Chapter II: Sculpture (2)

This peculiar handling, at once free and a little hard, is to be found in all the works of these people. It may be recognized in a wooden lion, unfortunately much mutilated, which belongs to the Louvre (Fig. 55), and in those carvings upon the shells of pearl oysters that have been found in such numbers, especially in Lower Chaldæa.[140] The ivories alone are, sometimes at least, without this peculiar character. They display a certain harshness in which the distinguishing mark of Chaldæan origin has been recognized. We may give as an instance the small object thus described in the catalogue of the Louvre: “Lion devouring a wild goat, of which only the head and neck are visible. This group ornaments one face of a small object, rounded above and with a flat base. There is an oblong slit in the latter. The object is apparently a seal” (Fig. 56).[141] On the other hand, although most of the ivory carvings that were used for the handles of walking-sticks and daggers and such purposes, show the characteristics we have mentioned, it must be acknowledged that the ivory tablets from Nimroud are free, for the most part, from the style we have attempted to define as that proper to Chaldæa and Assyria. The treatment is lighter and more elegant, reminding us of Egypt. Must we believe that when the Assyrians attacked this beautiful material they changed their confirmed habits and gave a refinement to their touch it had never known before? Such an idea seems very improbable. We know that their ornamentists borrowed certain motives from the Egyptians, such as the winged globe, the lotus-garland, the sphinx; but in doing so they stamped them with their own personal and independent taste. It seems likely, therefore, that the more carefully wrought of these ivories were imported from abroad, either from Egypt itself, or from its imitator, Phœnicia. In the fragments we have already figured (Vol. I. Figs. 129 and 130) the features and head-dresses are easily recognized as Egyptian. This character is still more marked in another tablet from Nimroud, of which there are several repetitions in the British Museum (Fig. 57). Two women are seated opposite to each other. They are Egyptian in every detail. Their attitudes and symmetrical arrangement; their robes and head coverings; the action of their hands, one raised in adoration, the other holding the hare-headed staff; the _crux ansata_ under their chairs, all are continually found in the monuments of the Nile valley. A still more decisive feature is the oval surmounted by two ostrich plumes in the centre of the plaque. This is not inscribed with hieroglyphs taken at random, as in the small objects of Phœnician origin on which those characters are used merely as decoration, but with a royal name, Auben, or Auben-Ra.[142] It is true that no such name has as yet been encountered on any other monument, but it may very well have been that of one of those petty monarchs who swarmed in the Delta towards the time of the Ethiopian conquest. Most of them left very slight traces; not a few are known only by a single text. This tablet may have been carved, then, either in Egypt, or in Phœnicia after an Egyptian model. In any case, it seems clear to us that it is not the work of an Assyrian or Chaldæan. Other objects in the same material do not, like this, bear an irrefutable mark of their origin, but they are so like it in treatment that we are tempted to say they must have been produced under the same influence. Look at this fragment of a winged sphinx (Fig. 58). Its general physiognomy, the head-dress, the peculiar rendering of the wing-feathers, are none of them Chaldæan, but we often find them in Phœnicia and Cyprus. We may say the same of the fine piece in which two fantastic animals standing upon a peculiar and elaborate capital are surrounded by gracefully designed flowers and leafage (Fig. 59).

In attempting to give a clear idea of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture we must, therefore, put aside the more artistic among the numerous ivory carvings found in the ruins at Nimroud, and especially in the palace of Assurbanipal. It would seem that such things were imported from abroad when something better than the ivory knobs and handles made in the country was required. When we come to speak of metal cups we shall have to repeat this remark.

It may be said that we should have postponed our notice of these objects, and, if they had all borne as incontestable a mark of their origin as the tablet with the royal oval, we should have done so, we should have reserved both the carved ivories and the engraved cups of metal until we reached those pages of our history in which the arts of Phœnicia will be treated. But, unfortunately, when we come to details it is not always easy to establish the distinction between objects of foreign manufacture and those productions of the same kind that were made at home; in many cases it requires the tact and instinct of the archæologist to know one from the other. Such faculties are always, in some degree, liable to err, while in many cases it is very difficult to give reasons for the conclusions arrived at by their exercise. The simplest way out of the difficulty has seemed to us to describe these remains at the same time as the main compositions to which they were formerly attached. But while we do so we keep their doubtful character in mind; in our definition of the style of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture we shall only have recourse to them under great reserve, especially as the style in question is to be amply studied without their help.

§ 3. _The Principal Conventions of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture._

The art of Mesopotamia, like that of Egypt, had its conventions, some of which were peculiar to itself, while others are common to all nations that have arrived at sovereign power and maturity of knowledge.

