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

In the ages that rolled away before the commencement of the period that we call antiquity, the eastern world saw the birth of three great civilizations; the civilization of Egypt, the civilization of Chaldæa, and the civilization of China. All three are primitive in character. So far at least as we can judge, no other form of civilized life had preceded them in those countries; the past had left no examples to guide them on their way. In the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Yang-tse-kiang, three natural theatres in which all was prepared for the work to be performed upon their stages, man emerged from barbarism much sooner than he did in any other part of Asia or Africa; he there formed organized societies whose beginnings are lost in so impenetrable a past that we have no little difficulty in deciding on which hearth the flame of civilized life was first kindled.

Although these civilizations had each a physiognomy of its own, they had, nevertheless, more than one common feature. It would take too long to notice all the resemblances, but we may point out two by which the historian can hardly fail to be impressed as soon as the idea of making a comparison suggests itself to his mind.

All three nations learnt to write, and to write in ideographic characters. These characters are by no means alike in Egypt, Chaldæa, and China. In each case they began by representing the thing whose idea they wished to convey, and with time they reduced and simplified the images thus created until they had a certain number of conventional forms. This work of simplification did not always proceed on the same lines. The direction it took and the final result were greatly affected by the materials employed. Writing traced upon rice paper or papyrus, with a reed pen, gradually put on an appearance very different to that of characters punched in clay with a point or stylus. The three systems were in the end perfectly distinct; and when, by dint of long and patient effort, you have mastered all the difficulties of Chinese writing, you are no nearer than you were before to a comprehension of the wedges or the hieroglyphs.

And yet these three creations of man’s genius are identical in method and principle. Their point of departure was the same. They began by figuring every object to which a distinctive name had been given. The next step was to invent expedients by which these concrete signs could be used for the expression of abstract ideas, and the next again to employ them for the notation, not of ideas, but of sounds. In one country the passage from the direct to the metaphorical use of a term, and from the pure ideogram to the phonetic character, was made with more skill and rapidity than in another. Here the corrections and retouches suggested by practice were more cleverly used to remedy the vices of the system than there. But the fact to be remembered is that, without previous concert, all three societies solved the problem put before them in the same fashion, and that problem was how to fix their thoughts and transmit them to future generations. They began with naïve and roughly executed images, like those made by modern savages. From this stage, in which so many less gifted races stuck fast, all three nations emerged with equal decision and good fortune. By the same roads and by-ways they arrived at the expression of the most complex ideas with a most imperfect instrument. But in spite of all their good will and their subtle intellects, neither Egypt nor Chaldæa nor China succeeded in reducing the word to its elements, and fixing upon a special symbol for each of the fundamental articulations of the human voice. A kind of hidden force, a secret instinct, seems to have urged them on to the required analysis, while they were held back by some fatality or prejudice of their birth or early education. They were all three on the point of touching the goal, but they never quite reached it, and it is to another race that the glory of having invented the alphabet must be given.

These civilizations have a second characteristic at which the observer cannot but feel surprise, namely, their singular longevity and immobility. No doubt when we examine them closely we see that they changed, like everything else that is born, that lives and dies; but the changes only took place with extreme slowness. In the course of three or four thousand years beliefs and mental ideas could hardly remain quite stationary, but the forms and ceremonies of religion varied in no appreciable degree.

We may say the same of manners and social institutions. These could not, of course, remain quite the same during such a lapse of time; a single word, for instance, may have changed its meaning more than once in so many centuries; but it is none the less true that the conservative spirit, as we should call it, had a permanent force that it seems to have lost in the west, amid the rapid transformations and perpetual mobility of our modern world.

And we must recollect that these societies did not escape any more than others from the disorders of civil war, of political revolutions or barbarian inroads. Like all other human systems, they were subject to catastrophes which must have thrown everything into confusion for a time. But after each crisis had spent its force the ranks were closed and dressed, like those of a well-disciplined regiment after receiving a destructive volley. When quiet had come again men returned to their places in the framework of a society closely bound together by habits formed during countless generations. This framework had been so patiently elaborated and co-ordinated, it was so elastic, and, at the same time, so full of resistance, that even a foreign master found it more politic to preserve it and fall in with its ways than to destroy it; he was content, in most cases, to step into the place occupied by the prince whom he ousted. Affairs thus fell into their accustomed groove as soon as a conquest was complete; classes were reconstituted on their old bases; property and people took up their former conditions; the only difference lay in the fact that a new group of privileged individuals shared the wealth created by agricultural, industrial, and commercial activity. The sovereign and his chief officers might be of foreign race, but the social machine rolled on over the same road and with the same wheels as before.

