the preceding pages our chief aim has been to determine the
nature and the mode of action of the influences under which the
Assyro-Chaldæan sculptor had to do his work. We have explained how
certain conditions hampered his progress and in some respects arrested
the development of his skill.
The height to which the plastic genius of this people might have
carried their art had their social habits been more favourable to the
study of the nude, may perhaps be better judged from their treatment of
animals than anything else. Some of these, both in relief and in the
round, are far superior to their human figures, and even now excite the
admiration of sculptors.
The cause of this difference is easily seen. When an artist had to
represent an animal, his study of its form was not embarrassed by any
such obstacle as a long and heavy robe. The animal could be watched
in its naked simplicity and all its instinctive and characteristic
movements grasped. The sculptor could follow each contour of his model;
he could take account of the way in which the limbs were attached to
the trunk; he saw the muscles swell beneath the skin, he saw them
tighten with exertion and relax when at rest. He was not indifferent
to such a sight; on the contrary, he eagerly drank in the instruction
it afforded, and of all the works he produced those in which such
knowledge is put into action are by far the most perfect; they show us
better than anything else how great were his native gifts, and what a
fund of sympathy with the beauties of life and with its inexhaustible
variety his nature contained. Whether he model an animal separately or
introduce it into some historic scene, it is always well rendered both
in form and movement.
This is to be most clearly seen in the rich and varied series of
Assyrian reliefs, but the less numerous works of the same kind of
Babylonian origin show the same tendency and at least equal talent.
In copying the principal types of the animal world with fidelity and
vigour, the Assyrian sculptors only followed the example set them by
their south-country masters.
[Illustration: FIG. 68.--Head of a cow, bronze. British
Museum. Width across the cheeks 3¾ inches.]
A cow’s head in bronze, which was brought from Bagdad by Mr. Rassam,
is broad in treatment and of great truth (Fig. 68); the same good
qualities are to be found in a terra-cotta tablet found by Sir Henry
Rawlinson in the course of his excavations in the Birs-Nimroud (Fig.
69). It represents a man, semi-nude and beardless and with a stout
stick in his hand, leading a large and powerfully made dog by a plaited
strap. It is a sort of mastiff that might be used for hunting the wild
beasts in the desert and marshes, the wild boar, hyena, and panther,
if not the lion. The characteristics of the species are so well marked
that naturalists have believed themselves able to recognise it as
that of a dog which is still extant, not in Mesopotamia indeed, but in
Central Asia.[167] We may seek in it for the portrait of one of those
Indian hounds kept, in the time of Herodotus, by the Satrap of Babylon.
His pack was so numerous that it took the revenues of four large
villages to support it.[168]
Similar subjects were represented upon other tablets of the same
origin. One of them shows a lion about to devour a bull and disturbed
by a man brandishing a mace. Nothing could be more faithful than the
action of the animal; without letting go his prey he raises a paw, its
claws opened and extended and ready to be buried in the side of the
rash person who interrupts his meal.[169]
[Illustration: FIG. 69.--Terra-cotta tablet. British
Museum. Height 3⅗ inches.]
We may also mention a cylinder which, from its style, M. Ménant does
not hesitate to ascribe to the first Chaldæan monarchy. It represents
two oxen in a field of wheat. The latter, by a convention that also
found favour with the Greeks, is indicated by two of those huge
ears that so greatly astonished Herodotus.[170] Was it on a similar
principle that the Chaldæan engraver gave his oxen but one horn apiece?
In spite of this singularity and the peculiar difficulties offered
by work in intaglio on a very hard material, the forms are well
understood, and the artist has not been content to give them merely in
outline. At the croup and under the belly an effort has been made to
model the figure and to mark its thickness.
Judging from their style and inscriptions, several more of these
engraved stones may be ascribed to the oldest Chaldæan schools of art,
but we are satisfied with again reminding our readers that it was in
Lower Mesopotamia that everything had its beginning. We shall take our
remaining examples from the richer deposits of Assyria.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.--Cylinder of black marble.