Like all those who attempt plastic figuration by the light of nature, the artists of Mesopotamia began with profiles. In speaking of Egyptian sculpture we had occasion to show how this method of representation is always followed by first beginners,[143] as it is the simplest and easiest of all. The Chaldæo-Assyrian artists, unlike those of Egypt and Greece, were unaccustomed to the nude, and were therefore without the incentive it supplies to fight against nature and to make her live in all her variety of aspect, a variety which work in the round is alone able to grasp without the aid of convention. One consequence of this is that almost exclusive love of the bas-relief in which Mesopotamian art is unlike that of any other people. In its very beginning it seems to have made a vigorous and promising effort to rise to the production of statues in the round, but discouragement appears to have rapidly followed, and in later years but a very few attempts, and those attended with no great success, were made. The salience of figures was increased or diminished according to their place and the part they played, but the idea of detaching them altogether from the background and giving them an independent existence of their own, was soon abandoned. Under the first Chaldæan empire, real statues, round which we can walk, were modelled (see Plates VI. and VII.). In several of these, although the forms are not so round as in nature, the back is as carefully treated as the front. On the other hand, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us are all too thin from front to back, while their backs are hardly more than roughly-dressed stone. You feel at once that they were made to stand against a wall, and you think of children and of those whose limbs are so infirm that they cannot stand without support. Before such things, we are far enough, not only from the grace, vitality, and freedom of the Greeks, but even from the proud repose of the Egyptian colossi. Although our figures show, of course, only the front view, this impression is very striking in the statues of Nebo (Vol. I. Fig. 15) and Assurnazirpal (Fig. 60), which have migrated from Nimroud to the British Museum. The latter was found by Layard at the entrance of one of the temples whose plans we have given (Vol. I. Fig. 189). It is cut from a very hard and close-grained limestone, and stands upon a pedestal that is nothing but another block of the same material. We have been compelled, in order to keep our figure sufficiently large, to reduce this block to the dimensions of a shallow plinth. In reality it is a cube thirty-one inches high and twenty-one and three-quarter inches wide.[144]

PLATE VI

ROYAL STATUE

Louvre

J. Bourgoin, del. Imp. Ch. Chardon Sulpis, sc.]

The statues of Nebo and Assurnazirpal are standing figures, but, at Kaleh-Shergat, Layard found a seated figure of Shalmaneser II. (Fig. 61).[145] It is in black basalt and has no head. It is of great interest because it recalls the very oldest Chaldæan statues both in material and attitude. It has suffered so much, however, and its workmanship seems to have been so sketchy, that even in the original itself the details of modelling and costume are hardly to be recognized. We give a slight sketch of it merely to show its pose.

These statues, if they deserve such a name, show the work of the Assyrians at its feeblest; the plastic genius of the people must not be judged from them, but from the _genre_ in which they were most at home, from the long lines of figures that stand out in various salience from the palace walls. Among the productions of this latter class that have come down to our time we find every degree of relief, from the bas-relief strictly speaking, to what is but little removed from the round.

Let us begin with the bas-relief. It is with sculptures executed on this principle that the walls of temples and palaces were covered, as if with a stone tapestry. The Assyrian process is identical in principle with that afterwards adopted by the Greeks, as, on the whole, the most convenient for the purpose in view. We find no examples of the Egyptian fashion of defining the outlines of figures by a deep groove cut with the point, nor of those figures that were, so to speak, let into and modelled within the surface of the wall.[146] In both Chaldæa and Assyria the figure stands out from the bed of the relief from two or three millimetres to a centimetre, according to its size. The bed is nowhere hollowed, it is one even surface, except that where the figures are very small, and consequently of very slight relief, the sculptor has reinforced them with an incised outline one or two millimetres deep. This artifice must be examined on the monuments themselves; it could hardly be shown in reproductions on a reduced scale.

Most of the great bas-reliefs have but one plane, and to this they owe the simplicity that gives them a certain nobility in spite of their monotonous design (see Vol. I. Figs. 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 23, 24, &c.). Examples of two planes, in which the figures are grouped in couples, the nearest to the spectator in each couple covering a large part of his companion, are by no means rare (see Fig. 62); we may say the same of those in which a background of trees is introduced beyond the figures (Fig. 63). This arrangement is especially frequent in the more complicated pictures, where the figures are small and numerous; but even in the last century of the Assyrian monarchy, when the sculptor showed an ever-increasing desire to draw attention and excite interest by the introduction of these picturesque details, he never quits his hold of a right instinct for the true conditions of the bas-relief. Unlike the Roman sculptors, and even those of the Renaissance, he shows no hankering after those effects that seem to get rid of the bed; he never destroys the clarity of his conception by unduly multiplying the planes. He did not understand how to put objects in perspective or manage foreshortening, and this ignorance served him well; it preserved him from the temptation into which more skilful artists are so prone to fall; it prevented him from forgetting “that the design best suited to the bas-relief is purely geometrical in its essentials.”[147]

The relief, of course, becomes higher as the size of the figures increases. It is as much as from eight to ten inches in the winged genii (Figs. 27 and 34) that accompany and divide the bulls on the decorated façades and in the gateways. Even when it is highest the salience does not go beyond what is called _mezzo-relievo_; that is to say, no part of the principal or accessory figure, of the genius himself or of the lion, stands out from the wall in the round, as, for instance, do the heads and limbs in the metopes of the Parthenon.