The effect of this uniform and continuous movement did not stop here: it had another consequence in the rapid assimilation of heterogeneous and accidental elements, which adapted themselves in a very short time to the mould into which they were pushed and pressed by the never-sleeping action of an intense organic life, until, in time, they became fused and lost in the life they had meant to dominate.

Thus we find that Egypt, from the time of Menes to the end of the Roman domination, appropriated, and, as it were, digested and absorbed all the emigrants who came to establish themselves within her borders. Some of these came sword in hand, after having destroyed all opposition; others crept in humbly, demanding nothing better than permission to live in peace. Some were barbarian mercenaries in the pay of Pharaoh, some shepherds or agricultural labourers attracted by the splendid fertility of the soil, others were artizans in search of wealthy patrons, or merchants who sought a profit in distributing the products of the Egyptian soil or industry over foreign lands. No matter to what race they belonged, all these strangers and foreign sojourners, from the Hyksos to the Phœnicians and the Greeks, came under the spell of Egypt and exercised but little influence over her constitution, her manners, and ideas. To dissolve a body that appeared indestructible required two great religious revolutions—the rise of Christianity, and, but a few centuries later, that of Islamism.

So it was with the civilization born in the double valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Between the days of Ourkam and those of the Sassanids it had many different masters, but long before the apparent triumph of the Greek system, we find certain religious types maintained and repeated, which bear witness to the tenacity with which habits and beliefs, formed long before the first dawn of historic times, clung to life. Finally, China offers us a still more curious example of the intimate cohesion and the resisting force that defies the centuries. Egypt, Chaldæa, and Assyria are only memories; but China, protected by its situation, and by the circle of mountains and deserts that nature has drawn about it, the China of Confucius, still lives upon its ancient sites. Its religion is still that of the two primitive peoples we have been studying, an elaborate form of fetishism, or animism as some would have us call it. The adoration of the sovereign and of his great officers is addressed chiefly to the celestial bodies, to the sky itself, to the earth and its mountains; the common people fear and worship the genii that people the air and the waters, and, still more, the spirits of their own dead. These they feel hovering about them; they talk to them; with touching solicitude they prepare their funeral feasts.

As for the chief by whom these five hundred millions of human beings are governed, his power still preserves the absolute, theocratic, and patriarchal character that distinguishes royalty in all primitive social systems. We cannot tell what the future may have in store for China, which is now in contact with the west on all its frontiers, but it is curious to think that we have as contemporaries in one of the vastest empires in the world, a nation of men who in all their intellectual conceptions are nearer to the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans than to a modern Englishman or Frenchman. And what adds to our surprise is that a people of whom we are sometimes inclined to speak with contempt is not more easily affected by our ideas and our scientific knowledge, and even goes so far as to add one more to the anxieties that beset the civilization of which we are so proud. Even a power like that of the United States of America takes alarm at the invasion of Chinese workmen, who do more work for less pay than men of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, or German birth.

The isolation in which China has lived so long has prevented us from giving her a place in our history, but we could not ignore her altogether; we have felt ourselves compelled to point out the close and striking resemblances that make her a sister of Egypt and Chaldæa—a younger sister indeed, but one that has survived her elders; and the comparison is important because the example of China enables us to realize better than we otherwise could the conditions under which the industrial activities of Egypt and Chaldæa were exercised. Thanks to the data she furnishes we can understand how the workshops of Babylonia and the Nile delta were able to scatter their productions in such prodigious quantities over all the markets of Western Asia; how objects elegant and carefully made as they were could be delivered at a price low enough to find plenty of buyers, even when the heavy charges for freight, brokerage, &c., were added to their original cost. On the fertile plains of the Euphrates and the Nile, as in the “yellow” district of China, life was so easy and food so abundant that the workman’s wage was almost nil. This gave to the dwellers in those happy regions a first advantage over the tribes condemned to win a laborious existence from the dry soil of the islands and mountain-chains of Southern Europe.

In a great bee-hive like modern China, where men swarm in countless millions, work is not only done cheaper, it is done better than among the poor and scanty tribes that peopled the shores and narrow valleys of Greece and Italy in those remote days when Memphis and Babylon were still great capitals. These small clans of fishermen and woodmen, of shepherds and agriculturists, were cut off from one another by lofty ridges, which were often to be crossed only by difficult and dangerous paths. A happy chance or a well directed effort of thought might lead one of them to discover some technical secret, but a long time would elapse before the invention would cross the mountains and simplify the toil of the neighbouring tribes. In that western world which remained so restless until the eleventh or tenth century before our era, it constantly happened that a tribe was bitten by a kind of mania to seek for a new and more favourable home. These displacements put an end to labour for a time, and brought about shocks and conflicts by which development was arrested and settled questions reopened. A canton sacked or a few villages destroyed was enough to put an end to some promising invention or to destroy the memory of some successful process. No conquest over natural difficulties was final.

