The beauty of the ivory surface was often enhanced by the insertion of coloured enamels and lapis-lazuli in the hollows of the tablet. Traces of this inlay may be seen on many of the Museum ivories, especially on those recently brought from Van, in Armenia. The tablets also show traces of gilding.
All this proves that the Mesopotamian decorator had no contemptible resources for the ornamentation of his panelled walls and coffered ceilings. These chiselled, enamelled, and gilded ivories must have been set in frames of cedar or cypress. The Assyrian texts bear witness in more than one place to the use of those fine materials, and the Hebrew writers make frequent allusion to the luxurious carpentry imitated by their own princes in the temple at Jerusalem.[390] In one of his invectives against Nineveh Zephaniah cries: "Desolation shall be in the thresholds: for he shall uncover the cedar work."[391]
The more we enter into detail the richer and more varied does the decoration of these buildings appear. In our day the great ruins are sad and monotonous enough. The rain of many centuries has washed away their paint; their ornaments of metal and faïence, of ivory and cedar, have fallen from the walls; the hand of man has combined with the slow action of time to reduce them to their elements, and nothing of their original beauty remains but here and there a fragment or a hint of colour. And yet when we bring these scanty vestiges together we find that enough is left to give the taste and invention of the Assyrian ornamentist a very high place in our respect. That artist was richly endowed with the power of inventing happy combinations of lines, and of varying his motives without losing sight for an instant of his original theme.
We may show this very clearly by a more careful study of two motives already encountered, the rosette, and the running ornament which is known in its countless modifications as the "knop and flower pattern." These two motives are united in those great thresholds which have been found now and then in such marvellous preservation. They also occur in certain bas-reliefs representing architectural decorations, so that we are in possession of all the documents required for the formation of a true idea of their varied beauties. In the Assyrian Basement Room of the British Museum there is a fine slab of gypsum of which we reproduce one corner in our Fig. 131.[392] Besides the daisy shaped rosette which is so conspicuous, there is one of more elaborate design which we reproduce on a larger scale and from another example in our Fig. 132. It is inclosed in a square frame adorned with chevrons. This frame with the rosette it incloses may be taken as giving some idea of the ceiling panels or coffers.
In this rosette it should be noticed that beyond the double festoon about the central star appears the same alternation of bud and flower as in the straight border. That flower has been recognized as the Egyptian lotus, but Layard believes its type to have been furnished, perhaps, by a scarlet tulip which is very common towards the beginning of spring in Mesopotamia.[393] We ourselves believe rather in the imitation of a motive from the stuffs, the jewels, the furniture, and the pottery that Mesopotamia drew from Egypt at a very early date through the intermediary of the Phœnicians. The Phœnicians themselves appropriated the same motive and introduced it with their own manufactures not only into Mesopotamia but into every country washed by the Mediterranean. Our conjecture is to some extent confirmed by an observation of Sir H. Layard's. This lotus flower is only to be found, he says, in the most recent of Assyrian monuments, in those, namely, that date from the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., centuries during which the Assyrian kings more than once invaded Phœnicia and occupied Egypt.[394] In the more ancient bas-reliefs flowers with a very different aspect—copied in all probability directly from nature—are alone to be found. Of these some idea may be formed from the adjoining cut. It reproduces a bouquet held in the hand of a winged genius in the palace of Assurnazirpal (Fig. 133).
The lotus flower is to be found moreover in monuments much older than those of the Sargonids, but that does not in any way disprove the hypothesis of a direct plagiarism. The commercial relations between the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates date from a much more remote epoch, and about the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptians seem to have occupied in force the basin of the Khabour, the principal affluent of the Euphrates. Layard found many traces of their passage over and sojourn in that district, among them a series of scarabs, many of which bore the superscription of Thothmes III.[395] So that the points of contact were numerous enough, and the mutual intercourse sufficiently intimate and prolonged, to account for the assimilation by Mesopotamian artists of a motive taken from the flora of Egypt and to be seen on almost every object imported from the Nile valley. This imitation appears all the more probable as in the paintings of Theban tombs dating from a much more remote period than the oldest Ninevite remains, the pattern with its alternate bud and flower is complete. Many examples may be found in the plates of Prisse d'Avennes' great work;[396] one is reproduced in our Fig. 134.
The Assyrians borrowed their motive from Egypt, but they gave it more than Egyptian perfection. They gave it the definitive shapes that even Greece did not disdain to copy. In the Egyptian frieze the cones and flowers are disjointed; their isolation is unsatisfactory both to the eye and the reason. In the Assyrian pattern they are attached to a continuous undulating stem whose sinuous lines add greatly to the elegance of the composition. The distinctive characters of the bud and flower are also very well marked by the Assyrian artists. The closed petals of the one the open ones of the other and the divisions of the calix are indicated in a fashion that happily combines truth with convention. In our Fig. 135 we reproduce, on a larger scale, a part of the slab already illustrated at page 240, so that the merits of its workmanship may be better appreciated.
The painter also made use of this motive. In a bas-relief from the palace of Assurbanipal we find the round-headed doorway illustrated in Fig. 136. Its rich decoration must have been carried out in glazed bricks, similar to those discovered by M. Place on one of the gates of Khorsabad. Here, however, the figures of supernatural beings are replaced by rosettes and by two lines of the knop and flower ornament.
