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

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.

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.”