National Library, Paris.]
Among all those animals that attracted the attention of man either by
their size or strength, either by the services they rendered or the
terror they caused, there were none that the chisel of the Assyrian
sculptor did not treat and treat with taste and skill. With their
passion for the chase the kings and nobles of Assyria were sure to
love dogs and to train them with scrupulous care.[171] They did more.
They employed sculptors in making portraits of them. In the palace of
Assurbanipal terra-cotta statuettes of his best dogs have been found
(Fig. 71). They belong to the same race as the Chaldæan mastiff above
mentioned, but their strength, their fire, I might almost say their
ferocity, is better shown in those pictures where they are no longer
in a state of repose, but in movement and action. Look at the series
of slabs representing the departure for the chase. The hounds are held
in the leash by attendants who carry bags on their shoulders for the
smaller game (see Fig. 72). Mark the tightened cord, the straining
bodies, the tension of every muscle in their desire to get at their
quarry! We can almost fancy we hear the deep, confused bayings with
which they prelude the regular music of the hunt itself when the game
is afoot. These animals are represented with no less truth and vivacity
when a kill has taken, or is about to take, place. As an example of
this we may point out a relief from the same palace in which two of
these bloodhounds launch themselves upon a wild ass whose flight has
been arrested by an arrow. The ass still manages to stagger along, but
he will not go far; the hounds are already upon him and have buried
their teeth in his flanks and croup.[172]
[Illustration: FIG. 71.--Terra-cotta dog. British
Museum. Height 2⅖ inches.]
Other domestic animals are figured with no less sure a hand; to each
is given the proportions and attitudes that really characterise it. We
shall now study them all in succession; others have done so, and have
found much precious information upon the fauna of Western Asia and upon
the state of Mesopotamian civilization;[173] we shall content ourselves
with mentioning the principal types and those in which the sculptor has
shown most skill.
[Illustration: FIG. 72.--The hounds of Assurbanipal.
British Museum. Height 26 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
The colossi of the gateways have already given us an opportunity for
showing how art enlisted the powerful limbs and natural majesty of
the bull in its service. Elsewhere the bovine race occupies a less
important part in Assyrian sculpture than in that of Egypt, in whose
tombs scenes of agricultural art are of such constant occurrence. We
find, however, the wild bull,[174] which the kings of Calah hunted
in the neighbouring desert (Fig. 15), and the draught ox, which,
after a lucky raid, the terrors of Asia drive before them with their
prisoners and other booty (Vol. I. Fig. 30).[175]--We may also point
to the heifer’s head in ivory which acts as tail-piece to the third
chapter of our first volume. We sometimes find also sheep and goats
of both sexes (Fig. 54);[176] but of all the animals that have close
relations with man, that which occurs most often on the palace walls is
the horse. They did not use him as a beast of burden; it was the mule
that was used for drawing carts (Vol. I. Fig. 31), for carrying women
and children and merchandise (Vol. I. Figs. 30 and 115). As with the
Arabs of to-day, the horse was reserved for war and hunting. But the
Assyrians were not, like the Egyptians, content to harness him to the
chariot; they rode him as well. Their armies comprised a numerous and
well-provided cavalry; and the Assyrian artist drew the horse a great
deal better than his Egyptian _confrère_.
The horses we meet with in the Assyrian sculptures are of a heavier
breed than Arabs; they are generally shorter and more thickly set.
Travellers believe the breed to still exist in the horses of Kurdistan,
a country which was bordered by ancient Assyria and dependent upon
it.[177] The head is small, well-formed, and well-carried (Fig. 73),
the shoulders sloping, the neck and limbs well set on, and the muscles
strongly marked. We have already had occasion to figure horses at full
speed (Vol. I. Fig. 5), standing still (Vol. I. Figs. 67 and 115),
and proceeding at a slow pace (Figs. 21 and 31).[178] No observer can
avoid being struck by the truth of attitude, and movement given by the
Assyrian sculptor to horses both driven and mounted. Nowhere is this
merit more conspicuous than in one of those bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal
that figure the episodes of a chase of wild asses (Fig. 74).
