A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 2 (of 2)

§ 4. Metal Dishes and Utensils.

Metal vases are often represented in the bas-reliefs, where we find them sometimes of very simple form, like the bowl (Fig. 204) and bucket (Fig. 205) here figured, which may have been of copper. They are provided on the upper edge with small loops through which a cord might be passed. As for the buckets that were used in the ritual of public worship, and that the sculptor put in the hands of the winged genii adoring the sacred tree (Vol. I., Figs. 4 and 8), they were certainly of bronze, both body and handle. Their forms are very elegant, and their walls are ornamented at the top and bottom with twisted and wavy lines, with palmettes and flowers both open and closed. In the example we figure (Fig. 206) the winged globe, which is introduced just below the upper edge, attests the religious character of the object.[408]

The bas-reliefs tell us nothing about those large vessels, analogous, no doubt, to the λέβης and κρατὴρ of the Greeks, upon the sides of which the human-headed birds with extended wings, one of which we have already figured, were fixed (Fig. 91). Neither has any complete specimen of the class yet been discovered in the excavations. The frequent employment of this motive is proved, however, by the number of these detached pieces that we possess. They all come from Van, but they belonged to different vases. We here engrave a second example (Fig. 207). The ring on the back by which the handle was attached will be noticed. As in the throne described above the bronze was relieved with inlaid ornament; there is a hollow in the breast in which it was set. In the originals the rivet-holes which afforded a means of fixing them may be seen; in one or two the heads of the rivets are still in place. This specimen differs from one figured on page 172, in that it has two heads.

We do not multiply examples of the vessels used to transport liquids, because their decorative forms were found pretty equally distributed all over Chaldæa and Assyria. We have every reason to believe that they were produced in great numbers in all the towns of Mesopotamia. On the other hand, there is a whole class of vessels that perplex and embarrass archæologists almost as much as they delight them—the class of metal cups. This name is to some extent a misnomer. We shall employ it for the sake of simplicity, but most of the objects in question are rather what we should call dishes or platters than cups. They belong to the same class as the Greek φιύλη and the Roman patera. Their vertical section is shown at the bottom of our Fig. 208. The slight ridge underneath, caused by the gentle elevation of the flat bottom, enabled the dish to be more firmly grasped than would otherwise have been possible.

Such things must have been comparatively rare and costly. In a store-room of the North-Western Palace at Nimroud, Layard found a great number of them, packed one within another in cauldrons like those mentioned above; others, of less value no doubt, were stacked against the wall. At first the explorers were inclined to think that they all dated from the reign of Assurnazirpal, the founder of the building; but many things combined to suggest that the palace was repaired by Sargon and even inhabited by him.[409] He may have lived there until his own house at Khorsabad was finished. It is possible, therefore, that some or all of these cups date from the eighth century B.C.

In many instances oxydization had gone so far that the cups could not be lifted without falling to pieces; others, however, though covered with a thick coat of oxide, were brought away and successfully cleaned.[410] At the British Museum I compiled a catalogue of forty-four plates or cups of this kind, nearly all from the same treasure, while in the store rooms of the same institution there are many more waiting to be cleaned and rendered fit for exhibition. All these, with a few exceptions, are ornamented, the simplest among them having a star or rosette in the centre. Wherever the bronze has not been completely eaten away the decoration may be recovered, and often it is still singularly clear and sharp. A few cups that had been protected by those placed above them showed, when discovered, such brilliant copper tones that the workmen at first thought they were of gold. The mistake was soon recognized, but we may well believe that the conquerors of half Asia numbered gold and silver vessels among the treasures stored in their palaces; as yet, however, none have been found. All these cups, like the deeper vessels recovered at the same time, were of bronze; the precious metals only appear in the form of small inlays and incrustations in the alloy. In the centre of the rosettes with which some of the bands are decorated a small silver stud, slightly raised above the rest of the surface, is sometimes placed, and in a few cases the points of the great rosette that occupies the centre of the plate radiate from a centre of gold, silver being banished to the small rosettes at the edge. Again, the middle is sometimes a kind of boss, over the whole of which traces of gold may still be distinguished.