It was quite otherwise in those ancient states which had a population firmly rooted in the soil, and of industrious, sedentary habits. In such societies there was no danger of a rude interruption to a work begun. When some artizan more skilful or imaginative than his fellows improved the tools of his trade, the knowledge of those improvements spread rapidly from workshop to workshop. Even in the cities of the modern East those who follow a particular trade live together in their own quarter of the town. In Constantinople and Cairo, in Damascus and Bagdad, there is the armourers’ quarter, the jewellers’ quarter, that of the saddlers, the tailors, and of many others. These quarters have their own special entrances, their officers and watchmen; in the days of antiquity as now, they formed so many small industrial towns, where, thanks to the heredity of professions and the constancy of habits and fashions, the prosperity of the manual arts was not at the mercy of political accident. Wars and changes of dynasty might cause a moment of stagnation and dulness, but such troubles did not prevent the apprentice from receiving from his master the instruction in his trade that he would afterwards pass on to his successors, with all that he himself could add to the legacy of the past. There were no sudden interruptions, no solutions of continuity: all that was found was kept; nothing was forgotten or wasted.

Until the still distant day when Ionia, Greece, and Italy should also have their populous cities, Egypt and Chaldæa found themselves in a very favourable situation compared with the peoples, or rather tribes, who dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean. Among the latter none but those simple industries that could be carried on under the family roof, and in which the women and children could take their part, were understood. In the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates there were real manufactures. Artizans were specially trained and grouped into corporations; they did not work only in the hours they could spare from agriculture; they laboured at their trade without interruption from one end of the year to the other, producing objects which commerce would afterwards “place” where the demand was brisk. In fact they had a real, we might almost say a great industry. Beside the machine-fed industry of modern Europe its output was no doubt small; neither Egypt nor Chaldæa had steam, nor electricity, nor the “spinning-jenny;” but their organization and division of labour gave them a superiority over their contemporaries no less crushing than that by which modern Europe is enabled to flood the whole surface of this planet with her manufactures, and to substitute them for the local industries. In every little village of Anatolia I found the cottons of Manchester and the blue plates of Creil; they could be bought cheaper than native pottery and textiles. It was the same in antiquity. In the islands and on the coasts of the Ægæan, there was no competition to be feared by the faïence, the vessels of terra-cotta or metal, the textiles, the arms, the ivories, the glass, the utensils of every shape and kind sent out in such inexhaustible quantities from the workshops of Egypt and Chaldæa.

We must endeavour to point out the channels by which the overflow from this rich and varied production reached the people by whom it was consumed. And we have a distinction to make between the various foreign countries to which it was conveyed. We have, on the one hand, those countries that were in direct contact with Egypt and Chaldæa, such as Syria, for instance, which dealt immediately with the manufacturers of the Delta and the Euphrates valley. On the other there were distant clients who scarcely knew the name of the country from which their merchandize was brought. They made their purchases at second or even third hand. The influence of the two great primitive civilizations was naturally felt with less force at a distance than when close at hand. In the case of next-door neighbours, it no doubt favoured the progress of industry and the creation of wealth, but at the same time it must have weighed like an incubus on the national genius and imagination; by furnishing it with a complete repertory of forms and types it must have discouraged it and prevented it from becoming truly creative. On the other hand, with those who only came under that influence when attenuated, and, as it were, refracted by interposed media, the effect was quite different. It gave useful hints and suggestions, stimulating the spirit at the same time as it dispensed with the necessity of long periods of experiment and uncertainty. In the latter case originality was not crushed in the bud; it was enabled to develop itself with complete freedom.

These differences will be pointed out hereafter as they occur, but it was necessary to insist before going any further on the common features presented and the similar parts played by Egypt and Chaldæa in all the earlier ages of antiquity. These two peoples, who were so long practically forgotten, were the real founders of western civilization. To be ignorant of this capital fact or to shut one’s eyes to it for a moment is to lose one’s grasp of the true rise and subsequent development of the system which is in course of completion under our eyes and with our help.

Five or six centuries seem to have been sufficient for Greece and Italy to raise themselves to the pitch of refinement and culture suggested to us by the names of Pericles, of Alexander and Augustus. At first one is not amazed by this singular phenomenon. One thinks a satisfactory reason has been given for it by a few general statements as to the genius of those gifted races. But criticism has now grown to be more exacting. It has more precise observations and more numerous points of comparison at its command. It knows how slowly, especially in the first steps, collective and successive works are accomplished. It seeks for an explanation of such rapid progress in the duration and importance of the preliminary work carried out with untiring patience by the older societies, the laborious forerunners of the brilliant favourites of history. Without this long preparing of the ground, lasting at least some two or three thousand years, without the countless efforts of invention and the prolific activity that filled up that period, how much longer the nations of Southern Europe would have been in shaking themselves free of the barbarism in which Scythians and Sclaves, Celts and Germans were steeped until they were conquered by Rome. What turn things might have taken we cannot even guess, but of this we may be sure, that the world would not have witnessed when it did the marvellous and almost sudden appearance of the flowers of classic art and poetry.