[Illustration: FIG. 73.--Chariot horses; from Layard.]
Contrary to their usual habits the herd have allowed themselves to
be surprised. One of those armies of beaters who are yet employed by
eastern sovereigns on such occasions, has driven them upon the hunters.
The latter, preceded by their dogs, throw themselves upon the herd,
which breaks up in all directions. They pierce those that are within
reach with their arrows; those that do not fall at once are pursued and
brought down by the hounds. We cannot reproduce the whole scene,[179]
but we doubt whether there is any school of animal painters that has
produced anything more true to nature than the action of this poor
beast stopping in the middle of his flight to launch futile kicks at
his pursuers.
[Illustration: FIG. 74.--Wild ass. From the hunt of
Assurbanipal, in the British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
The ibex and the wild goat figure in the same sculptured pictures.
One marching in front of the herd turns and anxiously sniffs the
wind, while her companion quietly browses by her side; farther off,
two kids trot by the side of their mother. The alarm has not yet been
given, but upon the next slab the artist shows the headlong flight
that follows the discovery of the enemy. Naturally it is the wild
and domestic animals of Mesopotamia and the districts about that
are most commonly figured in these reliefs, but the sculptor also
took advantage of every opportunity and pretext for introducing into
his repertory those rare and curious animals which were only seen in
Nineveh on rare occasions. Thus the camel that we find in so many
pictures is the same as that which now occupies the same region and
marches in its slow caravans;[180] but on the obelisk of Shalmaneser
we find the double-humped Bactrian camel (Fig. 49).[181] The clumsy
tribe of the pachyderms is not only represented by the wild boars that
still have their lairs in the marshes of the lower Euphrates;[182] the
rhinoceros and the Indian elephant also occur on the obelisk (Vol. I.
Fig. 111).[183] The apes shown in our Fig. 64 also seem to belong to an
Indian species.[184]
The sculptor was not always as happily inspired by these exotic
animals as by those of his own country, and in that there is nothing
surprising. He only caught a passing glimpse of them as they defiled,
perhaps, before the people in some triumphal procession. On the other
hand, the fauna of his native land were known to him through long
habit, and yet his reproductions of the elephant and the dromedary
are very good, much better than those of the semi-human ape. His idea
of the rhinoceros is very faulty; the single horn planted on the nose
leaves no doubt as to his meaning, but the lion’s mane with which the
animal’s back is clothed has never belonged to the rhinoceros. The
artist may have worked from a description.
In these pictures birds hold a very secondary place; Assyrian sculpture
was hardly light enough of hand to render their forms and feathers. For
such a task, indeed, painting with its varied handling, its delicate
lines and brilliant colours is required. It was with the brush that the
Egyptians succeeded, in the frescoes of their tombs, in figuring the
principal birds of the Nile Valley with all their elegance of form and
brilliant variety of plumage. In Assyria, among a nation of soldiers
and in an art whose chief inspiration had to do with war, the only
bird we find often reproduced is the eagle, the symbol of victory,
who floats over the chariot of the king, and the vulture who devoured
where they fell the bodies of the enemies of Assyria; and even these
images are rather careless and conventional, which may perhaps be
accounted for by their partially symbolic character and their frequent
repetition.[185] A group of partridges rising and, in those sculptures
of the later Sargonids in which the artists show a love for picturesque
detail, birds hopping in the trees or watching over their nestlings,
have been mentioned as showing technical excellence of the same kind
as the hunting scenes.[186] The ostrich appears on the elaborate
decorations of the royal robes (Fig. 75) and upon the cylinders (Fig.
76). Perhaps it was considered sacred.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.--Embroidery on the king’s robe;
from Layard.]