THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.
§ 1.--_Ceramics._
Of all the materials put in use by the inhabitants of Mesopotamia,
clay was the first and by far the most important. Clay furnished the
sun-dried bricks of which the great buildings were constructed, the
burnt bricks with which the artificial mounds on which those buildings
stood were cased, and the enamelled bricks that enabled certain parts
to be covered with a rich polychromatic decoration. The figures of
the gods and demons they worshipped and the tombs into which they
were thrust after death were both made of this same material. It was
upon clay that they learnt to write; it was to slabs of terra-cotta
that their kings confided the memory of their victories and acts
of devotion, and the private population their engagements and the
contracts into which they entered. For thousands of years tablets of
clay thus received not only long texts, but those impressions from
seals, each one of which represents a signature. While wet and soft,
clay readily accepted any symbol that man chose to place upon it; once
it was burnt, those symbols became practically indestructible.
Accustomed to employ the unrivalled docility of kneaded earth in so
many ways, the Chaldæans must, at a very early date, have used it for
domestic purposes, for cooking, for holding grain, fruits, and liquids.
Like every one else they must have begun by shaping such utensils with
their fingers and drying them in the sun. Few remains of these early
attempts have been preserved. The invention of the potter’s wheel and
firing-oven must have taken place at a very remote period both in
Egypt and Chaldæa. The oldest vases found in the country, those taken
from tombs at Warka and Mugheir, have been burnt in the oven. Some,
however, do not seem to have been ‘thrown’ on the wheel. The thickness
of their walls and their irregular shape suggest that the potter
fashioned them with the back and palm of his hand (Figs. 163–165). The
paste is coarse; it is mixed with chopped straw, which shows here and
there on the surface; there is neither ornament nor glaze, and the
curves are without grace.[361]
[Illustration: FIGS. 163–165.--Chaldæan vases of the
first period. British Museum.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 166–168.--Chaldæan vases of the
second period. British Museum.]
Some other vases found in the same cemeteries are ascribed to a later
epoch. They give evidence of a real progress in art. We have already
figured two examples in our first volume (Figs. 159 and 160); three
more are given in Figs. 166–168. The body is finer, and sometimes
covered with a slight glaze; there is still no decoration, but the
forms are obviously meant, and not without distinction. These objects
have been thrown on the wheel, and the dexterity of their maker is
further shown by the skill with which their handles are attached.
[Illustration: FIG. 169.--Chaldæan vase, about 4 inches
high. British Museum.]
We have no means of assigning even an approximate date to the vases
found in other parts of Chaldæa. A curious vase from Hillah may be
ascribed to a much later period, however, on the evidence of its shape
alone (Fig. 169). It has the general form of a bucket. The body is
decorated with indented triangles cut in its thickness and detached
from the background. In all this there is a striving after effect that
suggests the decadence. Nothing like it has been found in Assyria
dating from the ninth, eighth, or seventh centuries. Sir H. Layard
brought from Nimroud a certain number of vases showing a real progress
even when compared with the remains from the second period of Chaldæan
ceramics. Among these were some quaintly shaped pieces, such as the
hexagonal vase with slightly concave sides reproduced in Fig. 170. To
the same class belongs the very common form, with a pointed base, that
could be thrust into the sand (Fig. 171), and the large bottles shown
in Figs. 172 and 173. By the side of these not very graceful pieces
we find some with shapes at once simple and happy, and comparable, in
more than one instance, to those that the Greeks were to adopt in later
years. Goblets with feet and without (Figs. 174–176), a well-shaped
ewer (Fig. 177) and some variously contoured amphoræ, should be
noticed. One of the latter has a long neck and two very small handles
(Fig. 178), the handles of the other two are larger and more boldly
salient, while in one they are twisted to look like ropes.
The vase last figured, like many others from the same place, is glazed,
and glazed in two colours, a bluish-green round the neck and a decided
yellow upon the body. At the line where they meet the two colours run
one into the other, producing a far from disagreeable effect.
[Illustration: FIGS. 170–173.--Assyrian vases; from
Layard.]
It will be noticed that the decoration upon all these objects is very
slight. We can point to little beyond the double row of chevrons on one
of the amphoræ (Fig. 178), and the collar of reversed leaves round a
kind of alabastron found at the same place (Fig. 181).
[Illustration: FIGS. 174–176.--Goblets; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 177.--Ewer; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 178–180.--Amphoræ; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 181.--Alabastron; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 182.--Fragment of a vase. British
Museum.]
The taste for decorating their works seems to have spread among the
Assyrian potters between the ninth and seventh centuries B.C.
At least many traces of it have been found among the remains at
Kouyundjik. The date is fixed for us by a fragment on which the name
of Esarhaddon occurs, the letters of which it is composed standing out
in light against a dull black background. There is no further ornament
than a line of zig-zags traced with some brown pigment. The fragment
we reproduce (Fig. 182) formed part of another vase decorated in the
same way. We cannot point to a single complete specimen of this work,
but by comparing many pieces all from the same place, we may gain some
idea of the taste in pottery that prevailed under the Sargonids. A vase
upon which certain Aramaic characters were traced with the brush was
decorated with bands of a reddish-brown pigment turning round the neck
and body at irregular intervals (Fig. 183).[362] Elsewhere we find a
more complicated form of the same ornament. The horizontal bands are
separated by a kind of trellis-work, in which the lines cross each
other, sometimes at right angles and sometimes obliquely, while in the
blank spaces we find a motive often repeated, which might be taken at
first sight for a Greek _sigma_. The resemblance, we need hardly
say, is purely accidental (Fig. 184). We may also mention a fragment
where the surface is sprinkled with reddish-brown spots on a light
yellow ground (Fig. 185). So far as we know the only complete example
of this decoration is the fine goblet dug up by Place in the Jigan
mound (Fig. 186).[363]
[Illustration: FIG. 183.--Fragment of a vase. British
Museum.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 184, 185.--Fragments of vases.
British Museum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 186.--Goblet. Height, 5 inches.
Louvre.]
[Illustration: FIG. 187.--Fragment of a vase. Actual
size. British Museum.]
In all these fragments the decoration is purely geometrical; it is
composed of lines, spots, and other motives having no relation to
the organic world. A step in advance of this seems, however, to have
been taken. On some other fragments from the same districts, files
of roughly-suggested birds appear upon the bands and between opposed
triangles (Figs. 187 and 188). We shall find the same motive in Cyprus,
at Mycenæ, and at Athens, in the pottery forming the transition between
the purely geometrical period and that in which imitation of life
begins. In a fragment which is tantalizingly small we catch a glimpse
of three lion’s paws playing with a chess-board ornament. A row of
cuneiform characters runs along the lower part (Fig. 189).
[Illustration: FIGS. 188, 189.--Fragments of vases.
Actual sizes. British Museum.]
These fragments, taken altogether, show that a certain effort was made
to produce decorated pottery towards the end of the Assyrian period.
Why was the attempt not carried farther? Why were earthenware vases not
covered with ornamental designs that might be compared for richness
and variety with those chiselled in or beaten out of stone or wood,
ivory or metal? The reason may, we think, be guessed. Clay appeared
such a common material that they never thought of using it for objects
of luxury, for anything that required great skill in the making, or in
which its proprietor could take any pride. When they wanted fine vases
they turned to bronze; bronze could be gilded, it could be damascened
with gold and silver, and when so treated was more pleasing to the eye
and more provocative of thought and ingenuity on the part of the artist
than mere clay. It was reserved for Greece to erect the painted vase
into a work of art. Her taste alone was able to make us forget the
poverty of the material in the nobility of the form and the beauty of
the decoration; we shall see that her artists were the first to give to
an earthenware jar or cup a value greater, for the true connoisseur,
than if they were of massive gold or silver.
During the period on which we are now engaged, the Mesopotamians
sometimes attempted to cover their vases with enamel. The British
Museum has several specimens of a pottery covered with a blue glaze
like that of the Egyptian faïence.[364] Here and there the blue has
turned green under the action of time. One of the vases reproduced
above (Fig. 180) belongs to this class. Vases of the same kind, covered
with a rather thick layer of blue and yellow enamel, have been found
among the rubbish in the Birs-Nimroud at Babylon,[365] but it is
difficult to fix an exact date for them with any confidence. On the
other hand, it is generally agreed that the large earthenware coffins
brought from the funerary mounds of Lower Chaldæa are very much later.
In style the small figures with which they are decorated resemble the
medals and rock sculptures of the Parthians and Sassanids.[366]
The art of making glass, which dates in Egypt at least as far back
as the first Theban dynasty,[367] was invented in Mesopotamia, or
imported into it, at a very early period. No glass objects have been
found in the oldest Chaldæan tombs, but they abound in the ruins of the
Assyrian palaces. A great number of small glass bottles, resembling the
Greek _alabastron_ or _aryballos_ in shape,[368] have been
dug up; many of them have been made brilliantly iridescent by their
long sojourn in the earth.[369] A vase found by Layard at Nimroud,
and engraved with Sargon’s name just below the neck, is generally
quoted as the oldest known example of transparent glass (see Fig.
190).[370] It has been blown solid, and then the inside cut out by
means of an instrument which has left easily-visible traces of its
passage; this instrument was no doubt mounted on a lathe. Sir H. Layard
believes, however, that many of the glass objects he found are much
older, and date from the very beginning of the Assyrian monarchy, but
their material is opaque and coloured.[371] Some bracelets of black
glass, which were dug up at Kouyundjik, prove that common jewelry
was sometimes made of that material; glass beads, sometimes round,
sometimes flat, have also been found.[372] A glass cylinder or tube, of
unknown use, was found by Layard at Kouyundjik; it is covered with a
decoration made up of lozenges with a concave surface (Fig. 191).
[Illustration: FIG. 190.--Glass vase or bottle. Height
3½ inches. British Museum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 191.--Glass tube. Height 8¾ inches.
British Museum.]
It is curious that no cylinders or cones of terra-cotta or glass have
come down to us from the Assyro-Chaldæan period. Clay was doubtless
thought too common a material for such uses, and as for glass, they
had not yet learnt how to make it a worthy substitute for _pietra
dura_, as the Greeks and Romans did in later years.