Now the industries of Egypt and Chaldæa won their great prestige, and the works with which they flooded all the countries within their reach awakened the plastic genius of the western races, because behind them there was an art, an art not without faults, but yet with no little originality and grandeur.

In both countries architecture had created buildings whose wealth of decoration corresponded to their ample size, and gave point to the significance of their plans. The ambition of Chaldæa was no less high than that of Egypt. For size and general magnificence its great edifices might be looked upon as worthy rivals to those of the Nile valley, and yet we cannot say they deserve to be put quite on the same level. In the vast plains of the Euphrates those staged towers whose restoration we have attempted had a singular importance; they amazed the eye with their size, and pleased it with their brilliant colours; but they fell short of the nobility, the mysterious beauty and dignity of the Egyptian temples. Temples, sanctuaries, or palaces, all the great structures of Mesopotamia seem to us to suffer from a certain heaviness and want of variety, and they had another great fault. They bore in their bosoms the seeds of their own rapid dissolution. Unlike the halls of Carnac and Luxor they had no defences against the action of time and the violence of man.

The Chaldæan architect must, then, be put below his Egyptian rival, and the real cause of his inferiority, as we have already explained, is to be looked for in the defects of the only material in which his conceptions could be carried out. That material was brick, brick either burnt in the kiln, or dried in the sun, with which any conception may be realized but one in which delicate mouldings and slender columns play a conspicuous part.

In the case of sculpture the balance hangs about level. The two schools rendered living forms, and especially those of mankind, in different ways, but their merits have seemed to us to be distinct rather than very unequal. In one we have found a more delicate feeling for line, for grace and refinement of contour; in the minutest statuettes as in the most gigantic colossi, we have tasted the charm of that proud and smiling serenity that is expressed as much in attitude and gesture as in the face. In the other we are chiefly struck by energy of modelling and power of movement. We have estimated these qualities of force and vigour at their full price, and we have pointed out that the form of man occupies a far more important place in the religious art of Chaldæa than in that of Egypt. In its more frankly anthropomorphic character it has seemed to us an advance upon that Egyptian sculpture which put the heads of crocodiles, hawks and hippopotamuses on the shoulders of its gods. And yet we have been obliged to acknowledge that the natural conditions were in some respects unfavourable to the development of Chaldæo-Assyrian art. Their funerary rites did not demand the absolute fidelity which made the early Egyptian sculptors such admirable portraitists. In the absence of such compulsion the Mesopotamian sculptors created general types rather than individual figures, and their art always had a more or less conventional character in consequence. Its progress was also hindered by the barrier of opaque drapery that was interposed between the artist and his model. In his figures of animals we may see how great his genius for the expression of life, form, and movement really was, and in all imitative qualities they leave his figures of men far behind. Nothing in the world can make up for the absence of that patient study of the nude, on which all really great sculpture is founded.

It is because Mesopotamian art never studied at this elementary school, and never mastered these foundations of all plastic skill, that such of its productions as border on what we call the industrial arts, never shook themselves clear of a certain heaviness of hand and a certain monotony of effect. These defects are easily accounted for; a robe—and especially a straight and clinging robe like that of Assyria—hides all refinements of modelling, and all the grace of those undulating lines by which the human form is bounded. If, as in Egypt, the sculptor and painter had made all the beauties of the human figure, and especially the graceful contours of woman, familiar to every eye, artizans would have known how to give more subtle and agreeable forms to their creations, and would have been compelled to give them. A knowledge of the nude would have enabled them to make countless variations on a single theme, and to use it again and again without danger of tiring the eye. All robed figures have a certain mutual resemblance, however little there may be in common in their movement and costume. In at least one Assyrian relief we have been obliged to leave it in doubt as to whether a life-size figure is that of a god or a goddess.

On the other hand, two nude figures may be almost identical in attitude and gesture, but even a careless eye will not confound one with the other. In one the bony framework and muscular development will be more strongly marked than in the other. Sex, age, habits of work or repose, will leave their unmistakable marks upon the fleshy contours. The artist’s difficulties begin when he attempts to record all the shades of form, and, no doubt, he can never be successful in such an attempt until he has accumulated no little stock of professional knowledge and skill. But it is something when he begins to perceive those shades, and to understand their interest and value. In endeavouring to reproduce them he feels his hand become lighter and more adroit; in time he will set himself to imitate nature in all her marvellous variety, and in doing so he will be led to perceive how she never repeats herself, how she gives to each individual his own distinctive physiognomy at the same time that she never confuses the identity of type or species. Put on his mettle by this discovery, he will become more ingenious and more inventive every day. Having learnt how scarcely perceptible variations of line and proportion suffice to distinguish between one being and another, he will accustom himself to give variety to his creations by the same process; however slight the changes may be between his successive productions, each will be a new and unique creation in the fullest sense of the word. Thenceforward the limits of his art will be as wide as those of nature herself. Once it has entered upon the road thus pointed out, it may indeed encounter certain difficulties of execution, but it need fear no longer a relapse into the worst of faults, monotony and uniformity.