TWO CHALDÆAN HEADS

J. Bourgoin, del. Ramus sc.

Imp. Ch. Chardon

The same remark holds good of the colossal figures of lions (Plate VIII.) and winged bulls (Plate IX.) which acted as guardians of the palace. We have already explained the ideas attached to these monsters by the Assyrians,[148] we shall here dwell upon some peculiarities of their execution. In these images there is a compromise between “the round” and the bas-relief of a very original and peculiar character.

Looked at from in front these lions and bulls seem to be independent statues; the head, the chest, the legs stand out with as much freedom and amplitude of development as in nature; but step a little to one side, to the right or the left as the case may be, and their aspect will change. You will then see that only the fore-part of the animal is disengaged from the block of alabaster or limestone in which it is cut, the rest of the body remains imprisoned in its substance. The contours alone are indicated, in low relief, on the two sides of the ponderous slab. Thus we have half, or rather a quarter, of the statue standing out from sixteen to twenty inches in front of the slab on which the sides are shown in silhouette. It looks as if the image had made an effort to shake itself clear of the mass of stone and had only partially succeeded. We find ourselves wondering whether, if Nineveh had not perished and the development of her art had gone on without interruption, these great beasts would not have ended by conquering their liberty and winning for themselves an existence independent of the walls to which they were attached. But the nature of the material employed says no--alabaster is too soft, and the legs of the lions and bulls could not support their massive bodies without assistance.

LION FROM THE PALACE OF ASSURNAZIRPAL, NIMROUD

British Museum

Saint-Elme Gautier del etsc Imp. Ch. Chardon]

There are other peculiarities in these images. Looked at from in front they appear stationary, their two fore-feet being on the same plane and close together; any other arrangement would have been awkward. But if we look at them from the side they appear to be walking, in which attitude alone would all the four legs be visible and clear of each other. In most cases the bulls were not parallel to the façades they decorated, but perpendicular to them;[149] they faced the visitor as he approached the gate, and it was not until he entered the passage that he got a side view of their bodies stretching along its walls (Figs. 26 and 27). Some contrivance was sought by which their figures should appear complete from both points of view, and the following expedient was hit upon. As soon as you had entered the passage between the bulls, you could, of course, no longer see more than the fore-leg nearest you; the other was hidden by it. The latter was then repeated by the sculptor and thrown back under the body of the animal, which, in the result, had five legs.

The idea is a better one than we are at first inclined to believe. More than once, perhaps, at the Louvre or the British Museum, you have paused before these colossal images, you have measured their height with your eye and admired their tranquil majesty. But have you ever noticed the artifice I have just described? To see it clearly you must choose a standpoint on the right or left front, as our draughtsman has done (Plates VIII. and IX.). If no chance has led you to such a standpoint in the first instance, if you have, as is most likely, looked at the figure first in front and then from the side, you have probably never suspected the sort of trick that the sculptor has played upon you. This contrivance is one of the distinguishing marks of Ninevite art;[150] it occurs nowhere else, unless in monuments such as those of Cappadocia, which are more or less feeble copies of Assyrian models.[151]

The conventions that remain to be noticed will not detain us so long. They are such as have been practised in all imperfect schools of art,--in all, in fact, that preceded the art of the Greeks.

Even in the greatest and most perfect schools of sculpture, the bas-relief, as if influenced by a souvenir of its origin, prefers figures in profile to those in full face. In those exceptional instances in which the Assyrians abandoned this preference, as, for example, in the decoration of entrances, they were visibly embarrassed. They did not understand how to foreshorten the feet, therefore they put the lower part of the figure in profile while the upper part faced the spectator (see Fig. 34).[152] This puts the figure in a painful and awkward attitude which could not be imitated by a living man without a violent effort, or retained for more than a second or two. It is the same when they wish to make a figure turn; the movement of the shoulders and neck is so clumsily rendered that the sculptor seems to have put on the head the wrong side foremost.[153] In general, however, the ample draperies help the artist out of his difficulties. Thanks to the veil which hides his ignorance of the attachment of limbs and the play of muscles, he succeeds in avoiding those dislocations that are so frequent in the Egyptian bas-reliefs and sometimes result in obvious deformity.[154]

When he had to render the human countenance the sculptor of Babylon or Nineveh fell into the same fault as he of Memphis; he placed a full, or nearly a full, eye in his profiles, and for the same reason.[155] This defect is not always so conspicuous as in a bas-relief from Nimroud representing a tributary of Assurnazirpal bringing two apes, one of which stands on his master’s shoulders while the other leaps before his feet (Fig. 64); but it is never absent altogether.

Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

If in its fidelity to habits that we may call childish the sculpture of Mesopotamia bears a strong resemblance to that of Egypt, it is nevertheless far inferior to it in other respects. The artist never seems to have looked closely enough or with a sufficiently awakened eye to perceive the differences that distinguish one individual or even one race from another; at least if he saw them he did not understand how to reproduce them; he did not even try to do so. From the very beginning--so far as we know it--the art of the Nile valley turned out portraits both of Pharaoh and of private individuals that are astonishing in their truth and life.[156] Even in those executed in a more summary fashion and not in any way to be classed as masterpieces, we find a singular aptitude in seizing and noting those peculiarities which make of every human face an unique creation, a medal of which but one example has been struck. Ethnic characteristics are given with no less truth; we have seen elsewhere how many faithful portraits they have left of the races with whom they entertained long and unbroken relations.[157]

Very few traces of this talent or disposition are to be found in the monuments of Mesopotamia. Of course in a draped school of sculpture we could hardly expect to find any great preoccupation with the various beauties of the human body. Given the Assyrian costume, it was impossible that the Assyrian artist should aspire to bring out those beauties. In many works from the Nile valley the influence of the sex, the age, and even the profession upon the development of the muscles, upon, if we may be allowed the expression, the physiognomy of the flesh, is skilfully shown in the modelling.[158] But faces were not concealed by the Assyrian draperies; why then were their distinctive marks of individuality so consistently ignored? The sculptor should have concentrated his attention upon them all the more, and so arrived at a faithful portrait. He did not do so however. Neither Assyrian nor Chaldæan had any such ambition. By a process of selection and abstraction they arrived at a kind of mean, at a certain ideal of manly beauty which served them to the end. That ideal is characterized by the abundance and symmetrical arrangement of the hair and beard, by a low forehead, heavy and strongly-arched eyebrows, a hooked and rounded nose, a small mouth with full but not too heavy lips, a strong, rounded chin, and limbs whose muscular development betrayed their vigour.

The universal acceptance of this type is proved chiefly by the Assyrian sculpture. The fact is that among all the thousands of figures it produced there are but two heads, the one with, the other without, a beard. We have already encountered the first in all the scenes in which the king, his ministers, his officers or his soldiers appear. It is also used for the gods (Vol. I. Figs. 13 and 15) and the winged bulls, whose heads, perhaps, like the Egyptian sphinxes, were supposed to be reproductions of the royal features. The beardless variety seems, in the royal processions, to be confined to those eunuchs who have always played such an important part at Oriental courts (Vol. I. Figs. 23 and 24, and Vol. II. Plate X.); the fleshy heaviness of their cheeks and necks (Fig. 65) has been thought to confirm this idea. But we should be mistaken if we recognized these miserable beings in all the beardless figures. The latter are so numerous in some compositions that no such explanation is admissible. In many instances they seem to represent people of the lowest class, peasants, labourers, and slaves (see Vol. I. Figs. 45, 151, 152, and Vol. II. Figs. 44 and 48). As the oldest sculptures of Chaldæa suffice to prove, the habit of wearing the hair and beard long did not date from the earlier years of that country. In those sculptures we find heads completely shaved. It is possible that the ancient custom was changed when the formidable army to which Assyria owed its power and fortune was created. The beard may then have become, as the moustache used to be with us, a sign of the military caste. We never find soldiers or their officers without it;[159] but their hair and beards are shorter than those of the king and his ministers (Fig. 66); they do not fall upon the chest and shoulders in several rows of curls carefully arranged.[160] In the reliefs the amplitude and length of the beard are always a sign of the highest rank.

FROM KHORSABAD

Louvre]

The temples, the forehead, and the nape of the neck were lost under this abundant hair, while the beard covered all below the cheek-bones and the tiara the top of the head. Beyond the nose and eyes there was hardly anything left by which one individual could be distinguished from another. Now the Assyrian race was a race in the proper sense of the word; it was homogeneous and pure-blooded. Between one member and another of the aristocracy that reigned and fought, these two features would vary little. All their noses were more or less aquiline, all or nearly all their eyes large and black. The national fashion of wearing the hair would suppress many of the characteristics by which we know one man from another. From all this it results that the crowd of kings and nobles who furnished the sculptor with his favourite theme are vastly like each other. This similarity or rather uniformity was ill calculated to awaken the sense of portraiture in the artist. The features that distinguished one king from another are slurred over by the sculptor simply because they were in reality so lightly marked that he hardly perceived their existence.

PLATE V

J.Bourgoin del. Imp.Ch.Chardon. J.Sulpis.sc.

ASSURBANIPAL IN HIS CHARIOT

FROM KOUYUNDJIK

Louvre]