Before we quit the subject of glass we must not forget to mention
a very curious object found by Layard at Nimroud, in the palace of
Assurnazirpal, and in the neighbourhood of the glass bottle and the
two alabaster vases on which the name of Sargon appears. It is a lens
of rock-crystal; its convex face seems to have been set up, with some
clumsiness, opposite to the lapidary on his wheel. In spite of the
imperfect cutting, it may have been used either as a magnifying, or,
with a very strong sun, as a burning, glass.[373] The fineness of the
work on some of the cylinders, and the minuteness of the wedges on some
of the terra-cotta tubs, had already excited attention, and it was
asked whether the Assyrians might not have been acquainted with some
aid to eyesight like our magnifying glass. It is difficult, however,
to come to any certain conclusion from a single find like this; but if
any more lenses come to light we may fairly suppose that the scribes
and lapidaries of Mesopotamia understood how thus to reinforce their
eyesight. In any case it is pretty certain that this is the oldest
object of the kind transmitted to us by antiquity.
§ 2. _Metallurgy._
Even at the time to which we are carried back by the oldest of the
graves at Warka and Mugheir, metallurgy was already far advanced in
Chaldæa. Tools and weapons of stone are still found in those tombs in
great numbers;[374] but side by side with them we find copper, bronze,
lead, iron, and gold. Silver alone is absent.
Copper seems to have been the first of all the metals to attract the
notice of man, and to be manufactured by him. This is to be accounted
for partly by the frequency of its occurrence in its native state,
partly by the fact that it can be smelted at a comparatively low
temperature. Soft and ductile, copper has rendered many services to man
from a very early period, and, both in Chaldæa and the Nile valley, he
very soon learnt to add greatly to its hardness by mixing a certain
quantity of tin with it. Where did the latter material come from? This
question we can no more answer in the case of Mesopotamia than in that
of Egypt; no deposits of tin have yet been discovered in the mountain
chains of Kurdistan or Armenia.[375] However this may be, the use of
tin, and the knowledge of its properties as an alloy with copper,
dates from a very remote period in the history of civilization. In its
natural state, tin is always found in combination, but the ore which
contains it in the form of an oxide does not look like ordinary rock;
it is black and very dense; as soon as attention was turned to such
things it must have been noticed, and no great heat was required to
make it yield the metal it contained. We do not know where the first
experiments were made. The uses of pure tin are very limited, and
we cannot even guess how the remarkable discovery was made that its
addition in very small quantities to copper would give the precious
metal that we call bronze. In the sepulchral furniture with which the
oldest of the Chaldæan tombs were filled we already find more bronze
than pure copper.[376]
Lead is rare. A jar of that metal, and the fragment of a pipe dug up
by Loftus at Mugheir may be mentioned.[377] It is curious that iron
though still far from common, was not unknown. Iron nowhere exists in
its native state on the surface of our planet, except in aerolites. Its
discovery and elimination from the ore requires more time and effort
and a far higher temperature than copper or tin. Those difficulties had
already been surmounted, but the smelting of iron ore was still such
a tedious operation that bronze was in much more common use. Iron was
looked upon as a precious metal; neither arms, nor utensils, nor tools
of any kind were made of it; it was employed almost exclusively for
personal ornaments, such as rings and bracelets.[378]
Gold, which is found pure in the veins of certain rocks and in the beds
of mountain torrents, and in pieces of a size varying from that of a
grain of dust to nuggets of many pounds, must very soon have attracted
the attention of man, and excited his curiosity, by its colour and
brilliancy. We find it in the tombs mixed with objects of stone and
bronze. Round beads for necklaces, earrings and finger rings of not
inelegant design were made of it.
[Illustration: FIG. 192.--Iron mattock; from Place.]
If, when the Chaldæans built their first cities, they already knew how
to put metals to such varied uses, they could hardly have failed to
take farther strides in the same direction. In order to measure the
progress made, we have only to establish ourselves among the Assyrian
ruins and to cast an eye over the plunder taken from them by Botta,
Layard, and Place. Metal is there found in every form, and worked with
a skill that laughs at difficulties. Silver and antimony are found
by the side of the metals already mentioned,[379] and, stranger than
all, iron is abundant. The excavations at Warka seem to prove that
the Chaldæans made use of iron sooner than the Egyptians;[380] in any
case it was manufactured and employed in far greater quantities in
Mesopotamia than in the Nile valley. Nowhere in Egypt has any find
been made that can be compared to the room full of instruments found
at Khorsabad, to the surprise and delight of M. Place.[381] There were
hooks and grappling irons fastened by heavy rings to chain-cables,
similar to those now in use for ships’ anchors; there were picks,
mattocks, hammers, ploughshares. The iron was excellent. The smith
employed upon the excavations made some of it into sickles, into tires
for the wheels of a cart, into screws and screw-nuts. Except the
Persian iron, which enjoys a well-merited reputation, he had never,
he said, handled any better than this. Its resonance was remarkable.
When the hammer fell upon it it rang like a bell. All these instruments
were symmetrically arranged along one side of the chamber, forming a
wall of iron that it took three days to dig out. After measurement,
Place estimated the total weight at one hundred and sixty thousand
kilogrammes (about 157 tons).[382]
According to the same explorer some of these implements, resembling the
sculptor’s sharp mallet in shape, were armed with steel points (Fig.
192).[383] Until his assertion is confirmed, we may ask whether Place
may not, in this instance, have been deceived by appearances. Before we
can allow that the Assyrians knew how to increase the hardness of iron
by treating it with a dose of carbon, we must have the evidence of some
competent and careful analyst.
It is certain, however, that in the ninth and eighth centuries this
people used iron more freely than any other nation of the time. Thus
several objects which appear at the first glance to be of solid bronze
have an iron core within a more or less thin sheath of the other metal.
Dr. Birch called my attention to numerous examples of this manufacture
at the British Museum, in fragments of handles, of tires and various
implements and utensils, from Kouyundjik and Nimroud. The iron could
be distinctly seen at the fractures. The Assyrians clung to the bronze
envelope because that metal was more agreeable to the eye and more
easily decorated than iron, but it was upon the latter substance that
they counted to give the necessary hardness and resistance. The contact
and adhesion between the two metals was complete. From this, experts
have concluded that the bronze was run upon the iron in a liquid
state.[384]
It is easy enough to understand how the inhabitants of Mesopotamia
came to make such an extensive use of iron in the instruments of their
industry; it was because they were nearer than any other nation to what
we may call the sources of iron. By this we mean the country in which
all the traditions collected and preserved by the Greeks agreed in
placing the cradle of metallurgy--the region bounded by the Euxine, the
Caucasus, the Caspian, the western edge of the tableland of Iran, the
plains of Mesopotamia, the Taurus, and the high lands of Cappadocia.
To find the deposits from which Nineveh and Babylon drew inexhaustible
supplies, it is unnecessary to go as far as the northern slopes of
Armenia, to the country of the Chalybes, the legendary ancestors of our
mining engineers. The mountains of the Tidjaris, a few days’ journey
from Mossoul, contain mineral wealth that would be worked with the
greatest profit in any country but Turkey.[385]
Bronze was reserved for such objects as we should make of some precious
metal. Botta and Place found numerous fragments of bronze, but it is
to Layard that we owe the richest and most varied collection of bronze
utensils. It was found by him in one room of Assurnazirpal’s palace at
Nimroud.[386] The metal has been analysed and found to contain ten per
cent. of tin, on the average.[387] These proportions we may call normal
and calculated to give the best results. In one of the small bells that
were hung to the horses’ necks the proportion was rather different;
there was about fifteen per cent. of tin. By this means it was hoped to
obtain a clearer toned and more resonant alloy.
Pure copper seems to have been restricted to kitchen utensils, such as
the large cauldrons that were often used as coffers in which to keep
small objects of metal, like the little bells of which we have spoken,
rosettes, buttons and the feet of tables and chairs not yet mounted,
etc.[388] It is probable that these vessels were also used for heating
water and cooking food.
All these metals, and especially iron and copper, were dearer perhaps
in Chaldæa than in Assyria, because Babylon was farther from the
mineral region than Nineveh; but the southern artizans were no less
skilful than their northern rivals. In our review of the metal
industries we shall borrow more frequently from the north than from the
south, but the only reason for the inequality is that Chaldæa has never
been the scene of exhaustive and prolific excavations like those of
Assyria.
§ 3. _Furniture._
Cursing Nineveh and exulting in the prospect of her fall, the prophet
Nahum calls to all those who had been crushed by the Assyrian hosts; he
summons all the nations of the east to take their part in the work of
revenge and their share in the spoil to be won. “Take ye the spoil of
silver,” he cries, “take ye the spoil of gold; for there is none end of
the store and glory out of all the pleasant furniture.”[389] We shall
find all this among our spoils of Nineveh. The princes and nobles of
Assyria seem to have had a peculiar love for luxurious furniture. To
see this we have only to look at the bas-reliefs, where the artist took
the greatest care to imitate every detail of the thrones on which he
placed his gods and kings; and many fragments of these richly decorated
chairs have been recovered in the course of the excavations; with the
help of the sculptures they could be put together and the missing
parts supplied. The elements of many such restorations exist in the
British Museum, and we may well ask why no attempt has been made to
reconstitute an Assyrian throne with their help, so as to give an exact
idea of the kind of state chair used by a Shalmaneser or a Sennacherib.
In order to carry out such a restoration successfully we should have
to begin by renewing all the wooden parts of the piece, the legs, back
and cross-bars. Wood alone could be used for such purposes. Metal
would be too heavy if solid, and not stiff and firm enough if hollow.
We have, besides, direct proof that the Assyrian joiner so understood
his work. “I found among the ruins,” says one explorer, “small bulls’
heads of copper, _repoussé_ and carefully chased, inside of
which a few fragments of dried wood still remained. These pieces had
certainly belonged to chairs exactly similar to those figured in the
reliefs.”[390]
At Nimroud, in the room in Assurnazirpal’s palace in which so many
precious objects were discovered, Layard found the royal throne, and
close beside it, the stool upon which the royal feet were placed, an
arrangement of which we may gain an exact idea from the reliefs (Figs.
47 and 127). The sides of this chair were ornamented with bronze
plaques nailed on to wooden panels, and representing winged genii
fighting with monsters. The arms were ornamented at the end with rams’
heads, and their points of junction with the uprights of the back were
strengthened with metal tubes.[391] All the wood had disappeared, but
it was impossible to look at the remains for a moment without seeing
how they were originally put together and what office they had to fill
in the complete piece. Most of the fragments are now in the British
Museum.