The decoration of these pateræ is always inside: on the outside nothing is to be seen but the confused reverse of the pattern, such as may be seen on the left of our Fig. 208. I have found but one exception to this rule in a much deeper cup on the outside of which a lion hunt is represented.[411] In that case figures engraved within the vase would have been invisible, for it is very deep.

In most cases the ruling principle of the decoration is the division of the disk into three, four, or five concentric circles, but in some instances the whole field, with the exception of a simple border, is occupied by one subject. In those cups upon which the greatest care and thought seem to have been lavished, the figures are beaten up into relief with the hammer and then finished with the burin. In the others the whole design is carried out with the latter tool, which is sometimes used with a degree of refinement that is amazing. As an example of this we may quote a patera that has been cleaned and put on view quite recently. Stags march in file around its five concentric zones, which are all of the same width. It is difficult to explain either the fineness of the lines or the regularity of the design, each animal being an accurate reproduction of his neighbour and the intervening spaces being exactly equal. One is almost tempted to believe that the work must have been done by machinery.

We know, however, that such mechanical helps were unknown to the ancients, and, although there are many cups and vases at the museum bearing a strong mutual resemblance, we cannot point to any two that are exactly similar. To give a fair idea of the variety of their designs we should have to reproduce not only all the cups figured by Sir H. Layard, but several more that have only been prepared for exhibition quite lately. Among the latter are some very curious ones. We cannot afford the space for all this, and must be content to give a few examples chosen from those on which the ornament is most definite and clearly marked.

It was noticed by those who saw the veil of oxide drawn away from the ornamentation of these bronze vessels that a large proportion of them were Egyptian rather than Assyrian in their general physiognomy. Some of them displayed motives familiar to all those who have travelled in the Nile valley. Take, for instance, the fragment we have borrowed from one of the best preserved of them all (Fig. 209).[412] Neither the minute lines of palmettes in the centre, nor the birds that occur in the outer border, have, perhaps, any great significance, but nothing could be more thoroughly Egyptian than the zone of figures between the two. The same group is there four times repeated. Two griffins crowned with the pschent, or double tiara of upper and lower Egypt, have each a foot resting upon the head of a kneeling child, but their movement is protective rather than menacing. Instead of struggling, the child raises its hands in a gesture of adoration. Between the griffins and behind them occur slender columns, quite similar to those we have so often encountered in the open architecture of Egypt.[413] Between the groups thus constituted are thicker shafts bearing winged scarabs on their campaniform capitals. These same columns and capitals occur on another cup from which we detach them in order to show their details more clearly.[414] In one instance the terminal of the shaft is unlike anything hitherto found elsewhere; it is a sphere (Fig. 210); but the contour of the next is thoroughly Egyptian (Fig. 211), and the symbols on the last three, a scarab and two uræi, proclaim their origin no less clearly (Figs. 212 to 214).

We gather the same impression from a platter only cleaned quite lately and consequently not to be found in Sir H. Layard’s works; it is now reproduced for the first time (Fig. 215). The whole decoration is finely carried out in line with the burin. The middle is occupied by a seven pointed star or rosette, nine times repeated. Around this elegant and complex motive there are concentric circles, the third of which, counting from the centre, is filled up with small figures hardly to be distinguished by the naked eye. We divine rather than see lions, birds, seated men, and certain groups of symbols, such as three lines broken and placed one above the other, which are continually recurring in the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt. The fifth zone has conventional papyrus stems alternating with rosettes. The sixth, much larger, is filled with ovals surmounted by two plumes and the uræus, that is by the royal cartouch of Egypt in its usual form. The interior of each oval contains very small groups of figures separated from one another by four horizontal lines.