We know that this opinion is not shared by all those who have busied themselves with the Assyrian monuments. It has been said and, in the belief of some, proof has been given, that we possess the elements of an Assyrian iconography, that the images of the kings, in the steles and on the palace walls, are true and faithful portraits.[161] We believe this to be a mistake. No doubt the proportions of the body, the expression of the face, and the general lines of the profile, are not the same for Assurnazirpal, Sargon, and the sons and grandsons of that prince. But what must we conclude from that? Only that Assyria did not escape, any more than Egypt, from the action of that law of change which is the very condition of life; that from one century and one reign to another the taste and execution of the Assyrian sculptors were modified, though in a very feeble degree. Thus figures are shorter and more thickset in the north-western palace at Nimroud than at Khorsabad or Kouyundjik; they are finer in their proportions, more graceful, and altogether better in their art under Assurbanipal than under his grandfather, the founder of the dynasty. Art, as we shall bring abundant evidence to prove, followed the same path at Nineveh as everywhere else. This is not to be denied; but before the hypothesis against which we contend can be accepted, its advocates must show that, in each series of monuments, the king is to be distinguished by his personal features from the people about him. You must not take the evidence of drawings or even of photographs; you must examine the originals themselves. This I have done with the most scrupulous attention both in the British Museum and the Louvre. I have carefully examined and compared the four great series of royal bas-reliefs that have come down to us, belonging respectively to Assurnazirpal, Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. If such an examination be made without prejudice, I am satisfied that only one conclusion can be come to. In all the pictures dating from one reign the king himself differs not at all from his officers and nobles; he is only to be recognized by his lofty tiara, an ornament that he alone had the right to wear, by his sceptre or some other attribute of the kind, by his richer costume, and, finally, by his greater stature. The sculptor always makes him taller than his subjects, still more than his enemies and captives (Vol. I. Fig. 22, and Fig. 15 above). This latter proceeding seems childish, but it is so natural, and is found in so many countries, that it is not at all astonishing. The sculptor has counted upon all these attributes to show, at a glance, which is the king; and they are, in fact, of a nature to prevent any chance of a mistake. He has not troubled himself to seek in his royal features for something by which he might be distinguished from the people about him. Winged genii, king and viziers, all have the same eye, the same nose and the same mouth. One would say that for each group of bas-reliefs the original designer only drew one head, which was repeated by tracing or some other process as often as there might be heads in the composition, and that it was afterwards carved and modelled in the alabaster by the chisel of the journeyman.

No, in spite of all that has been said, the Assyrians made no portraits. They did not even attempt to mark in any precise fashion, those physical characteristics by which they themselves were so sharply divided from many of the races by whom they were surrounded. Among the numerous peoples that figure in the sieges and battles that cover the palace walls, although some, like the Chaldæans, the Jews, and the Syrians, were near relations of their own, others belonged either to the Aryan or Turanian family; but any one who will examine the reliefs as we have done, will see that all the prisoners of war and other vanquished enemies have the same features as their conquerors.[162] The only exception to which we can point is in the case of certain bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal in which the episodes of an expedition into Susiana are retraced. There we can perceive in some of the figures--by no means in all--an endeavour on the part of the sculptor to mark the difference of race otherwise than by details of costume and head-dress. Here and there we find a head that suggests a negro;[163] but his characteristics are never as clearly marked as in Egypt. This may be merely the result of caprice on the part of some individual artist who has amused himself by reproducing with the edge of the chisel some head which had struck his fancy; but even here we only find one profile several times repeated. The modelling is far from searching, but wherever the work is in fair condition and the scale not too small the character we have described may be easily distinguished. The only differences over which the Assyrian sculptors naturally troubled themselves were those of costume and equipment; thus we find them recording that the people subdued in one of the expeditions of Sennacherib wore a crown or wreath of feathers about their heads (Fig. 48).[164] So, too, in the relief of a man with apes, the foot-covering, a kind of buskin with upturned toes (Fig. 64), should be noticed. But the lines of his profile remain unchanged; and yet there can be no doubt that the sculptor here meant to represent a man of negro race, because, as Layard, who dug up the monument, tells us, traces of black paint might be distinctly perceived upon the faces of this man and his companions.[165] On a Babylonian stele that we have already figured (Fig. 43), some have attempted to recognize a Mongol type, and thence to confirm the hypothesis that would make a Turanian race the founders of the Chaldæan civilization. This, too, we think a mistake.[166]

At first sight this curious monument surprises those who are accustomed to Assyrian art, but the nature of the material has not a little to do with that. The hardness and darkness of basalt affect the treatment of the sculptor in quite a different way from a gypseous stone like alabaster. Add to this that the proportions are quite unlike those of the Ninevite reliefs. This Marduk-idin-akhi is a work of the ancient school, which made its figures far shorter than those of such Assyrian reliefs as have come down to us. Finally the head-dress should be noticed. In place of being conical it is cylindrical, a form which overweights the figure and shortens its apparent proportions. On the whole, any one looking at this stele without bias on one side or the other, will, we think, acknowledge that the type it presents is the same as the figures at Nimroud, Khorsabad, and Kouyundjik. It is, moreover, identical with that we see in monuments even older than this royal Babylonian stele, such as the fragmentary relief found by M. de Sarzec at Sirtella (Fig. 67).

The type which crops up so often in the pages of this history was fixed, in all its main features, in the earliest attempts at plastic art made by the Chaldæans. By them it was transmitted to their scholars, the Assyrians, and during long centuries, until the fall of Nineveh and Babylon, the painters and sculptors of Mesopotamia, from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the foot of the mountains of Armenia, did not cease to reproduce and perpetuate it, I might say to satiety; they reproduced it with infinite patience, and, so far as we can see, without once suspecting that the human visage might sometimes vary its lines and present another aspect.

§ 4. _On the Representations of Animals._

In the preceding pages our chief aim has been to determine the nature and the mode of action of the influences under which the Assyro-Chaldæan sculptor had to do his work. We have explained how certain conditions hampered his progress and in some respects arrested the development of his skill.

The height to which the plastic genius of this people might have carried their art had their social habits been more favourable to the study of the nude, may perhaps be better judged from their treatment of animals than anything else. Some of these, both in relief and in the round, are far superior to their human figures, and even now excite the admiration of sculptors.

