Chapter IV: The Industrial Arts (2)

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

from Layard.]

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]

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.

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.

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.

§ 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.”