[Illustration: FIG. 193.--Fragment of a throne. Height
18 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
The same collection has been recently enriched by the fragments of
another throne, from Van.[392] A claw foot, uprights ending in several
rows of dentations, and two winged bulls that once in all probability
formed part of the arms, are among the parts preserved. The bulls
are without faces, which may have been carried out in some other
materials, gold perhaps, or ivory. The wings also are covered with
hollows in which inlays of ivory or lapis may have been fixed. From
Van also came the remains of another throne which now belongs to M.
de Vogué, who has been good enough to allow us to reproduce the more
important fragments. The best of these is one of the front feet which
ends at the top in a rectangular tablet on which a winged lion is
crouched (Fig. 193). Another piece seems to have been one of the cross
pieces of the back;[393] the round sockets with which one face of it
is nearly covered must once have been filled with precious stones.
This lion, like that on the London chair, also has its wings covered
with incisions, and its eyeballs represented by gaping hollows. The
effect of the whole was heightened by threads of gold inlaid on its
leading lines, such as round the grinning jaws of the lion. The largest
piece is a hollow casting, but very heavy. The various members were
connected by tenons and mortices; some of the latter are shown in our
illustrations. The large rectangular openings on the upper surface of
the cross-bar received a metal stem to which some small figures were
attached; their bases have left marks on the cross-bar which may still
be distinguished. Their feet were surrounded by a line of gilding.
[Illustration: FIG. 194.--Fragment of a throne. Length
18 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Illustration: FIG. 195.--Bronze foot of a piece of
furniture. Louvre.]
These pieces of furniture show great variety in their forms and
decorative motives. Sometimes the ornament is purely geometrical, like
that of the foot shown in our Fig. 195, where it is composed of several
rings placed one above the other with a bold torus-like swell in the
middle. More frequently, however, the bronze uprights end in capitals
resembling a bunch of leaves in shape. We have already encountered
this type in the ivories, where it occurs in the balustrade of a small
window (Vol. I., Fig. 129); we also find it strongly marked in the
throne from Van, where the drooping leaves are chiselled with much
care. We find the same motive in a small sandstone capital in the
British Museum. It is in one piece with its shaft. We are inclined to
think it a part of some stone chair in which the forms of wooden and
bronze furniture were copied (Fig. 196).[394]
[Illustration: FIG. 196.--Capital and upper part of a
small column. Height 2 feet. British Museum.]
Two pieces of the same kind found at Nimroud are more complex in
design. In one we have a bouquet of leaves reminding us of the
Corinthian capital (Fig. 197), while, in the other, a band seems to
hold two lance heads, opposed to each other at their base, and two
bean-shaped fruits, against the shaft (198). As for the feet of all
kinds of furniture, the favourite shapes are pine cones (Figs. 47 and
127) and lions’ paws (Figs. 47 and 199).
[Illustration: FIGS. 197, 198.--Fragments of bronze
furniture; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 199.--Footstool, from a bas-relief;
from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 200.--Stool; from Layard.]
These elaborate decorations are found not only on the royal thrones but
also on the footstools which are their necessary complement (Fig. 199),
and on the seats without backs which were used, perhaps, instead of
the more unwieldy throne when the king was away from his capital (Fig.
200). The footstool has lions’-claw feet, the more important object has
rams’ heads at each end of the upper cross-bar;[395] the leg shows
the capital with drooping leaves noticed above; volutes, opposed to
each other as in the capital from Persepolis, ornament the cross-bar
which holds the uprights together. In this piece of furniture, where
the sculptor has confined himself to the scrupulous reproduction of
his model, we may see how these objects were upholstered. A cushion
of some woven material with long bright-coloured woollen fringes, was
fitted to the seat. The whole is characterized by happy proportions and
severe simplicity of design. We know from the Sippara tablet that even
the gods were sometimes content with such a seat (Vol. I., Fig. 71).
The figures of Izdubar and Hea-bani are there introduced between the
uprights of Samas’s stool.
One of the most complex and effective of all these examples of
decorative art is the throne upon which Sennacherib is seated before
the captured city of Lachish (Fig. 47). The space between the uprights
is occupied by three rows of small male figures, who with their
uplifted arms and heads gently thrown back, seem to bear the weight
of the cross pieces. This naïve device is also to be met with in the
sculptures of Persia; it is suggestive of the absolute power which
places the king so far above his subjects that nothing is left for them
but to support and add to the edifice of his grandeur.[396]
Bronze and wood were not the only materials used in these objects of
regal luxury. As in the throne of Solomon,[397] the glory of gold and
the creamy whiteness of ivory were mingled with the sombre tones of
bronze. This is proved by the thrones from Van, and it was noticed by
the explorers of the Assyrian ruins; small fragments of ivory were
mixed with the pieces of bronze that have been recognized as the
_débris_ of furniture.[398] Some pieces of rock-crystal, found in
the palace of Sennacherib, appear also to have helped to ornament a
chair.[399]
It is easy to guess how ivory was used on these objects. Look at the
throne of Sennacherib (Fig. 47), the couch of Assurnazirpal, the table
on which his cup is placed and the high chair of his queen (Fig. 127).
The cross-bars and uprights are divided into numerous small panels or
divisions; each panel may have inframed a plaque of carved ivory.
Were all these plaques made in Mesopotamia? or were they imported from
Phœnicia and Egypt? The frankly Egyptian character of some among the
tablets we have reproduced (see Vol. I. Figs. 129 and 130; and above,
Figs. 57, 58 and 59) forbid us to deny that some of the ivories were
imported;[400] but we believe that to have been the exception rather
than the rule. We know both from the sculptured reliefs and from actual
finds that ivory was brought into Assyria in its rough state. Layard
found some elephant’s tusks in the royal houses at Nimroud,[401] and we
see others brought by tributaries as presents to the king, both in the
reliefs of Assurnazirpal’s palace,[402] and in those of Shalmaneser’s
obelisk.[403]
Hence it appears probable that ivory was worked at Nineveh and Babylon,
and that probability is changed into a certainty when we examine the
other ivories in the same collection. Although not a few of the ivories
chiselled in relief offer motives that are strange to Mesopotamian art,
it is not so with a series of tablets on which the designs are carried
out in pure line and with extreme refinement (Fig. 201). Figures and
ornaments are purely Assyrian; winged genii wearing the horned tiara,
dressed as in the reliefs, and surrounded with the rosettes and cable
pattern to which we have so often referred, and other motives of the
same kind. Among the latter may be noticed the variety of knop and
flower border that we find so often in the painted and enamelled
decoration, in which the knop is replaced by a disk (see Vol. I., Figs.
117 and 118).
[Illustration: FIG. 201.--Ivory panel. Actual size.
British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
We believe the truth to be as follows. A considerable quantity of
Indian ivory entered Mesopotamia by the Persian Gulf and the caravan
routes. It was there carved by native artists into the various shapes
required, but, especially during the heyday of the Assyrian monarchy,
it was far from supplying the whole demand. Africa, through Phœnicia,
was called upon to make up the deficiency. But the African ivory was
not imported in its raw state, it came in in the form of skilfully
chiselled plaques that only required mounting; the merchants, through
whom the trade was carried on, delivered sets of these plaques for
beds, or chairs, or what not. We thus get at some reason for the
difference in style between the tablets in relief and those engraved by
the point. The latter represent native art; in the former, where we so
often see the characteristic gods, sphinxes, costumes, head-dresses,
and even cartouches of the Egyptian monuments, we may recognize the
product of the Nile delta, or even of Tyre and Sidon. The inscriptions
on several fragments seem to confirm this hypothesis. I have seen no
ivory tablets with cuneiform characters, but plenty with those of the
Phœnician alphabet.[404]
[Illustration: FIG. 202.--Dagger hilt. Ivory. Actual
size. Louvre.]
Ivory was used for many purposes; we have described how it was employed
upon ceilings and doors;[405] we have just seen how it helped to
ornament articles of furniture; it also supplied the material for
many useful and ornamental objects, such as sceptres, boxes, cups,
knife-handles, etc. (Fig. 202). Did the Assyrians understand how
to give still greater variety to the appearance of these things by
staining the ivory? At first sight it might appear that they did. Among
the specimens in the British Museum some have the fine yellow colour of
the Renaissance ivories; others are white, grey, brown or even quite
black. These tints, as I myself ascertained, are not superficial; they
extend entirely through the pieces. But we do not believe they were
produced by any artificial process. If the Assyrians had understood how
to dye ivory, would they not have dyed it red and blue as well as the
colours above mentioned? But they did nothing of the sort. The tints
in question are, then, to be otherwise explained. They are not the
direct result of fire. Wherever the flame has touched the ivory it has
calcined it, and left nothing but a whitish friable substance. They
may, however, have been caused by the long continued impregnation with
smoke and carbon received from a soil filled with ashes and washed by
the rain. An effect of the same kind is produced upon objects buried in
a peaty soil. In any case several of the fragments that have come down
to us are of a fine, glossy black, like that of ebony.[406]
In beds, tables, chairs, and footstools the framework was of wood
and the decoration of metal, an important _rôle_ being assigned
to incrustations of ivory, of lapis lazuli, of crystals, and other
materials of the kind. But there were also pieces of furniture whose
purpose made them well fitted to be carried out entirely in bronze;
such, for example, were the tripods on which the braziers or censers,
used in sacrifices, were placed. We have seen these figured in the
reliefs (Vol. I., Figs. 68 and 155); the Louvre possesses one that was
found at Babylon (Fig. 203). It is formed of three stems very slightly
inclined inwards, and bound together at the top by a circle decorated
with incised ornaments and four rams’ heads in relief. Towards the
bottom they are held together by three straight cross-bars, the points
of junction with the legs being masked by three human faces. The feet
are shaped after those of oxen. Cords are twisted round the point of
junction of foot and leg, then crossed in front of the fetlock and
knotted at the back.[407]
The chafing-dishes placed upon these bronze tripods were of the
same material. Chaldæans and Assyrians, although they neglected to
give their earthen vessels any great beauty of form or richness of
decoration, attached great importance to their metal vases. The bronze
vessel seems to have been one of the chief objects of luxury both in
the temple and the palace. The peculiarities offered by certain of
these objects and the interest of the problems they suggest, make it
necessary that they should be studied separately and in some detail.
