ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS.
VOL I.
P. 155.—It was not only as mortar that bitumen was used. Mr. Rassam tells us that he found at Abou-Abba (Sippara), in Chaldæa, a chamber paved with asphalte much in the same fashion as a modern street in London or Paris (Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology).
P. 200.—From a late communication to the Society of Biblical Archæology we learn that Mr. Rassam found the Sippara tablet in the corner of a room, under the floor; it was inclosed in an inscribed earthenware box.
P. 242, line 12; for Shalmaneser III. read Shalmaneser II.
P. 266, line 8 from foot: for Plate X. read Plate IX.
P. 305.—Intercourse between the valley of the Nile and that of the Tigris and Euphrates seems to have begun not sooner than the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. To this conclusion we are led both by Egyptian texts and by the tablets in the library of Assurbanipal. Most of the tablets are reprints—if we may say so—of texts dating originally from Ur, and from the time of the ancient Chaldæan monarchy. Now these texts seem to have been written by a people who knew not Egypt; no mention of that country is to be found in them. They contain a division of the world into four regions, in none of which Egypt has a place (Sayce, The Early Relations of Egypt and Babylonia, in Lepsius’s Zeitschrift, p. 150).
P. 349.—We may here draw attention to an object which may be compared to that described by M. Clermont Ganneau, both for its intrinsic character and its probable destination. It is a tablet in brown limestone, portable, and surmounted by a ring or staple cut in the material. On one face there is a bas-relief in which the goddess who occupies the lower register in Péretié’s bronze again appears. She has the head of a lioness, a snake dangles from each hand, the arms are outstretched, and two animals, in which Layard recognises a lioness and a sow, hang to her breasts. This goddess stands before an animal which has a bull’s head in the engraving given by Lajard. But its feet are those of a horse, and no doubt we should find that the animal in question was a horse if we could examine the original; but we do not know what has become of it. If, as there seems reason to believe, this goddess is an infernal deity, it is easy to understand why serpents were placed in her hands. These reptiles are the symbols of resurrection; every year they quit their old skins for new ones. The object in question is described in detail in the Recherches sur le Culte de Vénus, p. 130, and figured in Plate XVI, Fig. 1. Upon one of the larger faces of the tablet and upon its edges there are inscriptions, magic formulæ according to M. Fr. Lenormant.
This tablet was formerly in the cabinet of M. Rousseau, at one time French consul at Bagdad. It was found in the ruins of Babylon. Size, 24 inches high by 24 inches wide, and 3⅞ inches thick.
P. 384.—In speaking of the excavations made by Sir H. Rawlinson at Borsippa, we forgot to mention his paper entitled On the Birs Nimroud; or, The Great Temple of Borsippa (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xviii. p. 1–32). Paragraphs 1 and 2 give an account of the excavations, and we regret that we wrote of the religious architecture of Chaldæa before having read them. Not that they contain anything to cause us to change our conceptions of the staged towers. The excavations seem to have been carried on with great care, but they hardly gave results as complete as they might have done had they been directed by a thoroughly-trained architect.
VOL. II.
P. 48.—Upon Arvil, the ancient Arbela, and the likelihood of great discoveries in the mound which there rises 150 feet above the plain, see a contribution from Sir H. Rawlinson to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. i. new series, 1865, pp. 190–197. The mound is at present crowned by a Turkish fort.
P. 176.—Herr Fritz Hommel, one of the few non-French students of the remains from Tello, is no more inclined than we are to allow that the igneous rocks from which they are cut were brought from Egypt. He believes they were won from much nearer quarries, viz., on the borders of the Arabian plateau (Die Vorsemitische Kulturen in Egypten und Babylonien, pp. 211–223).
Pp. 188–190.—In enumerating the few monuments of Chaldæan sculpture that we possess over and above those brought home by M. de Sarzec, we forgot to mention a small Babylonian head in hard alabaster, now in the Louvre (Fig. 262). Its workmanship resembles that of the two heads from Tello (Plate VII.), and some of the small heads from the same place. It is conspicuous for the same frank and decided modelling, but it belongs to the period when long beards were worn.
P. 202.—To the list of Chaldæan sculptures we should, perhaps, add the rock-cut relief found by Sir H. Rawlinson in the district of Zohab, about fifty leagues from the left bank of the Tigris, and to the north-west of Bagdad, near the village of Sheikhan. This district forms a part of the Persian province of Kirmanchah (Journal of the Geographical Society, vol. ix. p. 31). The relief occurs, it seems, on the high road between Babylon and Ecbatana, in the defile which is now called Tak-i-Girrah, one of the passes leading up through Mount Zagros to the plateau of Iran. There is a sketch of the relief from the pencil of Sir H. Rawlinson in the Five Great Monarchies of his brother (vol. iii. p. 7). The king stands with his foot on the body of a conquered enemy. An individual, probably the royal general, presents two kneeling captives, who are held by a cord attached to rings put through their noses. More captives with ropes about their necks are carved on the kind of plinth upon which the main group is supported. The whole picture is about two feet wide and five high. Near it there is an apparently unfinished inscription in Babylonish cuneiform characters. The Chaldæan origin of the work is confirmed by the flounces on the general’s robe. In the same neighbourhood there are ruins which appear to date from a very early period.
Fig. 262.—Fragment of a Chaldæan statuette. Louvre.
P. 219.—We have here omitted to draw attention to one of the differences between the art of the Sargonids and that of the preceding dynasty. In the figures from Tello and in the bas-reliefs of the time of Assurnazirpal the sculptor has left the eyeballs smooth (Plate VII.; Vol. I. Fig. 15; Vol. II, Figs. 43, 64, 113). In the sculptures of the time of Sargon and his successors, on the other hand, the cornea is indicated in the figures both of men and animals, by a clearly traced circle (Vol. I, Figs. 22 and 25; Vol. II. Fig. 118 and Plate X.). It was, no doubt, the desire to give a more lifelike expression to the physiognomy that led the artist thus to modify his proceeding. There are a few figures in which the desire for imitative truth is pushed even farther. In a bas-relief in the Louvre there is an eagle-headed deity in which not only the cornea but the pupil also is marked by a smaller circle within the first. See the De l’Expression des Yeux dans la Statuaire of Doctor Debrou (Correspondant, April 10th, 1883). His special knowledge has enabled him to make more than one remark upon the representation of the eye in ancient and modern sculpture, to which writers upon art would do well to pay attention.
P. 398.—On the subject of the female divinity whose worship was so widely spread over the whole East and over the Mediterranean coasts, the dissertation of Herr Gelzer, Zum Cultus der Assyrischen Aphrodite (Lepsius’s Zeitschrift, 1875, p. 127) may be consulted with profit.
We received the admirable Guide to the Kuyundjik Gallery, published by the authorities of the British Museum, too late to make use of it for our work. It joins to an exhaustive account of the bas-reliefs of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal a description of the smaller objects contained in the glass cases of the same gallery. Many of these objects date from a very early period, and many were found in Chaldæa. Some of the more interesting texts are translated by Mr. Pinches; of others he gives a summary. The body of the work is preceded by an introduction giving such details of Assyrian history, religion and manners as are required by the general student. When a similar brochure is forthcoming for the Nimroud gallery—and the energy of the English officials is a guarantee that we shall not have to wait long for it—visitors to the museum will be in possession of all that is necessary to enable them to profit to the fullest extent by its superb collection.