The cause of this difference is easily seen. When an artist had to represent an animal, his study of its form was not embarrassed by any such obstacle as a long and heavy robe. The animal could be watched in its naked simplicity and all its instinctive and characteristic movements grasped. The sculptor could follow each contour of his model; he could take account of the way in which the limbs were attached to the trunk; he saw the muscles swell beneath the skin, he saw them tighten with exertion and relax when at rest. He was not indifferent to such a sight; on the contrary, he eagerly drank in the instruction it afforded, and of all the works he produced those in which such knowledge is put into action are by far the most perfect; they show us better than anything else how great were his native gifts, and what a fund of sympathy with the beauties of life and with its inexhaustible variety his nature contained. Whether he model an animal separately or introduce it into some historic scene, it is always well rendered both in form and movement.

This is to be most clearly seen in the rich and varied series of Assyrian reliefs, but the less numerous works of the same kind of Babylonian origin show the same tendency and at least equal talent. In copying the principal types of the animal world with fidelity and vigour, the Assyrian sculptors only followed the example set them by their south-country masters.

A cow’s head in bronze, which was brought from Bagdad by Mr. Rassam, is broad in treatment and of great truth (Fig. 68); the same good qualities are to be found in a terra-cotta tablet found by Sir Henry Rawlinson in the course of his excavations in the Birs-Nimroud (Fig. 69). It represents a man, semi-nude and beardless and with a stout stick in his hand, leading a large and powerfully made dog by a plaited strap. It is a sort of mastiff that might be used for hunting the wild beasts in the desert and marshes, the wild boar, hyena, and panther, if not the lion. The characteristics of the species are so well marked that naturalists have believed themselves able to recognise it as that of a dog which is still extant, not in Mesopotamia indeed, but in Central Asia.[167] We may seek in it for the portrait of one of those Indian hounds kept, in the time of Herodotus, by the Satrap of Babylon. His pack was so numerous that it took the revenues of four large villages to support it.[168]

Similar subjects were represented upon other tablets of the same origin. One of them shows a lion about to devour a bull and disturbed by a man brandishing a mace. Nothing could be more faithful than the action of the animal; without letting go his prey he raises a paw, its claws opened and extended and ready to be buried in the side of the rash person who interrupts his meal.[169]

We may also mention a cylinder which, from its style, M. Ménant does not hesitate to ascribe to the first Chaldæan monarchy. It represents two oxen in a field of wheat. The latter, by a convention that also found favour with the Greeks, is indicated by two of those huge ears that so greatly astonished Herodotus.[170] Was it on a similar principle that the Chaldæan engraver gave his oxen but one horn apiece? In spite of this singularity and the peculiar difficulties offered by work in intaglio on a very hard material, the forms are well understood, and the artist has not been content to give them merely in outline. At the croup and under the belly an effort has been made to model the figure and to mark its thickness.

Judging from their style and inscriptions, several more of these engraved stones may be ascribed to the oldest Chaldæan schools of art, but we are satisfied with again reminding our readers that it was in Lower Mesopotamia that everything had its beginning. We shall take our remaining examples from the richer deposits of Assyria.

Among all those animals that attracted the attention of man either by their size or strength, either by the services they rendered or the terror they caused, there were none that the chisel of the Assyrian sculptor did not treat and treat with taste and skill. With their passion for the chase the kings and nobles of Assyria were sure to love dogs and to train them with scrupulous care.[171] They did more. They employed sculptors in making portraits of them. In the palace of Assurbanipal terra-cotta statuettes of his best dogs have been found (Fig. 71). They belong to the same race as the Chaldæan mastiff above mentioned, but their strength, their fire, I might almost say their ferocity, is better shown in those pictures where they are no longer in a state of repose, but in movement and action. Look at the series of slabs representing the departure for the chase. The hounds are held in the leash by attendants who carry bags on their shoulders for the smaller game (see Fig. 72). Mark the tightened cord, the straining bodies, the tension of every muscle in their desire to get at their quarry! We can almost fancy we hear the deep, confused bayings with which they prelude the regular music of the hunt itself when the game is afoot. These animals are represented with no less truth and vivacity when a kill has taken, or is about to take, place. As an example of this we may point out a relief from the same palace in which two of these bloodhounds launch themselves upon a wild ass whose flight has been arrested by an arrow. The ass still manages to stagger along, but he will not go far; the hounds are already upon him and have buried their teeth in his flanks and croup.[172]

Other domestic animals are figured with no less sure a hand; to each is given the proportions and attitudes that really characterise it. We shall now study them all in succession; others have done so, and have found much precious information upon the fauna of Western Asia and upon the state of Mesopotamian civilization;[173] we shall content ourselves with mentioning the principal types and those in which the sculptor has shown most skill.