[Illustration: FIG. 203.--Bronze tripod. 13 inches high.
Louvre.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 204, 205.--Metal vases. From
Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 206.--Metal bucket. From Layard.]
§ 4. _Metal Dishes and Utensils._
Metal vases are often represented in the bas-reliefs, where we find
them sometimes of very simple form, like the bowl (Fig. 204) and bucket
(Fig. 205) here figured, which may have been of copper. They are
provided on the upper edge with small loops through which a cord might
be passed. As for the buckets that were used in the ritual of public
worship, and that the sculptor put in the hands of the winged genii
adoring the sacred tree (Vol. I., Figs. 4 and 8), they were certainly
of bronze, both body and handle. Their forms are very elegant, and
their walls are ornamented at the top and bottom with twisted and wavy
lines, with palmettes and flowers both open and closed. In the example
we figure (Fig. 206) the winged globe, which is introduced just below
the upper edge, attests the religious character of the object.[408]
The bas-reliefs tell us nothing about those large vessels, analogous,
no doubt, to the λέβης and κρατὴρ of the Greeks, upon the sides of
which the human-headed birds with extended wings, one of which we
have already figured, were fixed (Fig. 91). Neither has any complete
specimen of the class yet been discovered in the excavations. The
frequent employment of this motive is proved, however, by the number of
these detached pieces that we possess. They all come from Van, but they
belonged to different vases. We here engrave a second example (Fig.
207). The ring on the back by which the handle was attached will be
noticed. As in the throne described above the bronze was relieved with
inlaid ornament; there is a hollow in the breast in which it was set.
In the originals the rivet-holes which afforded a means of fixing them
may be seen; in one or two the heads of the rivets are still in place.
This specimen differs from one figured on page 172, in that it has two
heads.
[Illustration: FIG. 207.--Applied piece. Height 9
inches; width 14 inches. From the collection of M. de Vogüé.]
We do not multiply examples of the vessels used to transport liquids,
because their decorative forms were found pretty equally distributed
all over Chaldæa and Assyria. We have every reason to believe that
they were produced in great numbers in all the towns of Mesopotamia.
On the other hand, there is a whole class of vessels that perplex
and embarrass archæologists almost as much as they delight them--the
class of _metal cups_. This name is to some extent a misnomer.
We shall employ it for the sake of simplicity, but most of the objects
in question are rather what we should call dishes or platters than
cups. They belong to the same class as the Greek φιύλη and the Roman
_patera_. Their vertical section is shown at the bottom of our
Fig. 208. The slight ridge underneath, caused by the gentle elevation
of the flat bottom, enabled the dish to be more firmly grasped than
would otherwise have been possible.
[Illustration: FIG. 208.--Bronze platter. From Layard.]
Such things must have been comparatively rare and costly. In a
store-room of the North-Western Palace at Nimroud, Layard found a great
number of them, packed one within another in cauldrons like those
mentioned above; others, of less value no doubt, were stacked against
the wall. At first the explorers were inclined to think that they all
dated from the reign of Assurnazirpal, the founder of the building; but
many things combined to suggest that the palace was repaired by Sargon
and even inhabited by him.[409] He may have lived there until his own
house at Khorsabad was finished. It is possible, therefore, that some
or all of these cups date from the eighth century B.C.
In many instances oxydization had gone so far that the cups could
not be lifted without falling to pieces; others, however, though
covered with a thick coat of oxide, were brought away and successfully
cleaned.[410] At the British Museum I compiled a catalogue of
forty-four plates or cups of this kind, nearly all from the same
treasure, while in the store rooms of the same institution there are
many more waiting to be cleaned and rendered fit for exhibition. All
these, with a few exceptions, are ornamented, the simplest among them
having a star or rosette in the centre. Wherever the bronze has not
been completely eaten away the decoration may be recovered, and often
it is still singularly clear and sharp. A few cups that had been
protected by those placed above them showed, when discovered, such
brilliant copper tones that the workmen at first thought they were of
gold. The mistake was soon recognized, but we may well believe that
the conquerors of half Asia numbered gold and silver vessels among the
treasures stored in their palaces; as yet, however, none have been
found. All these cups, like the deeper vessels recovered at the same
time, were of bronze; the precious metals only appear in the form of
small inlays and incrustations in the alloy. In the centre of the
rosettes with which some of the bands are decorated a small silver
stud, slightly raised above the rest of the surface, is sometimes
placed, and in a few cases the points of the great rosette that
occupies the centre of the plate radiate from a centre of gold, silver
being banished to the small rosettes at the edge. Again, the middle is
sometimes a kind of boss, over the whole of which traces of gold may
still be distinguished.
The decoration of these _pateræ_ is always inside: on the outside
nothing is to be seen but the confused reverse of the pattern, such as
may be seen on the left of our Fig. 208. I have found but one exception
to this rule in a much deeper cup on the outside of which a lion hunt
is represented.[411] In that case figures engraved within the vase
would have been invisible, for it is very deep.
In most cases the ruling principle of the decoration is the division
of the disk into three, four, or five concentric circles, but in some
instances the whole field, with the exception of a simple border, is
occupied by one subject. In those cups upon which the greatest care
and thought seem to have been lavished, the figures are beaten up
into relief with the hammer and then finished with the burin. In the
others the whole design is carried out with the latter tool, which
is sometimes used with a degree of refinement that is amazing. As an
example of this we may quote a _patera_ that has been cleaned
and put on view quite recently. Stags march in file around its five
concentric zones, which are all of the same width. It is difficult
to explain either the fineness of the lines or the regularity of the
design, each animal being an accurate reproduction of his neighbour and
the intervening spaces being exactly equal. One is almost tempted to
believe that the work must have been done by machinery.
We know, however, that such mechanical helps were unknown to the
ancients, and, although there are many cups and vases at the museum
bearing a strong mutual resemblance, we cannot point to any two that
are exactly similar. To give a fair idea of the variety of their
designs we should have to reproduce not only all the cups figured
by Sir H. Layard, but several more that have only been prepared for
exhibition quite lately. Among the latter are some very curious ones.
We cannot afford the space for all this, and must be content to give a
few examples chosen from those on which the ornament is most definite
and clearly marked.
[Illustration: FIG. 209.--Bronze platter. Diameter about
9 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.]
It was noticed by those who saw the veil of oxide drawn away from the
ornamentation of these bronze vessels that a large proportion of them
were Egyptian rather than Assyrian in their general physiognomy. Some
of them displayed motives familiar to all those who have travelled in
the Nile valley. Take, for instance, the fragment we have borrowed from
one of the best preserved of them all (Fig. 209).[412] Neither the
minute lines of palmettes in the centre, nor the birds that occur in
the outer border, have, perhaps, any great significance, but nothing
could be more thoroughly Egyptian than the zone of figures between the
two. The same group is there four times repeated. Two griffins crowned
with the _pschent_, or double tiara of upper and lower Egypt,
have each a foot resting upon the head of a kneeling child, but their
movement is protective rather than menacing. Instead of struggling, the
child raises its hands in a gesture of adoration. Between the griffins
and behind them occur slender columns, quite similar to those we have
so often encountered in the open architecture of Egypt.[413] Between
the groups thus constituted are thicker shafts bearing winged scarabs
on their campaniform capitals. These same columns and capitals occur on
another cup from which we detach them in order to show their details
more clearly.[414] In one instance the terminal of the shaft is unlike
anything hitherto found elsewhere; it is a sphere (Fig. 210); but the
contour of the next is thoroughly Egyptian (Fig. 211), and the symbols
on the last three, a scarab and two uræi, proclaim their origin no less
clearly (Figs. 212 to 214).
[Illustration: FIGS. 210–214.--Columns or standards
figured upon a bronze cup; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 215.--Bronze platter. Diameter 8
inches. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.]
We gather the same impression from a platter only cleaned quite lately
and consequently not to be found in Sir H. Layard’s works; it is now
reproduced for the first time (Fig. 215). The whole decoration is
finely carried out in line with the burin. The middle is occupied by a
seven pointed star or rosette, nine times repeated. Around this elegant
and complex motive there are concentric circles, the third of which,
counting from the centre, is filled up with small figures hardly to
be distinguished by the naked eye. We divine rather than see lions,
birds, seated men, and certain groups of symbols, such as three lines
broken and placed one above the other, which are continually recurring
in the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt. The fifth zone has conventional
papyrus stems alternating with rosettes. The sixth, much larger, is
filled with ovals surmounted by two plumes and the uræus, that is by
the royal cartouch of Egypt in its usual form. The interior of each
oval contains very small groups of figures separated from one another
by four horizontal lines.
[Illustration: FIG. 216.--Part of a bronze cup or
platter. Diameter about 9 inches. British Museum.]
We may quote a cup figured by Layard as a last example of this exotic
style of decoration. In the centre there are four full-face heads with
Egyptian wigs (Fig. 216). Around them a mountainous country is figured
in relief, and sprinkled with trees and stags engraved with the point.
The wide border, which is unfortunately very much mutilated, is covered
with groups of figures apparently copied from some Egyptian monument,
if we may judge from the attitudes and costume. One figure, whose torso
has entirely disappeared, wears the _pschent_ and brandishes a
mace over his head; the movement is almost identical with that of the
victorious Pharaoh with whom we are so familiar. A goddess, who might
be Isis, stands opposite to him. In another part of the border there is
a misshapen monster crowned with feathers and resembling the Egyptian
Bes.[415]
[Illustration: FIG. 217.--Bronze cup. Diameter 11
inches; from Layard.]