Unlike the Egyptians, and, as we shall see, still more unlike the Greeks, the Chaldæans had to dispense with this invaluable training. Hence the inferiority of their art. That their imaginations were lively enough is proved chiefly by the decoration of their carpets and embroidered stuffs, on which all the resources of line are developed with unfailing taste and fancy; on which vegetable and animal forms, both real and fantastic, are mingled with the figures of men and supernatural genii in a fashion that is always graceful and full of variety. But the variety is more apparent than real. Every human figure is robed and practically identical in appearance; the artist was without the resources enjoyed by his Egyptian rival for modifying his theme without destroying its fundamental character.

Compelled to judge of these embroideries from a small number of examples handed down to us on the reliefs, we are ready to admire them for the diversity of their motives, but perhaps if we had a larger collection we should find some particular group or figure frequently reappearing. But even if it were so it ought not to lead us to condemn the taste of the artizans who made them. On stuffs used for garments, on carpets spread upon floors and tapestries hung upon walls, repetitions were not out of place. The motive was not looked at for itself, for its value as an isolated creation, but for the effect produced by its continual repetition. The eye receives a certain kind of pleasure from the constant return of a single arrangement of line or harmony of colour; and an element which, taken by itself, would have but little value, may be used to build up rich and graceful compositions. This is sufficiently proved by the ceramics and textiles of the modern East, such as the faïence of Persia, the shawls of India, the embroidered silks of China and the porcelain of Japan.

The same law does not hold good in all the sumptuary arts. Take jewelry and gold or silversmith’s work, for instance. The aim is no longer to decorate and illumine a surface of indefinite extent, it is to create an object with a distinct unity and form of its own. The great resource of the worker in precious metal lies, therefore, in those figures of men and animals to which nature has given a clearly defined shape and special features by which one is distinguished from the other. In this respect the goldsmith is the pupil of the sculptor. He reproduces, on a smaller scale, the types created by the statue-maker, and multiplies his copies with the freedom of hand imposed by the necessity for meeting a wider demand. It matters little that in one time or place these imitations are made with less care and refinement of taste than in another; the principle is always the same. In the industrial arts, at least in those in which the figure plays an important rôle, we find nothing that cannot be referred to some model created by the same people in their fine arts. The work of the artizan is the reduction, the reflection—enfeebled, indeed, but faithful so far as it goes—of the work of the artist.

In glancing over the productions of Chaldæo-Assyrian armourers, jewellers, workers in metal, cabinetmakers, turners, &c., we shall, then, feel no surprise at the introduction and skilful treatment of animals and parts of animals, for we have already shown that the Assyrian sculptors were, perhaps, the foremost animaliers of all antiquity. On the other hand, in the whole of those objects which have taught us some of the favourite motives of the Assyrian ornamentist, we have hardly encountered a human figure; at the most we can only point to one or two objects on which it was used. In the throne of Sennacherib (see above, Fig. 47) it was in reality no more than a symbol. It was not introduced for its own sake, but in order to suggest a particular idea to the mind of the spectator. And as for the earrings moulded into the shape of a child (Figs. 251 and 252), we are not at all sure that they belong to the place and period to which they are ascribed.

But although we are met on all sides by animals and by fragments from their bodies, by serpents, rams, goats, bulls, lions (most frequent of all), griffins and other fictitious monsters, we are distressed by the absence of those figures of men, still more of women, which occur so continually on the articles of furniture, on the domestic utensils, on the metal vases and the jewelry of the Egyptians. Wearied by the very wealth of an art so rich and so marvellously inventive, we have given, perhaps, in our volumes upon Egypt, examples too few and chosen from an insufficient number of classes; but our readers cannot have forgotten the graceful girlish forms carved on the handles of the perfume spoons, here stepping delicately among the stems of papyrus, there with their slender limbs extended like those of a swimmer.[461] We may be allowed, perhaps, to refresh the memories of readers who have dwelt so long with us in Assyria, by placing before them two more examples from the marvellous art wealth of the Nile valley (Figs. 260 and 261).