We may quote a cup figured by Layard as a last example of this exotic style of decoration. In the centre there are four full-face heads with Egyptian wigs (Fig. 216). Around them a mountainous country is figured in relief, and sprinkled with trees and stags engraved with the point. The wide border, which is unfortunately very much mutilated, is covered with groups of figures apparently copied from some Egyptian monument, if we may judge from the attitudes and costume. One figure, whose torso has entirely disappeared, wears the pschent and brandishes a mace over his head; the movement is almost identical with that of the victorious Pharaoh with whom we are so familiar. A goddess, who might be Isis, stands opposite to him. In another part of the border there is a misshapen monster crowned with feathers and resembling the Egyptian Bes.[415]

Side by side with these platters we find others on which nothing occurs to suggest foreign influence. Take, for instance, the example reproduced in Fig. 208. In the centre there is a small silver boss, while the rest of the flat surface is occupied by the fine diaper pattern made up of six-petalled flowers that we have already met with on the carved thresholds (Vol. I. Fig. 96). The hollow border is ornamented with four lines of palmettes united by an undulating line, a motive which is no less Assyrian than the first (Vol. I., Figs. 128, 138, 139, etc.). In Fig. 217 we reproduce a cup on which its original mounting, or ring by which it was suspended, is still in place. The whole of the decoration is pure Assyrian. The rosette is exactly similar to many of those found on the enamelled bricks (see Vol. I., Figs. 122, 123). In the first of the three zones, gazelles march in file; in the second, a bull, a gazelle, an ibex, and a winged griffin, followed by the same animals attacked by lions and making fourteen figures in all; in the third zone fourteen heavy-crested bulls follow one another round the dish. All these animals are among those most constantly treated by the Assyrian sculptor; their shapes and motions are as well understood and as well rendered as in the bas-reliefs. The bulls especially are grandly designed. Moreover, the idea of employing all these animals for the adornment of such a surface is entirely in the spirit of Assyrian decoration. We shall meet with it again in the shields from Van; we figure the best preserved of the latter on page 347.

It would be easy to give more examples, either from Layard or from our own catalogue of these objects, of the purely Assyrian style on the one hand, or of that in which the influence of Egyptian models is so clearly shown, on the other. It is enough, however, that we have proved that these little monuments may be divided into two clearly marked classes. Did the two groups thus constituted share the same origin? Did they both come from the same birth-place? Further discoveries may enable us to answer this question with certainty, and even now we may try to pave the way to its solution.

There would be no difficulty if these bronze vessels bore cuneiform inscriptions, especially if the latter formed a part of the decorative composition, as in the palace reliefs, and were cut by the same hand. But this, so far as we know at present, was never the case. In some fragments of pottery we have found cuneiform characters (Fig. 185), and the name of Sargon has even been read on a glass phial (Fig. 190), but—and we cannot help feeling some surprise at the fact—none of these objects of a material far more precious bear a trace of the Mesopotamian form of writing. I do not know that a single wedge has been discovered upon them. A certain number of them are inscribed, but inscribed without exception with those letters which Phœnicia is supposed to have evolved out of the cursive writing of Egypt.[416] They were not introduced with any idea of enriching the design, as they always occur on the blank side of the vessel. They are close to the edge, and their lines are very slender, suggesting that they were meant to attract as little attention as possible. They consist of but a single name, that of the maker, or, more probably, the proprietor of the cup.[417]

May we take it that these inscriptions afford a key to the mystery? that they prove the vases upon which they occur at least to have been made in Phœnicia? We could only answer such a question in the affirmative if peculiarities of writing and language belonging only to Phœnicia properly speaking were to be recognized on them; but the texts are too short to enable us to decide to which of the Semitic idioms they should be referred, while the forms of the letters do not differ from those on some of the intaglios (Figs. 156 and 157) and earthenware vases (Fig. 183), and upon the series of weights bearing the name of Sennacherib.[418] The characters belong to that ancient Aramæan form of writing which seems to have been practised in Mesopotamia in very early times as a cursive and popular alphabet.

The inscriptions, then, do little to help us out of our embarrassment, and we are obliged to turn to the style of the vessels and their decoration for a solution to our doubts. The conviction at which we soon arrive after a careful study of their peculiarities is that even those on which Egyptian motives are most numerous and most frankly employed were not made in Egypt. In the first place we remember that the Egyptians do not seem to have made any extensive use of such platters; their libations were poured from vases of a different shape, and the cups sometimes shown in the hands of a Pharaoh always have a foot.[419] Moreover, in the paintings and bas-reliefs of Egypt, where so many cups and vases of every kind are figured, and especially the rich golden vessel that must have occupied such an important place in the royal treasure, we only find the shape in question in a few rare instances.[420]