Side by side with these platters we find others on which nothing
occurs to suggest foreign influence. Take, for instance, the example
reproduced in Fig. 208. In the centre there is a small silver boss,
while the rest of the flat surface is occupied by the fine diaper
pattern made up of six-petalled flowers that we have already met with
on the carved thresholds (Vol. I. Fig. 96). The hollow border is
ornamented with four lines of palmettes united by an undulating line,
a motive which is no less Assyrian than the first (Vol. I., Figs. 128,
138, 139, etc.). In Fig. 217 we reproduce a cup on which its original
mounting, or ring by which it was suspended, is still in place. The
whole of the decoration is pure Assyrian. The rosette is exactly
similar to many of those found on the enamelled bricks (see Vol. I.,
Figs. 122, 123). In the first of the three zones, gazelles march in
file; in the second, a bull, a gazelle, an ibex, and a winged griffin,
followed by the same animals attacked by lions and making fourteen
figures in all; in the third zone fourteen heavy-crested bulls follow
one another round the dish. All these animals are among those most
constantly treated by the Assyrian sculptor; their shapes and motions
are as well understood and as well rendered as in the bas-reliefs. The
bulls especially are grandly designed. Moreover, the idea of employing
all these animals for the adornment of such a surface is entirely in
the spirit of Assyrian decoration. We shall meet with it again in the
shields from Van; we figure the best preserved of the latter on page
347.
It would be easy to give more examples, either from Layard or from our
own catalogue of these objects, of the purely Assyrian style on the
one hand, or of that in which the influence of Egyptian models is so
clearly shown, on the other. It is enough, however, that we have proved
that these little monuments may be divided into two clearly marked
classes. Did the two groups thus constituted share the same origin?
Did they both come from the same birth-place? Further discoveries may
enable us to answer this question with certainty, and even now we may
try to pave the way to its solution.
There would be no difficulty if these bronze vessels bore cuneiform
inscriptions, especially if the latter formed a part of the decorative
composition, as in the palace reliefs, and were cut by the same hand.
But this, so far as we know at present, was never the case. In some
fragments of pottery we have found cuneiform characters (Fig. 185),
and the name of Sargon has even been read on a glass phial (Fig. 190),
but--and we cannot help feeling some surprise at the fact--none of
these objects of a material far more precious bear a trace of the
Mesopotamian form of writing. I do not know that a single wedge has
been discovered upon them. A certain number of them are inscribed,
but inscribed without exception with those letters which Phœnicia is
supposed to have evolved out of the cursive writing of Egypt.[416]
They were not introduced with any idea of enriching the design, as
they always occur on the blank side of the vessel. They are close to
the edge, and their lines are very slender, suggesting that they were
meant to attract as little attention as possible. They consist of but
a single name, that of the maker, or, more probably, the proprietor of
the cup.[417]
May we take it that these inscriptions afford a key to the mystery?
that they prove the vases upon which they occur at least to have
been made in Phœnicia? We could only answer such a question in the
affirmative if peculiarities of writing and language belonging only to
Phœnicia properly speaking were to be recognized on them; but the texts
are too short to enable us to decide to which of the Semitic idioms
they should be referred, while the forms of the letters do not differ
from those on some of the intaglios (Figs. 156 and 157) and earthenware
vases (Fig. 183), and upon the series of weights bearing the name of
Sennacherib.[418] The characters belong to that ancient Aramæan form of
writing which seems to have been practised in Mesopotamia in very early
times as a cursive and popular alphabet.
The inscriptions, then, do little to help us out of our embarrassment,
and we are obliged to turn to the style of the vessels and their
decoration for a solution to our doubts. The conviction at which we
soon arrive after a careful study of their peculiarities is that even
those on which Egyptian motives are most numerous and most frankly
employed were not made in Egypt. In the first place we remember that
the Egyptians do not seem to have made any extensive use of such
platters; their libations were poured from vases of a different shape,
and the cups sometimes shown in the hands of a Pharaoh always have a
foot.[419] Moreover, in the paintings and bas-reliefs of Egypt, where
so many cups and vases of every kind are figured, and especially the
rich golden vessel that must have occupied such an important place in
the royal treasure, we only find the shape in question in a few rare
instances.[420]
After this general statement we may go into the details. In these
the hand of the imitator is everywhere visible; he borrows motives
and adapts them to his own habits and tastes. Take as an example the
platter to which a double frieze of hieroglyphs gives a peculiarly
Egyptian physiognomy (Fig. 215). An Egyptian artist would never
employ hieroglyphs in such a position without giving them some real
significance, such as the name of a king or deity. Here, on the other
hand, an Egyptologist has only to glance at the cartouches to see that
their hieroglyphs are brought together at haphazard and that no sense
is to be got out of them. This is obvious even by the arrangement of
the several characters in the oval without troubling to examine them
one by one. They are divided into groups by straight lines, like those
of a copy book. The Egyptian scribe never made use of such divisions;
he distributed his characters over the field of the oval according
to their sense and shape. The arrangement here followed is only to
be explained by habits formed in the use of a writing that goes in
horizontal lines from left to right or right to left. There is, in
fact, nothing Egyptian but the shape of the ovals, and the motive with
which they are crowned. The pretended hieroglyphs are nothing but
rather clumsily executed pasticcios. And it must be noticed that even
this superficial Egyptianism is absent from the centre of the dish. In
those Theban ceilings which display such a wealth of various decoration
we may find a simple rosette here and there, or rather a flower with
four or eight petals, but these petals are always rounded at the
end; nowhere do we find anything that can be compared to the great
seven-pointed star which is here combined so ingeniously with eight
more of the same pattern but of smaller size. On the other hand this
motive is to be found on a great number of cups where no reminiscence
of Egypt can be traced. The ruling idea is the same as that of the
diaper-work in the thresholds from Khorsabad and Nimroud (see Vol. I.,
Fig. 135).
After such an example we might look upon the demonstration as made,
but it may be useful to complete it by analyzing the other cups we
have placed in the same class. That on which the scarabs on standards
and the opposed sphinxes appear (Fig. 209) seems pure Egyptian at
first sight; but if we take each motive by itself we find variations
that are not insignificant. In Egyptian paintings, when the scarab
is represented with extended wings they are spread out horizontally,
and not crescent-wise over its head.[421] We may say the same of the
sphinx. The griffin crowned with the _pschent_ is to be found in
Egypt as well as the winged sphinx,[422] but the Egyptian griffins had
no wings,[423] and those of the sphinxes were folded so as to have
their points directed to the ground. In the whole series of Egyptian
monuments I cannot point to a fictitious animal like this griffin. It
is in the fanciful creations of the Assyrians alone that these wings,
standing up and describing a curve with its points close to the head
of the beast that wears them (see Fig. 87), is to be seen. It is an
Assyrian griffin masquerading under the double crown of Egypt, but a
trained eye soon penetrates the disguise.
The arrangement, too, of the group is Assyrian. When the Egyptians
decorated a jewel, a vessel, or a piece of furniture by combining
two figures in a symmetrical fashion, they put them back to back
rather than face to face.[424] Very few examples can be quoted of the
employment in Egypt of an arrangement that is almost universal in
Assyria. In the latter country this opposition of two figures is so
common as to be common-place; they are usually separated from each
other by a palmette, a rosette, a column or even a human figure (see
Vol. I., Figs. 8, 124, 138, 139; and above, Figs. 75, 90, 141, 152,
153, 158, etc.), and it was certainly from Mesopotamia that Asia Minor
borrowed the same motive, which is so often found in the tombs of
Phrygia and in Greece as far as Mycenæ, whither it was carried from
Lydia by the Tantalides.[425]
The same remarks will apply to the cup partially reproduced in our
Fig. 216. The ornament of the centre and of the outer band is Egyptian
in its origin, but the mountainous country with its stags and its
trees, that lies between--have we found anything like it in Egypt?
The mountains are suggested in much the same fashion as in the palace
reliefs, and we know how much fonder the sculptors of Mesopotamia were
of introducing the ibex, the stag, the gazelle, etc., into their work
than those of Egypt. The rocky hills and sterile deserts that bounded
the Nile valley were far less rich in the wilder ruminants than the
wooded hills of Kurdistan and the grassy plains of the double valley.
There is one last fact to be mentioned which will, we believe, put
the question beyond a doubt. Of all antique civilization, that which
has handed down to us the most complete material remains is the
civilization of Egypt. Thanks to the tomb there is but little of it
lost. Granting that these cups were made in Egypt, how are we to
explain the fact that not a single specimen has been found in the
country? About sixty in all have been recovered; their decoration
is distinguished by much variety, but when we compare them one with
another we find an appreciable likeness between any two examples. The
forms, the execution, the ornamental motives are often similar, or, at
least, are often treated in the same spirit. The majority come from
Assyria, but some have been found in Cyprus, in Greece, in Campania,
Latium, and Etruria. Over the whole area of the ancient world there is
but one country from which they are totally absent, and that country is
Egypt.
We may, then, consider it certain that it was not Egyptian industry
that scattered these vessels so widely, from the banks of the Euphrates
to those of the Arno and the Tiber, not even excepting from this
statement those examples on which Egyptian taste has left the strongest
mark. Egypt thus put out of the question, we cannot hesitate between
Mesopotamia and Phœnicia. If the cups of Nimroud were not made where
they were found, it was from Phœnicia that they were imported. The
composite character of the ornamentation with which many of them were
covered is consistent with all we know of the taste and habits of
Phœnician industry, as we shall have occasion to show in the sequel.
On the other hand we must not forget at how early a date work in metal
was developed in the workshops of Mesopotamia. Exquisite as it is, the
decoration of the best of these vases would be child’s play to the
master workmen who hammered and chiselled such pictures in bronze as
those that have migrated from Balawat to the British Museum.
We are inclined to believe that the fabrication of these cups began
in Mesopotamia; that the first models were issued from the workshops
of Babylon and Nineveh, and exported thence into Syria; and that the
Phœnicians, who imitated everything--everything, at least, that had
a ready sale--acclimatized the industry among themselves and even
carried it to perfection. In order to give variety to the decoration of
the vases sent by them to every country of Western Asia and Southern
Europe, they drew more than once from that storehouse of Egyptian ideas
into which they were accustomed to dive with such free hands; and this
would account for the combination of motives of different origin that
we find on some of the cups. Vases thus decorated must have become
very popular, and both as a result of commerce and of successful wars,
must have entered the royal treasures of Assyria in great numbers. We
know how often, after the tenth century, the sovereigns of Calah and
Nineveh overran Palestine, as well as Upper and Lower Syria. After each
campaign long convoys of plunder wended their way through the defiles
of the Amanus and Anti-Lebanon, and the fords of the Euphrates, to the
right bank of the Tigris. The Assyrian conquerors were not content with
crowding the store-rooms of their palaces with the treasures thus won,
they often transported the whole population of a town or district into
their own country. Among the Syrians thus transplanted there must have
been artizans, some of whom endeavoured to live by the exercise of
their calling and by opening shops in the bazaars of Babylon, Calah,
and Nineveh. Clients could be easily gained by selling carved ivories
and these engraved cups at prices much smaller than those demanded when
the cost of transport from the Phœnician coast had to be defrayed.