The colossi of the gateways have already given us an opportunity for showing how art enlisted the powerful limbs and natural majesty of the bull in its service. Elsewhere the bovine race occupies a less important part in Assyrian sculpture than in that of Egypt, in whose tombs scenes of agricultural art are of such constant occurrence. We find, however, the wild bull,[174] which the kings of Calah hunted in the neighbouring desert (Fig. 15), and the draught ox, which, after a lucky raid, the terrors of Asia drive before them with their prisoners and other booty (Vol. I. Fig. 30).[175]--We may also point to the heifer’s head in ivory which acts as tail-piece to the third chapter of our first volume. We sometimes find also sheep and goats of both sexes (Fig. 54);[176] but of all the animals that have close relations with man, that which occurs most often on the palace walls is the horse. They did not use him as a beast of burden; it was the mule that was used for drawing carts (Vol. I. Fig. 31), for carrying women and children and merchandise (Vol. I. Figs. 30 and 115). As with the Arabs of to-day, the horse was reserved for war and hunting. But the Assyrians were not, like the Egyptians, content to harness him to the chariot; they rode him as well. Their armies comprised a numerous and well-provided cavalry; and the Assyrian artist drew the horse a great deal better than his Egyptian _confrère_.

The horses we meet with in the Assyrian sculptures are of a heavier breed than Arabs; they are generally shorter and more thickly set. Travellers believe the breed to still exist in the horses of Kurdistan, a country which was bordered by ancient Assyria and dependent upon it.[177] The head is small, well-formed, and well-carried (Fig. 73), the shoulders sloping, the neck and limbs well set on, and the muscles strongly marked. We have already had occasion to figure horses at full speed (Vol. I. Fig. 5), standing still (Vol. I. Figs. 67 and 115), and proceeding at a slow pace (Figs. 21 and 31).[178] No observer can avoid being struck by the truth of attitude, and movement given by the Assyrian sculptor to horses both driven and mounted. Nowhere is this merit more conspicuous than in one of those bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal that figure the episodes of a chase of wild asses (Fig. 74).

Contrary to their usual habits the herd have allowed themselves to be surprised. One of those armies of beaters who are yet employed by eastern sovereigns on such occasions, has driven them upon the hunters. The latter, preceded by their dogs, throw themselves upon the herd, which breaks up in all directions. They pierce those that are within reach with their arrows; those that do not fall at once are pursued and brought down by the hounds. We cannot reproduce the whole scene,[179] but we doubt whether there is any school of animal painters that has produced anything more true to nature than the action of this poor beast stopping in the middle of his flight to launch futile kicks at his pursuers.

The ibex and the wild goat figure in the same sculptured pictures. One marching in front of the herd turns and anxiously sniffs the wind, while her companion quietly browses by her side; farther off, two kids trot by the side of their mother. The alarm has not yet been given, but upon the next slab the artist shows the headlong flight that follows the discovery of the enemy. Naturally it is the wild and domestic animals of Mesopotamia and the districts about that are most commonly figured in these reliefs, but the sculptor also took advantage of every opportunity and pretext for introducing into his repertory those rare and curious animals which were only seen in Nineveh on rare occasions. Thus the camel that we find in so many pictures is the same as that which now occupies the same region and marches in its slow caravans;[180] but on the obelisk of Shalmaneser we find the double-humped Bactrian camel (Fig. 49).[181] The clumsy tribe of the pachyderms is not only represented by the wild boars that still have their lairs in the marshes of the lower Euphrates;[182] the rhinoceros and the Indian elephant also occur on the obelisk (Vol. I. Fig. 111).[183] The apes shown in our Fig. 64 also seem to belong to an Indian species.[184]

The sculptor was not always as happily inspired by these exotic animals as by those of his own country, and in that there is nothing surprising. He only caught a passing glimpse of them as they defiled, perhaps, before the people in some triumphal procession. On the other hand, the fauna of his native land were known to him through long habit, and yet his reproductions of the elephant and the dromedary are very good, much better than those of the semi-human ape. His idea of the rhinoceros is very faulty; the single horn planted on the nose leaves no doubt as to his meaning, but the lion’s mane with which the animal’s back is clothed has never belonged to the rhinoceros. The artist may have worked from a description.

In these pictures birds hold a very secondary place; Assyrian sculpture was hardly light enough of hand to render their forms and feathers. For such a task, indeed, painting with its varied handling, its delicate lines and brilliant colours is required. It was with the brush that the Egyptians succeeded, in the frescoes of their tombs, in figuring the principal birds of the Nile Valley with all their elegance of form and brilliant variety of plumage. In Assyria, among a nation of soldiers and in an art whose chief inspiration had to do with war, the only bird we find often reproduced is the eagle, the symbol of victory, who floats over the chariot of the king, and the vulture who devoured where they fell the bodies of the enemies of Assyria; and even these images are rather careless and conventional, which may perhaps be accounted for by their partially symbolic character and their frequent repetition.[185] A group of partridges rising and, in those sculptures of the later Sargonids in which the artists show a love for picturesque detail, birds hopping in the trees or watching over their nestlings, have been mentioned as showing technical excellence of the same kind as the hunting scenes.[186] The ostrich appears on the elaborate decorations of the royal robes (Fig. 75) and upon the cylinders (Fig. 76). Perhaps it was considered sacred.