These two examples do not belong to the same class as the perfume spoons, but their ruling idea is the same. They are mirrors with bronze handles. In both cases these handles are modelled in the shape of nude women or young girls, the slender proportions recalling the sculptures and paintings of the New Empire. In the first the right arm hangs by the side while the left is crossed upon the chest; the head alone, protected by the thick hair or wig, supports the mirror (Fig. 260). In the second both arms are raised as high as the shoulders and the hands bent upwards from the wrists to meet a depressed cross-piece to which the polished disk is attached (Fig. 261). In both cases the modelling of limbs and torso is a little dry and summary; but the motive is well imagined, and in spite of defects in detail the whole is characterized by style and grace.

Nothing of the kind has been found, or, to all appearance, will ever be found, in the goldsmith’s work of Babylon and Nineveh. As new excavations are made, we shall, no doubt, find new arrangements, but it is very unlikely that anything yet to be discovered can essentially modify the idea we have been led to form of the tastes and habits of Mesopotamian industry. We are sufficiently familiar with Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture, both in its strength and its weakness, to thoroughly understand the gaps which must always have existed in the storehouse to which the artizan went for his ideas. The artizan followed the example of the sculptor; he gave his attention to the bas-relief and it repaid his trouble. Among the figures sprinkled with so lavish a hand over stone and wood, ivory and metal, some were traced with the point or engraved in intaglio; others were beaten up with the hammer or chisel so as to stand in gentle salience above their bed. But, speaking generally, no attempt was made to model the nude figures of men or women in the round. No suspicion of the wealth of suggestion latent especially in the latter, seems to have dawned upon the Assyrian mind. If we except a few terra-cotta statuettes, the artist who in some way gave proof of so much resource, of so much skill and ingenuity, seems never to have felt the charm of female beauty. The beauty of woman is the light of nature, the perennial joy of the eye; to exclude it from the ideal world created by the plastic arts is to condemn that world to a perpetual twilight, to cast over it a veil of chill monotony and sadness.

In the arts of all those peoples who received the teachings of Egypt and Chaldæa, whether at first hand, like the Phœnicians, or at second, like the Greeks, the two distinct influences can always be traced. Mesopotamia may be recognized in certain ornamental motives, such as the “knop and flower,” the rosettes and palmettes, as well as in its taste for the symmetry given by coupled figures; still more clearly is it betrayed in motives into which lions and the whole tribe of fantastic animals are introduced, struggling with and devouring each other, and occasionally brought to the ground by some individual dressed in a long gaberdine and crowned with a tiara.

On the other hand, it is to Egypt that our thoughts are turned when the human body meets our eyes in its unveiled nobility, with all the variety of attitude and outline its forms imply. The peoples of Western Asia learnt much in the school of the Chaldæan artist, but the teaching given by the Egyptian sculptor was of a higher order, and far better adapted to guide them in the way that leads to those exquisite creations in which delicacy and certainty of hand are happily allied with imaginative power. Sooner or later such teaching must have aroused, in open and inquiring minds, a feeling for beauty like that felt in her peculiar fashion by Egypt, a feeling to which Greece, when once put in her right way, gave the fullest expression it has ever received in marble and bronze.

In order to make good a comparison that no historian of art can avoid, we have placed ourselves successively at two different points of view, and from both we have arrived at the same result: as artists the Egyptians take a higher rank than the Assyrians, than those constructors who obstinately neglected the column even when they built with stone, than those sculptors who avoided measuring themselves with nature, and who shirked her difficulties by draping their figures. But before thus bringing the two methods and the two ways of looking at form into opposition, we ought perhaps to have pointed out a difference in which this inequality is foreshadowed. In all the monarchies of the East the great monuments were anonymous, or, at least, if a name was given in the official texts it was not that of the artist who conceived them, but of the king under whom they were created. It is not till we arrive at Greece that we find public opinion placing the work of art and its author so high that the latter feels himself justified in signing his own creation. But although this practice was not inaugurated in Egypt, numerous inscriptions bear witness to the high rank held in Egyptian society by the artists to whom the king confided the construction and decoration of his buildings.[462] These men were not only well paid; they received honours which they are careful to record, and their fame was spread over the whole valley of the Nile. In the cuneiform texts we have so far failed to discover the name of a single architect or sculptor, and it does not appear that a reason for the omission is to be sought in the peculiar conditions of Chaldæo-Assyrian epigraphy. Although Babylon and Nineveh have not left us thousands of epitaphs like those rescued from the sands of Egypt, we possess many private contracts and agreements in which information similar to that afforded in other countries by the sepulchral steles is to be found. Neither there nor elsewhere do we find a trace of anything corresponding to the conspicuous rank held under the Theban princes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, by a Semnat, a Bakhenkhonsou, or any other of the royal architects whose names have been handed down to us in the texts.