In one of these two ways it is, then, easy to explain the introduction
of these foreign motives into Assyria, where they would give renewed
life to a system of ornament whose resources were showing signs of
exhaustion. This tendency must have become especially pronounced about
the time of the Sargonids, when Assyria was the mistress of Phœnicia
and invaded the Nile valley more than once. To this period I should be
most ready to ascribe the majority of the bronze cups; the landscapes,
hunts and processions of wild animals with which many of them are
engraved, seem to recall the style and taste of the bas-reliefs of
Sennacherib and Assurbanipal rather than the more ancient schools of
sculpture.
In any case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish
between the vases engraved in Mesopotamia by native workmen and those
imported from Phœnicia, or made at Nineveh by workmen who had received
their training at Tyre or Byblos. The resemblances between the two are
too many and too great. At most we may unite all the platters found in
Mesopotamia into a single group, and point out a general distinction
between them and those that have been discovered in the Mediterranean
basin. The ornament on the Nimroud cups is, on the whole, simpler than
on those found in Cyprus and Italy; the figure plays a less important
part in the former, and the compositions are more simple. The Assyrian
cups, or, to be more accurate, those found in Assyria, represent
the earliest phase of this art, or industry, whichever it should be
called. In later years, after the fall of Nineveh, when Phœnicia had
the monopoly of the manufacture, she was no longer content with purely
decorative designs and small separate pictures. Her bronze-workers
multiplied their figures and covered the concentric zones with real
subjects, with scenes whose meaning and intention can often be readily
grasped. This we shall see when the principal examples of this kind of
art come under review in our chapters upon Phœnicia.[426]
[Illustration: FIG. 218.--Bronze cup. British Museum.]
Meanwhile, we shall not attempt to establish distinctions that are
nearly always open to contest; they would, besides, require an amount
of minute detail which would here be quite out of place. To give but
one example of the evidence which might lead to at least plausible
conclusions, we might see pure Assyrian workmanship in the cup figured
below (Fig. 218),[427] where mountains, trees, and animals stand up in
slight relief, both hammer and burin having been used to produce the
desired result. Among these animals we find a bear, which must have
been a much more familiar object to the Assyrians living below the
mountain-chains of Armenia and Kurdistan than to the dwellers upon the
Syrian coast. In the inscribed records of their great hunts, the kings
of Assyria often mention the bear.[428] Nothing that can be compared
to these wooded hills peopled by wild beasts is to be found on the
cups from Cyprus or Italy. I may say the same of another cup on which
animals of various species are packed so closely together that they
recall the engravings on some of the cylinders (see Fig. 149).[429]
On the other hand, there are plenty of motives which may just as easily
have had their origin in one country as the other. The two vultures,
for instance, preparing to devour a hare stretched upon its back, which
we figure below (Fig. 219).[430]
[Illustration: FIG. 219.--Border of a cup; from Layard.]
It may be thought that we have dwelt too long upon these cups; but
the sequel of our history will show why we have examined them with an
attention that, perhaps, neither their number nor their beauty may
appear to justify. They are first met with in Assyria, but they must
have existed in thousands among the Greeks and Italiots. Light, solid,
and easy to carry, they must have furnished western artists with some
of their first models. As we shall see, they not only afforded types
and motives for plastic reproduction, but, by inciting them to find a
meaning for the scenes figured upon them, they suggested myths to the
foreign populations to whom they came.
§ 5. _Arms._
We shall not, of course, study Assyrian arms from the military point
of view. That question has been treated with all the care it deserves
by Rawlinson and Layard.[431] From the stone axes and arrow-heads that
have been found in the oldest Chaldæan tombs, to the fine weapons and
defensive armour in iron and bronze, used by the soldiers of Nineveh in
its greatest years, by the cavalry, the infantry, and the chariot-men
of Sargon and Sennacherib, the progress is great and must have required
many long centuries of patient industry. In Assyria no trade can have
occupied more hands or given rise to more invention than that of the
armourer. For two centuries the Assyrian legions found no worthy rivals
on the battlefields of Asia; and, although their superiority was mainly
due, of course, to qualities of physical vigour and moral energy
developed by discipline, their unvarying success was in some degree the
result of their better arms. Without dwelling upon this point we may
just observe that when war is the chief occupation of a race, its arms
are sure to be carried to an extreme degree of luxury and perfection.
Some idea of their elaboration in the case of Assyria may be gained
from the reliefs and from the original fragments that have come down to
us.
[Illustration: FIGS. 220, 221.--Chariot poles; from a
bas-relief.]
It was from the animal kingdom that the Assyrian armourer borrowed most
of the forms with which he embellished the weapons and other military
implements he made. Thus we find the chariot poles ending in the head
of a bull, a horse, or a swan (Figs. 220 and 221).[432] Elsewhere we
find a bow no less gracefully contrived; its two extremities are shaped
into the form of a swan’s head bent into the neck.[433]
[Illustration: FIGS. 222, 223.--Sword scabbards, from
the reliefs; from Layard.]
The sword is the king of weapons. By a kind of instinctive metaphor
every language makes it the symbol of the valour and prowess of him who
wears it. It was, therefore, only natural that the Assyrian scabbard,
especially when worn by the king, should be adorned with lions (Figs.
82, 222, 223). These were of bronze, no doubt, and applied. In the
last of our three examples a small lion is introduced below the larger
couple. The sword-blade itself may have been decorated in the same
fashion. The Assyrians understood damascening, an art that in after
ages was to render famous the blades forged in the same part of the
world, at Damascus and Bagdad. The Arab armourers did no more, perhaps,
than practise an art handed down to them from immemorial times, and
brought to perfection many centuries before in the workshops of
Mesopotamia. At any rate we know that two small bronze cubes found at
Nimroud were each ornamented on one face with the figure in outline
of a scarab with extended wings, and that the scarab in question was
carried out by inlaying a thread of gold into the bronze (Fig. 224).
Meanwhile we may point to an Assyrian scimitar, the blade of which is
inscribed with cuneiform characters.[434]
In the reliefs we find a large number of shields with their round
or elliptical surfaces divided into concentric zones.[435] A recent
discovery enables us to say how these zones were filled, at least in
the case of shields belonging to kings or chiefs. In 1880 Captain
Clayton found, on the site of an ancient building at Toprak-Kilissa,
in the neighbourhood of Van, four shields, or rather their remains,
among a number of other objects. These shields are now in the British
Museum. Upon one fragment we may read an inscription of Rushas, king of
Urardha, or Armenia, in the time of Assurbanipal.[436]
[Illustration: FIG. 224.--Bronze cube damascened with
gold; from Layard.]
This inscription, which is votive in its tenor, combines with the
examination of the objects themselves, to prove that these shields are
not real arms, made for the uses of war. The bronze is so thin--not
more than a millimetre and a half in thickness--that even if nailed
upon wood or backed with leather it could have afforded no serious
protection, and its reliefs must have been disfigured and flattened
with the least shock. The edge alone is strengthened by a hoop of
iron. The shields are votive, and must have been hung on the walls
of a temple, like those we see thus suspended in a bas-relief of
Sargon (Vol. I. Fig. 190), a relief in which a temple of this same
Armenia is represented.[437] But although they were made for purposes
of decoration, these arms were none the less copies of those used in
actual war, except in the matter of weight and solidity; thus they were
furnished with loops for the arms, but these were too narrow to allow
the limb of a man of average size to pass through them with any freedom.
[Illustration: FIG. 225.--Votive shield. Diameter about
34½ inches. Drawn by R. Elson.]
For us the most interesting point about them is their decoration, which
is identical in principle with several of the bronze platters lately
discussed (see Fig. 217). This may be clearly seen in our reproduction
of the shield which has suffered least from rust (Fig. 225).[438] In
the centre there is a rosette with many radiations; next come three
circular bands separated from each other and from the central boss by
a double cable ornament. The innermost and outermost zones are filled
with lions passant, the one between with bulls in the same attitude.
And here we find a curious arrangement of which we can point to no
other example: both lions and bulls have their feet turned sometimes
to the centre of the shield, sometimes to its outer edge. The general
character of the form is well grasped in both cases; but the design has
neither the breadth nor firmness of that upon the cup to which we have
already compared this shield (Fig. 217). The armourers were inferior in
skill to the gold and silversmiths--we can think of no more appropriate
name for them--by whom the metal cups were beaten and chased, although
they made use of the same models and motives. No one would attribute
a Phœnician origin to these bucklers; they were found in Armenia and
were covered with cuneiform inscriptions. They must have been made
either in Assyria, or in a neighbouring country that borrowed all from
Assyria, its arts and industries as well as its written characters. The
Assyrians attached too much importance to their arms and made too great
a consumption of them to be content with importing them from a foreign
country.
[Illustration: FIG. 226.--Knife-handle. Bone. Louvre.]
When we turn to objects of less importance, such as daggers and
knives, we find their handles also often modelled after animals’ heads.
We have already figured more than one example (Vol. I., tail-piece to
chapter II., and Vol. II., tail-piece to chapter I.). But sometimes
they were content with a more simple form of decoration belonging
to the class of ornament we call geometrical, which they combined
with those battlement shapes that, as we have seen, the enameller
also borrowed from the architect (Vol. I. Fig. 118). A by no means
ungraceful result was obtained by such simple means (Figs. 202 and
226). These knife-handles are interesting not so much on account of
their workmanship as for their tendency and the taste they display.
They were objects of daily use and manufacture. Cut from ivory and
bone, they were sold in hundreds in the bazaars. But in every detail
we can perceive a desire to make the work please the eye. The evidence
of this desire has already struck us in Egypt; it will be no less
conspicuous in Greece. In these days, how many useful objects turned
out by our machines have no such character. Those who design them think
only of their use. They are afraid of causing complications by any
attempt to make one different from the other or to give varied shapes
to tools all meant for the same service. They renounce in advance the
effort of personal invention and the love for ornament that gives
an interest of its own to the slightest fragments from an ancient
industry, and raises it almost to the dignity of a work of art.