After this general statement we may go into the details. In these the hand of the imitator is everywhere visible; he borrows motives and adapts them to his own habits and tastes. Take as an example the platter to which a double frieze of hieroglyphs gives a peculiarly Egyptian physiognomy (Fig. 215). An Egyptian artist would never employ hieroglyphs in such a position without giving them some real significance, such as the name of a king or deity. Here, on the other hand, an Egyptologist has only to glance at the cartouches to see that their hieroglyphs are brought together at haphazard and that no sense is to be got out of them. This is obvious even by the arrangement of the several characters in the oval without troubling to examine them one by one. They are divided into groups by straight lines, like those of a copy book. The Egyptian scribe never made use of such divisions; he distributed his characters over the field of the oval according to their sense and shape. The arrangement here followed is only to be explained by habits formed in the use of a writing that goes in horizontal lines from left to right or right to left. There is, in fact, nothing Egyptian but the shape of the ovals, and the motive with which they are crowned. The pretended hieroglyphs are nothing but rather clumsily executed pasticcios. And it must be noticed that even this superficial Egyptianism is absent from the centre of the dish. In those Theban ceilings which display such a wealth of various decoration we may find a simple rosette here and there, or rather a flower with four or eight petals, but these petals are always rounded at the end; nowhere do we find anything that can be compared to the great seven-pointed star which is here combined so ingeniously with eight more of the same pattern but of smaller size. On the other hand this motive is to be found on a great number of cups where no reminiscence of Egypt can be traced. The ruling idea is the same as that of the diaper-work in the thresholds from Khorsabad and Nimroud (see Vol. I., Fig. 135).

After such an example we might look upon the demonstration as made, but it may be useful to complete it by analyzing the other cups we have placed in the same class. That on which the scarabs on standards and the opposed sphinxes appear (Fig. 209) seems pure Egyptian at first sight; but if we take each motive by itself we find variations that are not insignificant. In Egyptian paintings, when the scarab is represented with extended wings they are spread out horizontally, and not crescent-wise over its head.[421] We may say the same of the sphinx. The griffin crowned with the pschent is to be found in Egypt as well as the winged sphinx,[422] but the Egyptian griffins had no wings,[423] and those of the sphinxes were folded so as to have their points directed to the ground. In the whole series of Egyptian monuments I cannot point to a fictitious animal like this griffin. It is in the fanciful creations of the Assyrians alone that these wings, standing up and describing a curve with its points close to the head of the beast that wears them (see Fig. 87), is to be seen. It is an Assyrian griffin masquerading under the double crown of Egypt, but a trained eye soon penetrates the disguise.

The arrangement, too, of the group is Assyrian. When the Egyptians decorated a jewel, a vessel, or a piece of furniture by combining two figures in a symmetrical fashion, they put them back to back rather than face to face.[424] Very few examples can be quoted of the employment in Egypt of an arrangement that is almost universal in Assyria. In the latter country this opposition of two figures is so common as to be common-place; they are usually separated from each other by a palmette, a rosette, a column or even a human figure (see Vol. I., Figs. 8, 124, 138, 139; and above, Figs. 75, 90, 141, 152, 153, 158, etc.), and it was certainly from Mesopotamia that Asia Minor borrowed the same motive, which is so often found in the tombs of Phrygia and in Greece as far as Mycenæ, whither it was carried from Lydia by the Tantalides.[425]

The same remarks will apply to the cup partially reproduced in our Fig. 216. The ornament of the centre and of the outer band is Egyptian in its origin, but the mountainous country with its stags and its trees, that lies between—have we found anything like it in Egypt? The mountains are suggested in much the same fashion as in the palace reliefs, and we know how much fonder the sculptors of Mesopotamia were of introducing the ibex, the stag, the gazelle, etc., into their work than those of Egypt. The rocky hills and sterile deserts that bounded the Nile valley were far less rich in the wilder ruminants than the wooded hills of Kurdistan and the grassy plains of the double valley.