As for fishes, crabs, and shells, these were scattered broadcast over the watercourses in the reliefs, but they are never studied with any great care (see Vol. I., Figs. 34 and 157), nor is any attempt made to distinguish their species. They seem to have been introduced merely as hints to the spectator, to dispel any doubt he may entertain as to the meaning of those sinuous lines by which the sculptor suggested rivers and the sea. Where these indications are not given we might indeed very easily mistake the artist’s intention (see Vol. I., Figs. 38 and 71).

Some of the animals in the Assyrian reliefs are then nothing but determinative signs, a kind of pictorial gloss. Of these it will suffice to mention the existence. Their forms are so much generalized that they offer no matter for study. On the other hand, our best attention should be given to those figures whose modelling has strongly interested the artist, who has taken a lively pleasure in reproducing their various aspects and in making them live again in all the originality of their powerful and exceptional natures. In this respect the lion deserves particular notice. He interested the Assyrian sculptors more profoundly than any other animal and they devoted extraordinary attention to illustrating his various attitudes and characteristics. One is inclined to believe that the more skilful among them chose a lion for treatment when they wished to display all the talent they possessed and to gain a reputation for complete mastery of their art.[187]

Here we find the great beast stretched carelessly upon the ground, full of confidence in his strength and careless of danger (Plate XI.); there he rises to his feet and advances ready to collect himself and spring upon any threatening enemy or passing prey (Plate VIII.). We sometimes find both these motives united, as in a bas-relief of Assurbanipal, which is unfortunately mutilated (Fig. 77). Here a lioness is stretched upon the ground, her head upon her forepaws and her tail outstretched behind her, in a favourite attitude of very young cats. The lion stands upright before her in a proud, extended attitude like that of the colossal lion from Nimroud (Plate VIII.); his head and the hind parts of his body are unfortunately missing.

FROM KHORSABAD

Louvre]

Elsewhere we find the lion cautiously emerging from a stoutly-built timber cage (Fig. 78). He has been captured in a net or snare and shut up in this narrow prison until the day of some great hunt.[188] When that arrives the door is raised at a given signal by a man perched on the top of the cage and protected by a timber grating. In spite of this defence the service would hardly be free from danger but that the lion is too pleased to find himself at liberty to look behind him.[189]

The lion finds himself confronted by the Royal huntsman who fights, as a rule, from his chariot, where two or three companions, chosen from his bravest and most skilful servants, are ready to lend him help if necessary. The British Museum possesses a great number of sculptured pictures in which every incident of the hunt is figured up to its inevitable end. We reproduce two figures from the slabs representing the great hunt of Assurbanipal. The first shows a huge lion mortally wounded by an arrow which still stands in his body. It has transfixed some great vessel, and the blood gushes in a wide torrent from his open mouth. Already the chills of death are upon him and yet with his back arched, and his feet brought together and grasping the soil, he collects his energies in a last effort to prevent himself rolling over helplessly on the sand.

Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

Still more expressive, perhaps, and more pathetic, is the picture of a lioness struck down by the same hand, but in a different fashion (Fig. 80). One of three arrows that have reached her has transfixed the spinal column at the loins. All the hinder part of the body is paralysed. The hind feet drag helplessly on the ground, while the poor animal still manages for a moment to support herself on her fore paws. She still faces the enemy, her half opened jaws are at once agonised and menacing, and, as we gaze upon her, we can almost fancy that we hear her last groan issue from her dying lips.

We might multiply these examples if we chose, but the two fragments we have reproduced will, we hope, send our readers to the British Museum to see the _Hunt of Assurbanipal_ for themselves. In any case they are enough to prove that the Assyrian sculptor studied the lion from nature. He was not without opportunities. He was, no doubt, allowed to assist at those great hunts of which he was to be the official chronicler. He there saw the king of beasts throw himself on the spears of the footmen or fly before the arrows of the charioteers, and break the converging line of beaters; he saw him fall under his repeated wounds and struggle in his last convulsions. Later on he could supplement his recollections, he could complete and correct his sketches by the examination of the victims.[190] At the end of the day the “bag” was displayed as it is now at the end of a modern _battue_, when the keepers bring pheasants, hares and rabbits, and lay them in long rows in some clearing or corner of the covert. In one of the Kouyundjik reliefs we see the king standing before an altar and doing his homage to the gods after the emotions and dangers of a hunt that was almost a battle.[191] He seems to pour the wine of the libation upon four dead lions, which his attendants have arranged in line upon the ground.

There must also have been tame lions in the palaces and royal parks. Even now they are often to be met with in that country, under the tent of the Arab chief or in the house of the bey or pacha.[192] When captured quite young the lion is easily educated, and, provided that his appetite is never allowed to go unsatisfied, he may be an inoffensive and almost a docile companion until he is nearly full grown. We are ready to believe that the lion and lioness shown in our Fig. 77 were tame ones. The background of the relief suggests a park attached to the royal residence, rather than a marsh, jungle or desert. Vines heavy with fruit and bending flowers rise above the dozing lioness; we can hardly suppose that wild animals could intrude into such a garden. It follows, then, that the artist could study his models as they moved at freedom among the trees of the royal demesne, basking idly in the sun or stretching themselves when they rose, or burying their gleaming teeth on the living prey thrown to them by their keepers.