It is unlikely that this difference will vanish when more texts have been translated. The inequality in the position of the two artists is readily explained by the unequal development of the two arts. Egyptian architecture is learned and skilful after a fashion quite distinct from that of Mesopotamia. It is not content, like the latter, to spread itself out laterally and to heap up huge masses of earth, to be afterwards clothed in thin robes of enamelled faïence, of painted and sculptured alabaster. In spite of their rich decorations, palaces like those of Nimroud and Khorsabad never quite threw off their appearance of gigantic improvisations. Their plans once determined—and Assyrian plans only varied within very narrow limits—the method of roofing, flat or vaulted, fixed upon for each apartment, all the rest was only a matter of foremen and their legions of half-skilled workmen. At the very least we may say that the architect who superintended the building of a Ninevite palace had a far easier task than his rival of Thebes or Memphis. The arrangement of porticoes and hypostyle halls demanded much thought and taste, and, if the work when finished was at all to come up to the ideas of its creator, the workmen who cut the graceful capitals and sturdy architraves from the huge masses of granite, sandstone, or limestone, had to be supervised with an unremitting care unknown and uncalled for in Mesopotamia. The architects who raised the colonnades of Karnak and the Ramesseum for Seti and his famous son, were the Ictinus and Mnesicles of the East. We may become better acquainted than we are now with the monumental history of Mesopotamia, but we shall never find within her borders artists worthy to be placed on a level with those Theban masters.

And if we compare the sculptors of Thebes and Nineveh, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. On the one hand we find artists who, whether they worked for the tomb or the temple, in the most stubborn or the most kindly materials, chiselled images that either delight us with their simple truth, or impress us with their noble gravity and colossal size. A whole nation of statues issued from those Egyptian studios through which we have conducted our readers, many of them real masterpieces in their way. In Mesopotamia, after early attempts that seemed full of promise, the art of modelling statues was soon abandoned. In the glorious days of Nineveh, all that was required of the sculptor was a talent, we might say a knack, for cutting in the soft gypsum or limestone realistic illustrations of the conquests and hunts of the reigning prince. He had to turn out purely historical and anecdotic sculpture by the yard, or rather by the mile; while in Egypt we see the whole nation, with its kings and gods, revive to a second life in those forceful and sincere portraits of which so many thousands have come down to our day.

In placing the distinctive features of the individual upon wood or stone, the sculptor did something more than flatter the vanity of the great; he prolonged their existence, he helped them to keep off the assaults of death and to defy annihilation. From Pharaoh to the humblest fellah, every one had to conciliate the man who possessed such a quasi-magic power, and from whom such an all-important service might have to be demanded. The common people bought ready-made figures in a shop, on which they were content to cut their names, but the kings and nobles commissioned their statues from the best artists of the time, and some reflex from the respect and admiration surrounding the sovereign must have fallen upon the man to whom he confided the task of giving perpetuity to his royal features, in those statues that during the whole of his reign would stand on the thresholds and about the courts of the temple, and on the painted walls of that happy abode to whose shadows he would turn when full of years and eager for rest.

If, before the advent of the Greeks, there were any people in the ancient world in whom a passion for beauty was innate, they were the people of Egypt. The taste of Chaldæa was narrower, less frank and less unerring; she was unable, at least in the same degree, to ally force with grace; her ideal had less nobility, and her hand less freedom and variety. It is by merits of a different kind that she regains the advantage lost in the arts. If her artists fell short of their rivals, her savants seem to have been superior to those of Egypt. In their easy-going and well-organized life, the Egyptians appear to have allowed the inquiring side of their intellects to go to sleep. Morality seems to have occupied them more than science; they made no great efforts to think.

The Chaldæans were the reverse of all this. We have reason to believe that they were the first to ask themselves the question upon which all philosophy is founded, the question as to the true origin of things. Their solution of the problem was embodied in the cosmogonies handed down to us in fragments by the Greek writers, and although their conceptions have only been received through intermediaries by whom their meaning has often been altered and falsified, we are still enabled to grasp their fundamental idea through all the obscurities due to a double and sometimes triple translation, and that idea was that the world was created by natural forces, by the action of causes even now at work. The first dogma of the Babylonian religion was the spontaneous generation of things from the liquid element.[463]

The first vague presentiment and rough sketch, as it were, of certain theories that have made a great noise in the world in our own day, may be traced, it is asserted, in the cosmogonic writings of ancient Chaldæa. Even the famous hypothesis of Darwin has been searched for and found, if we may believe the searchers. In any case it seems well established that the echo of these speculations reached the Ionian sages who were the fathers of Greek philosophy. Their traces are perceptible, some scholars declare, in the Theogony of Hesiod. Possibly it is so; there are certainly some striking points of resemblance; but where the influence of such ideas is really and clearly evident is in those philosophic poems that succeeded each other about the sixth century B.C., all under the same title: concerning nature (περὶφύσεως).[464] These poems are now lost, but judging from what we are told by men who read them in the original, the explanation they gave of the creation of the world and of the first appearance upon it of organized beings, differed only in its more abstract character from that proposed many centuries before, and under the form of a myth, by the priests of Chaldæa. If we may trust certain indications, these bold and ingenious doctrines crossed over from Ionia to the mainland of Greece, and reached the ears of such writers as Aristophanes and Plato.