There is one last fact to be mentioned which will, we believe, put the question beyond a doubt. Of all antique civilization, that which has handed down to us the most complete material remains is the civilization of Egypt. Thanks to the tomb there is but little of it lost. Granting that these cups were made in Egypt, how are we to explain the fact that not a single specimen has been found in the country? About sixty in all have been recovered; their decoration is distinguished by much variety, but when we compare them one with another we find an appreciable likeness between any two examples. The forms, the execution, the ornamental motives are often similar, or, at least, are often treated in the same spirit. The majority come from Assyria, but some have been found in Cyprus, in Greece, in Campania, Latium, and Etruria. Over the whole area of the ancient world there is but one country from which they are totally absent, and that country is Egypt.

We may, then, consider it certain that it was not Egyptian industry that scattered these vessels so widely, from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Arno and the Tiber, not even excepting from this statement those examples on which Egyptian taste has left the strongest mark. Egypt thus put out of the question, we cannot hesitate between Mesopotamia and Phœnicia. If the cups of Nimroud were not made where they were found, it was from Phœnicia that they were imported. The composite character of the ornamentation with which many of them were covered is consistent with all we know of the taste and habits of Phœnician industry, as we shall have occasion to show in the sequel. On the other hand we must not forget at how early a date work in metal was developed in the workshops of Mesopotamia. Exquisite as it is, the decoration of the best of these vases would be child’s play to the master workmen who hammered and chiselled such pictures in bronze as those that have migrated from Balawat to the British Museum.

We are inclined to believe that the fabrication of these cups began in Mesopotamia; that the first models were issued from the workshops of Babylon and Nineveh, and exported thence into Syria; and that the Phœnicians, who imitated everything—everything, at least, that had a ready sale—acclimatized the industry among themselves and even carried it to perfection. In order to give variety to the decoration of the vases sent by them to every country of Western Asia and Southern Europe, they drew more than once from that storehouse of Egyptian ideas into which they were accustomed to dive with such free hands; and this would account for the combination of motives of different origin that we find on some of the cups. Vases thus decorated must have become very popular, and both as a result of commerce and of successful wars, must have entered the royal treasures of Assyria in great numbers. We know how often, after the tenth century, the sovereigns of Calah and Nineveh overran Palestine, as well as Upper and Lower Syria. After each campaign long convoys of plunder wended their way through the defiles of the Amanus and Anti-Lebanon, and the fords of the Euphrates, to the right bank of the Tigris. The Assyrian conquerors were not content with crowding the store-rooms of their palaces with the treasures thus won, they often transported the whole population of a town or district into their own country. Among the Syrians thus transplanted there must have been artizans, some of whom endeavoured to live by the exercise of their calling and by opening shops in the bazaars of Babylon, Calah, and Nineveh. Clients could be easily gained by selling carved ivories and these engraved cups at prices much smaller than those demanded when the cost of transport from the Phœnician coast had to be defrayed.

In one of these two ways it is, then, easy to explain the introduction of these foreign motives into Assyria, where they would give renewed life to a system of ornament whose resources were showing signs of exhaustion. This tendency must have become especially pronounced about the time of the Sargonids, when Assyria was the mistress of Phœnicia and invaded the Nile valley more than once. To this period I should be most ready to ascribe the majority of the bronze cups; the landscapes, hunts and processions of wild animals with which many of them are engraved, seem to recall the style and taste of the bas-reliefs of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal rather than the more ancient schools of sculpture.

In any case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the vases engraved in Mesopotamia by native workmen and those imported from Phœnicia, or made at Nineveh by workmen who had received their training at Tyre or Byblos. The resemblances between the two are too many and too great. At most we may unite all the platters found in Mesopotamia into a single group, and point out a general distinction between them and those that have been discovered in the Mediterranean basin. The ornament on the Nimroud cups is, on the whole, simpler than on those found in Cyprus and Italy; the figure plays a less important part in the former, and the compositions are more simple. The Assyrian cups, or, to be more accurate, those found in Assyria, represent the earliest phase of this art, or industry, whichever it should be called. In later years, after the fall of Nineveh, when Phœnicia had the monopoly of the manufacture, she was no longer content with purely decorative designs and small separate pictures. Her bronze-workers multiplied their figures and covered the concentric zones with real subjects, with scenes whose meaning and intention can often be readily grasped. This we shall see when the principal examples of this kind of art come under review in our chapters upon Phœnicia.[426]

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.