§ 6. _Instruments of the Toilet and Jewelry._
The preoccupation to which we have just alluded, the love for an
agreeable effect, is strongly marked in several things which are
now always left without ornament. A single example will be enough
to show the difference. Nowadays all that we ask of a comb is to
do its duty without hurting the head or pulling out the hair; that
its teeth shall be conveniently spaced and neither too hard nor too
pliant. These conditions fulfilled, it would not be out of place in
the most luxurious dressing-room. The ancients were more exacting, as
a series of ebony combs in the Louvre is sufficient to show (Figs.
227–229).[439] They have two rows of teeth, one coarse, the other
fine, and each is ornamented in the middle with a figure in open-work
(Figs. 228–229) or raised in relief on a flat bed (Fig. 227). Only a
part of the latter comb is preserved. The frame round the figures is
cut into the shape of a cable above and below, and into rosettes at the
ends. On one side of the comb there is a walking lion, on the other the
winged sphinx shown in our engraving. Its body is that of a lion, it
is mitred and wears a pointed beard. In the second example we have a
lion with lowered head within a frame with a kind of egg moulding. The
forms are so heavy that at first we have some difficulty in recognizing
the species. In our last specimen both design and execution are much
better. A lion is carved in the round within a frame ornamented with
a double row of zig-zag lines. The modelling has been carried out by
a skilful artist and is not unworthy of a place beside the Ninevite
reliefs.
[Illustration: FIG. 227.--Comb. Actual size. Louvre.]
We know of nothing among the spoils of Assyria that can be compared to
those wooden spoons that the Egyptian workman carved with so light a
hand;[440] but two objects found at Kouyundjik prove that the Assyrians
knew how to give forms elegant and graceful enough, though less
original, to objects of the same kind. One of these is a bronze fork,
the other a spoon of the same material. Cables, zig-zags, and beads
are used to ornament them, and the whole is a good example of Assyrian
taste in little things.
[Illustration: FIG. 228.--Comb. Actual size. Louvre.]
So far we have treated Assyrian metal-work of the ornamental kind only
as it is seen in bronze. Hardly any objects of gold or silver have,
in fact, been discovered in Mesopotamia. And yet it is impossible
that those two metals can have been very rare in the Nineveh of the
Sargonids or the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar; war and industry certainly
led to considerable accumulations of both. We must find a reason for
their absence in the success with which the Assyrian tomb has so far
avoided discovery. The tomb alone could offer a safe asylum to such
treasures, and preserve them in its shadows for the inquisitive eyes
of modern archæologists. Before being abandoned to the slow effects of
time, the temples and palaces were pillaged. Here and there, however,
in some well contrived hiding-place or forgotten corner, a few trinkets
may have escaped the eyes of greedy conquerors, or of the later
marauders who sounded the ruins in every direction for the sake of the
precious metals they might contain.
[Illustration: FIG. 229.--Comb. Actual size. Louvre.]
The oldest jewels left to us by these peoples are those found in the
most ancient tombs at Warka. Their forms are simple enough--bronze
bracelets made of a bar tapering rapidly to each end and beaten with a
hammer into a slight oval (Figs. 232, 233). These bars are sometimes
very thick, as our first example shows. The golden ear-drops from the
same tombs (Fig. 234) are made in the same way.
At Nineveh the art is more advanced. We may form our ideas of it from
the bas-reliefs, where people are shown with jewels about their arms,
their necks, and hanging on their cheeks; and also from a few original
specimens that have escaped the general wreck. In the foundations of
Sargon’s palace, under the massive threshold, were found too, together
with a large number of cylinders, the remains of necklaces made up
of pierced stones, such as carnelian, red and yellow jasper, brown
sardonyx, amethyst, &c., cut into cylinders, polygons, medallions,
and into the shapes of a pear and of an olive or date-stone (Fig.
235). This use of precious stones was a survival from the days when
pebbles were turned to the same purpose. Earrings were made in the same
fashion (Figs. 236, 237). In one of the reliefs we see a eunuch wearing
a necklace in which double cones alternate with disks (Fig. 238).
The same elements could of course be used for bracelets or armlets,
by shortening the wire on which they were strung. From an art point
of view such a jewel was quite primitive; all its beauty lay in the
rich colours of its separate stones, among which beads of glass and
enamelled earthenware have also been found.
[Illustration: FIGS. 230, 231.--Bronze fork and spoon;
from SMITH’S _Assyrian Discoveries_.]
Kings and other high personages were not content with such simple
adornments. It would seem that princes wore necklaces made up of
separate pieces each of which had an emblematic signification of its
own (Fig. 239), because we find them constantly reappearing in the
reliefs, sometimes around the sovereign’s neck, sometimes distributed
over the field of a stele. In the stele of Samas-Vul, the king only
wears a single ornament on his breast; it is exactly similar to what we
call a Maltese cross (Fig. 116).
[Illustration: FIGS. 232, 233.--Bracelets; from
Rawlinson.]
[Illustration: FIG. 234.--Ear-drop. British Museum.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 235–237.--Necklace and ear-drops.
Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
These ornaments must have been of gold and of some considerable size.
The grand vizier, and the king when his tiara is absent, wear a diadem
about their foreheads in which the rosette is the chief element of the
decoration (Vol. I. Figs. 25 and 29). The queen’s diadem, in the “Feast
of Assurbanipal,” is crenellated (Fig. 117), reminding us of that worn
by the Greek Cybele. In the same monuments the wrists of kings and
genii are surrounded with massive bracelets (Vol. I. Figs. 4, 8, 9, 15,
23, 24, 29, &c.). In the Louvre there is a bronze bracelet of exactly
the same type (Fig. 24C).[441] We may see them figured among
the objects offered in tribute in a bas-relief at Nimroud (Fig. 241).
From the same reliefs we gather several examples of ear-pendents (Figs.
242–244). It is probable that the same models were carried out in gold,
silver, or bronze, according to the rank and fortune of the people for
whom they were made.[442] The forms were not altogether happy.
[Illustration: FIG. 238.--Necklace; from Layard.]
And yet the Assyrian workmen could sometimes turn out lighter and more
graceful objects than these. It was, no doubt, when they laboured for
the softer sex that they modified their methods of work. The figure
of a winged genius in which we ventured to recognise a goddess wears
several necklaces, and one of them looks like a chain with alternately
thin and stout members (Fig. 162). Now, at Kouyundjik, a necklace has
been found (Fig. 245) bearing no little resemblance to the one here
copied by the sculptor. It is composed of slender gold tubes, separated
from each other by beads of the same metal. These beads are alternately
ribbed and smooth. The workmanship is good and very careful.
[Illustration: FIG. 239.--Royal necklace; from
Rawlinson.]
That these articles of personal jewelry were made in the country is
proved by the fact that not a few of the moulds used by the jewellers
for the patterns most in favour have been found. They are small slabs
of serpentine or very hard limestone, in one face of which the desired
pattern is cut in intaglio (Figs. 246 and 247). Wherever the pattern
communicates with the outer edge by a small opening, it may have been
used to receive the liquid metal; where no such gutter exists, the
design must have been stamped, the leaves of metal being placed over
the hollow and beaten into it with a mallet.[443]
[Illustration: FIG. 240.--Bracelet. Diameter 5 inches.
Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
It was by this latter process, no doubt, that those buttons which
have been found in such quantities by every one who has explored the
Assyrian palaces, were made. They are sometimes small disks ornamented
with concentric bands (Fig. 248), sometimes lozenges with beaded edges
(Fig. 249). These buttons have sometimes staples for attachment like
ours, but more often they are pierced with a small hole for the passage
of a metal thread. They were thus fixed on the king’s robes and the
harness of his horses. Our Fig. 250, which is copied from a bas-relief
at Kouyundjik, shows how the leather bands that encircled the necks of
the chariot-horses and supported bells, metal rosettes and coloured
tassels, were decorated.[444]
[Illustration: FIG. 241.--Bracelets; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 242.--Ear-drop; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 243, 244.--Ear-drops; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 248, 249.--Gold buttons. British
Museum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 245.--Necklace. British Museum.]
The habits and tastes of the Oriental saddler have not changed since
the days of antiquity. We cannot get a better idea of Assyrian harness
than by examining the sets exposed for sale in the present day in the
bazaars of Turkey, Persia, and India. More than once, when some Kurdish
bey rode past him on his Arab, Sir H. Layard felt as if he had seen
a vision from one of the Ninevite reliefs. The leather stitched with
bright coloured threads, the housings of gaudy wool, the hawk’s bells
tinkling round the horse’s neck, were all survivals from the past.
The equipment of a Spanish mule, or the harness that used to be worn
by the waggon teams of Eastern France within the memory of men not yet
old, gives some idea of the effect produced.
[Illustration: FIGS. 246, 247.--Moulds for trinkets;
from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 248, 249.--Gold buttons. British Museum.]
from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 250.--Part of the harness of a
chariot-horse.]
Personal jewelry and the apparatus of the toilet seem to have been no
less elaborate in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar than in the Nineveh
of Sennacherib, but we possess very few objects that can be surely
referred to that period. To the very last years of the Chaldæan
empire, if not to a still later date, must be ascribed two golden
earrings now in the British Museum (Figs. 251 and 252). They represent
a naked child, with long hair and a head much too large for its body.
We are told that they were found in a tomb at Niffer, with other
objects whose Chaldæan character was very strongly marked. Without this
assurance we should be tempted to think their date no more remote than
that of the Seleucidæ.
Among the knobs, or buttons, used so largely by joiners, tailors, and
saddlers, some have been found of ivory and of mother-of-pearl. The
jewellers, too, must have used these substances, which would give them
an opportunity for effective colour harmonies. Thus Layard mentions an
ear-pendent that he found at Kouyundjik, which had two pearls let into
a roll of gold.[445]
[Illustration: FIGS. 251, 252.--Ear-pendents. British
Museum.]