It does the greatest honour to Chaldæa that its bold speculations should have thus contributed to awaken the lofty intellectual ambitions and the scientific curiosity of Greece, and perhaps she may have rendered the latter country a still more signal service in teaching her those methods by whose use man draws himself clear of barbarism and starts on the road to civilization; a single example of this will be sufficient. It is more than forty years since Bœckh, and Brandis after him, proved that all the measures of length, weight and capacity used by the ancients, were correlated in the same fashion and belonged to one scale. Whether we turn to Persia, to Phœnicia or Palestine, to Athens or Rome, we are constantly met by the sexagesimal system of the Babylonians. The measurements of time and of the diurnal passage of the sun employed by all those peoples, were founded on the same divisions and borrowed from the same inventors. It is to the same people that we owe our week of seven days, which, though not at first adopted by the western nations, ended by imposing itself upon them.[465] As for astronomy, from a period far away in the darkness of the past it seems to have been a regular branch of learning in Chaldæa; the Greeks knew very little about it before the conquests of Alexander; it was more than a century after the capture of Babylon by the Macedonians that the famous astrological tables were first utilized by Hipparchus.[466]

In the sequel we shall come upon further borrowings and connections of this kind, whose interest and importance has never been suspected by the historian until within the last few years. Take the chief gods and demi-gods to whom the homage of the peoples of Syria and Asia Minor was paid, and you will have no difficulty in acknowledging that, although their names were often changed on the way, Mesopotamia was the starting place of them all. By highways of the sea as well as those on land, the peoples established on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean entered into relations with the tribes of another race who dwelt on the European coasts of the same sea; they introduced them to their divinities and taught them the rites by which those divinities were honoured and the forms under which they were figured. Without abandoning the gods they worshipped in common with their brother Aryans, the Greeks adopted more than one of these Oriental deities. This is not the place to consider the question in detail. We must put aside for the present both the Cybele of Cappadocia and Phrygia and that Ephesian Artemis, who, after being domiciled and naturalized in one of the Hellenic capitals, so obstinately and so long preserved her foreign characteristics; we must for the moment forget Aphrodite, that goddess of a different fortune whose name is enough to call up visions of not a few masterpieces of classic art and poetry. Does not all that we know of this daughter of the sea, of her journeys, of the first temples erected to her on the Grecian coasts and of the peculiar character of her rites and attributes—does not all this justify us in making her a lineal descendant of Zarpanitu, of Mylitta and Istar, of all those goddesses of love and motherhood created by the imagination and worshipped by the piety of the Semites of Chaldæa? On the other hand the more we know of Egypt the less inclined are we to think that any of the gods of her Pantheon were transported to Greece and Italy, at least in the early days of antiquity.

Incomplete as they cannot help being, these remarks had to be made. They will explain why in the scheme of our work we have given similar places to Chaldæa and Egypt. The artist will always have a predilection for the latter country, a preference he will find no difficulty in justifying; but the historian cannot take quite the same view. It is his special business to weigh the contributions of each nation to the common patrimony of civilization, and he will understand how it is that Chaldæa, in spite of the deficiencies of its plastic art, worked more for others than Egypt and gave more of its substance and life. Hidden among surrounding deserts the valley of the Nile only opened upon the rest of the world by the ports on a single short line of frontier. The basin of the Euphrates was much more easily accessible. It had no frontier washed by the Mediterranean, but it communicated with that sea by more numerous routes than Egypt, and by routes whose diversity enhanced the effect of the examples they were the means of conveying to the outer world.

It is, to all appearance, to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia that humanity owes the cultivation of wheat, its chief alimentary plant.[467] This precious cereal seems to have been a native of the valleys of the Indus and Euphrates; nowhere else is it found in a wild state. From those two regions it must have spread eastwards across India to China, and westwards across Syria into Egypt and afterwards on to the European continent. From the rich plains where the Hebrew tradition set the cradle of the human race, the winds carried many seeds besides those by which men’s bodies have so long been nourished; the germs of all useful arts and of all mental activities were borne on their breath like a fertilizing dust. Among those distant ancestors of whom we are the direct heirs, those ancestors who have left us that heritage of civilization which grows with every year that passes, there are none, perhaps, to whom our respect and our filial gratitude are more justly due than to the ancient inhabitants of Chaldæa.