On the other hand no amber has been found in Mesopotamia. That
substance was widely used by the Mediterranean nations as early as
the tenth century before our era, but it does not seem to have been
carried into the interior of Asia. It has been asserted that one of the
cuneiform texts mentions it;[446] that assertion we cannot dispute, but
it is certain that neither in the British Museum nor in the Louvre,
among the countless objects that have been brought from the Chaldæan
and Assyrian ruins to those great store-houses of ancient art, has
the smallest fragment of amber been discovered. If it ever entered
Mesopotamia, how could it have been more fitly used than in necklaces,
to the making of which glass, enamelled earthenware, and every
attractive stone within reach, contributed?[447]
§ 7. _Textiles._
Among people who looked upon nudity as shameful, the robe and its
decorations were of no little importance. Both in Chaldæa and Assyria
it was carried to a great pitch of luxury by the noble and wealthy.
They were not content with fine tissues, with those delicate and snowy
muslins for which the kings of Persia and their wives were, in later
years, to ransack the bazaars of Babylon.[448] They required their
stuffs to be embroidered with rich and graceful ornament, in which
brilliant colour and elegant design should go hand in hand.[449] The
Chaldæans were the first to set this example, as we know from the most
ancient cylinders, from the Tello monuments and from the stele of
Merodach-idin-akhi (Fig. 233). But it would seem that the Assyrians
soon left their teachers behind, and in any case the bas-reliefs
enable us to become far better acquainted with the costume of the
northern people than with that of their southern neighbours. Helped and
tempted by the facilities of a material that offered but a very slight
resistance to his chisel, the Assyrian sculptor amused himself now by
producing a faithful copy of the royal robes in every detail of their
patient embroidery, now by imitating in the broad thresholds, the
intersecting lines, the stars and garlands woven by the nimble shuttle
in the soft substance of the carpets with which the floors of every
divan were covered.
The images on the royal robes must have been entirely embroidered
(Figs. 253 and 254). They cannot have been metal cuirasses engraved
with the point, as we might at the first glance be tempted to think.
In the relief there is no salience suggesting the attachment of any
foreign substance. Neither have we any reason to believe that work of
such intricate delicacy could be carried out in metal. It was by the
needle and on a woollen surface that these graceful images were built
up.
The skill of the Babylonian embroiderers was famous until the last days
of antiquity.[450] During the Roman period their works were paid for by
their weight in gold.[451] Even now the women of every eastern village
cover materials often coarse enough in themselves with charming works
of the same kind. They decorate thus their long hempen chemises, their
aprons and jackets, their scarves, and the small napkins that are used
sometimes as towels and sometimes to lay on the floor about the low
tables on which their food is served.
It is likely that the Assyrian process was embroidery in its strictest
sense. In the modern bazaars of Turkey and Persia table-covers of
applied work may be bought, in which hundreds of little pieces of
cloth have been used to make up a pattern of many colours; but in the
sculptured embroideries the surfaces are cut up by numerous lines which
could hardly have been produced, in the original, otherwise than by
the needle. This, however, is a minor question. Our attention must be
directed to the composition of the pictures and to the taste which
inspired and regulated their arrangement.
[Illustration: FIG. 253.--Embroidery on the upper part
of the king’s mantle; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 254.--Embroidery upon a royal
mantle; from Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 255.--Embroidered pectoral; from
Layard.]
The principle of the decoration as a whole is almost identical with
that of the bronze platters. A central motive is surrounded by parallel
bands of ornaments in which groups of figures are symmetrically
disposed. Outside this again are narrow borders composed of forms
borrowed chiefly from the vegetable kingdom, such as conventional
flowers and buds, palmettes, and rosettes. The figures are strongly
religious in character; here we find winged genii, like those about the
palace doors, adoring the sacred tree, floating in space, or playing
with lions (see Fig. 253); in another corner the king himself is
introduced, standing between two monitory genii, or in act of homage to
the winged disk and mystic palm.
All these images are skilfully arranged, in compartments bounded by
gracefully curving lines. The designer has understood how to cover
his surface without crowding or confusion, and has shown a power of
invention and a delicate taste that can hardly be surpassed by any
other product of Mesopotamian art. There is no trace of the heaviness
to which we alluded in our section on jewelry.
[Illustration: FIG. 256.--Detail of embroidery; from
Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 257.--Detail of embroidery; from
Layard.]
[Illustration: FIG. 258.--Detail of embroidery; from
Layard.]
The impression made by these compositions as a whole is intensified
when we examine their separate details. The variety of the combinations
employed is very striking. Sometimes the ornament is entirely linear
and vegetable in its origin. Look, for instance, at the kind of square
brooch worn on his breast by one of the winged genii at Nimroud (Fig.
255). The sacred tree surrounded by a square frame of rosettes and wavy
lines occupies the centre, the palmette throws out its wide fronds
at one end. In another example we find a human-headed lion, mitred
and bearded, struggling with an eagle-headed genius. On the right of
our woodcut (Fig. 256) a bud or flower like that of the _silene
inflata_, hangs over the band of embroidery; it is a pendent from
the necklace. Sometimes we find real combined with fictitious animals.
In Fig. 257 two griffins have brought down a spotted deer. Elsewhere
we see a winged bull perched upon a large rosette in an attitude that
is at once unexpected and not ungraceful (Fig. 258). Finally the king
himself or a personage resembling him is often represented struggling
with fictitious monsters (Fig. 259). In this figure notice the rosettes
that are scattered promiscuously over the field. We shall encounter
the same prodigality of ornament in the oldest Greek vases, whose
decorators seem to have been afraid to leave a corner of their surface
unoccupied.
* * * * *
In his way the weaver was no less skilful than the embroiderer, but he
could not give quite so much rein to his fancy as his fellow workmen.
The shuttle was less free than the needle. In its passage through the
threads of the warp it could hardly do more than trace symmetrical
designs and repeat them at regular intervals. We must seek for the
patterns of Chaldæo-Assyrian carpets in the sculptured thresholds of
the palaces. In these the general principle never varied, but the
composition changed just as it does to-day in the carpets and rugs
imported from Turkey and Persia. In any case there was a border into
which the softest and most delicate colours were introduced. As a
rule it must have been decorated with one of those “knop and flower”
ornaments originally invented by the Egyptians.[452] The space so
inclosed was sometimes divided into coffer-like compartments or
panels, sometimes it was filled with a single diaper pattern, as in
the threshold from Khorsabad (Vol. I. Fig. 96). No figures of men or
animals are to be found here. The simple and perhaps monotonous forms
borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, were thoroughly well suited for
stuffs destined to be stepped upon by countless feet. If, in our
fancy, we clothe the patterns of the carved sills in all the charm
of varied colour, we obtain a glowing surface that may be compared,
at a respectful distance, with the gorgeous colour harmonies of the
Mesopotamian plains, when the spring showers have clothed them in a
robe of brilliant green, studded with the pure white of the marguerite,
the gold of the ranunculus, and the rich satin of the purple tulip.
[Illustration: FIG. 259.--Detail of embroidery; from
Layard.]
§ 8. _Commerce._
The industry whose products we have been describing presupposed an
active and widely extended commerce. It made use of many things
that were not to be found within its own country, and it produced
so much that it could not fail to seek for profitable exchanges.
“Thou [Nineveh] hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of
heaven,”[453] says the prophet Nahum; and Ezekiel calls Chaldæa “a land
of traffic” and Babylon “a city of merchants.”[454]
Like Egypt, neither Chaldæa nor Assyria understood the use of money,
but its absence did not affect their trade. Whether their system was
one of barter, or whether they employed the precious metals in rough
ingots or rings of a certain weight, weighing them in the balance for
each transaction, we cannot say, but we know that the great cities
of Mesopotamia had intimate business relations with the surrounding
countries for many centuries, and that their merchants had ingenious
methods of mobilizing their capital. It is even asserted that they
made use of the bill of exchange or of something strongly resembling
it.[455]
It was only at its southern extremity that Mesopotamia had a sea-board,
and we have very little information as to its maritime commerce.
There seems to be no doubt, however, that it held communication with
India by sea. Ur, the oldest of the successive capitals of Chaldæa,
was near the Persian Gulf, and its ships are often mentioned in the
inscriptions.[456]
As civilization advanced those vessels must have increased in number.
Isaiah speaks of the ships of the Chaldæans.[457] The regular winds
of the Indian Ocean enabled a sea traffic to be carried on without
danger; ships could proceed to the mouths of the Indus and return to
the Persian Gulf almost to the day. That communication of some kind
existed between the two countries can be proved. The _zebu_, or
humped ox, is often represented on the Mesopotamian monuments; and that
animal is indigenous in India, where its domestication dates back to
the remotest antiquity. Among the half decomposed beams that have been
disinterred from the ruins in Lower Chaldæa, some of teak have been
recognized.[458] Now the home of that tree is in India; it is to be
found neither in Chaldæa nor in any other part of Western Asia. Finally
a large proportion of the ivory consumed by the artificers of Babylon
and Nineveh must have come from India. The same ships may have brought
African ivory from the land of the Somalis, and, as they coasted along
Arabia they may have increased their cargoes with myrrh, incense, and
other aromatic spices from that country.[459]
But it was in the main by land that Mesopotamia imported her raw
material and exported her manufactures. There must have been continual
intercourse by caravan between Assyria and the Indus valley. The
route must have been by Cabul, Herat, the gates of the Caspian and
Media.[460] Several passes led down to the Tigris valley from the
plateau of Iran. Longer and more difficult roads brought Armenia and
the Caucasus into relations with Nineveh; but, as Herodotus noticed,
the rafts of inflated skins, or _keleks_ as they are now called,
could be used to float the stones and metals, the leather and the wool
of the hilly regions down to the Assyrian capital and the cities of
Chaldæa. Timber also would come down with the stream. Towards the west
the roads that crossed the fords of the Euphrates, either at Thapsacus,
or higher up, at Karkhemish, put Assyria into communication with Asia
Minor by the defiles of the Taurus, and with Upper Syria and Damascus
by the desert and the oasis of Tadmor. It was by this latter route
that the great ports on the Syrian coast received those draperies and
carpets which Ezekiel was so careful to enumerate when he pictured the
commerce of Tyre. Addressing that queen of the sea whose fall made him
leap for joy, he cries: “Haran, and Canneh, and Eden, the merchants of
Sheba, Asshur and Chilmad were thy merchants. These were thy merchants
in all sorts of things, in blue clothes, and broidered work, and in
chests of rich apparel, bound with cords, and made of cedar among thy
merchandize.”
[Illustration]