Vegetable forms brought luck to the Assyrian decorator. Even after taking a motive from a foreign style of ornament he understood, so to speak, how to naturalize a plant and to make its forms expressive of his own individuality. Our only difficulty is to make a choice among the numerous illustrations of his inventive fertility; we shall confine ourselves to reproducing the designs embroidered upon the royal robes of Assurnazirpal. We need hardly say that these robes do not now exist, but the Ninevite sculptor copied them in soft alabaster with an infinite patience that does him honour. He has preserved for us every detail with the exception of colour. The lotus is not to be found in this embroidery; its place is taken by the palmette or tuft of leaves (Fig. 137), through which appear stems bending with the weight of the buds they bear. Animals, real and imaginary, are skilfully mingled with the fan-shaped palmettes; in one place we find two goats (Fig. 138), in another two winged bulls (Fig. 139). Bulls and goats are both alike on their knees before the palmette, which seems to suggest that the latter is an abridged representation of that sacred tree which we have already encountered and will encounter again in the bas-reliefs, where it is surrounded by scenes of adoration and sacrifice. This motive has the double advantage of awakening religious feeling in the spectators, and of provoking a momentary elegance of line and movement in the two pairs of animals. On the other hand we can hardly explain the motive represented in our Figs. 140 and 141—a motive already met with in the figured architecture of the bas-reliefs and in the glazed tiles—by anything but an artistic caprice. In some cases the rosette and the palmette are introduced in a single picture (142).
We have ventured to supplement the scanty remains of architectural decoration by these illustrations from another art, because all Babylonian ornament, whether for carpets, hangings, or draperies, for works in beaten metal, in paint or enamelled faïence, is governed by the same spirit and marked by the same taste. In every form impressed upon matter by the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia the same symbols, the same types, and the same motives are repeated to infinity. The examples we have brought together suffice to show the principal characteristics of that decoration. It had doubtless one great defect, it was too easily separated from the building to which it belonged; it was fragile, apt to fall, and therefore unlikely to have any very long duration. But the architect was not to blame for that. The defect in question was consequent on the poverty of the material with which he had to work. Given the conditions under which he laboured, and we cannot deny that he showed great skill in making the best of them. He understood how to contrast wide unbroken surfaces with certain important parts of his ensemble, such as cornices, plinths, and especially doorways. Upon these he concentrated the efforts of the painter and sculptor; upon these he lavished all the hues of the Assyrian palette, and embellished them with the carved figures of men and gods, of kings and genii, of all the countless multitudes who had fought and died for Assyria and its divine protector, the unconquered and unconquerable Assur.
If, not content with this general view of Assyrian decoration, we enter into it in detail, we shall find its economy most judiciously arranged and understood. When the sculptor set himself to carve the slabs that enframe a door or those that protect the lower parts of a wall, he sought to render what he saw or imagined as precisely and definitely as possible. He went to nature for inspiration even when he carved imaginary beings, and copied her, in fragments perhaps, but with a loyal and vigorous sincerity. Everywhere, except in certain pictures with a strictly limited function, he obeyed an imagination over which a sure judgment kept unsleeping watch. His polychromatic decorations fulfilled their purpose of amusing and delighting the eye without ever attempting to deceive it. Such is and must always be the true principle of ornament, and the decorators of the great buildings of Babylon and Nineveh seem to have thoroughly understood that it was so; their rich and fertile fancy is governed, in every instance to which we can point, with unfailing tact, and to them must be given the credit of having invented not a few of the motives that may yet be traced in the art of the Medes and Persians, in that of the Syrians, the Phœnicians, the peoples of Asia Minor, and above all in that of the Greeks—those unrivalled masters who gave immortality to every artistic combination that they chose to adopt.
NOTES
[326] The cuneiform texts mention the "two bulls at the door of the temple E-schakil," the famous staged tower of Babylon. Fr. Lenormant, Les Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i. p. 114 (2nd edition, 1880).
[327] Rich, Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811, and a Memoir on the Ruins, p. 64. Layard, Discoveries, p. 507. According to Rich, this lion was of grey granite; according to Layard, of black basalt.
[328] Loftus says nothing of this lion in those Travels and Researches which we have so often quoted. It was, perhaps, on a later occasion that he found it. We came upon it in a collection of original sketches and manuscript notes (Drawings in Babylonia by W. K. Loftus and H. Churchill) in the custody of the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum. We have to express our acknowledgments to Dr. Birch for permission to make use of this valuable collection.
[329] Perrot, Guillaume et Delbet, Exploration archéologique de la Galatie, vol. ii. pl. 32.
[330] Exploration archéologique, vol. ii. pl. 11.
[331] Layard, Discoveries, p. 508.
[332] Place, Ninive, vol. ii. pp. 68-70.
[333] This character of a tutelary divinity that we attribute to the winged bull is indicated in the clearest manner in the cuneiform texts: "In this palace," says Esarhaddon, "the sedi and lamassi (the Assyrian names for these colossi) are propitious, are the guardians of my royal promenade and the rejoicers of my heart, may they ever watch over the palace and never quit its walls." And again: "I caused doors to be made in cypress, which has a good smell, and I had them adorned with gold and silver and fixed in the doorways. Right and left of those doorways I caused sedi and lamassi of stone to be set up, they are placed there to repulse the wicked." (St. Guyard, Bulletin de la Religion assyrienne, in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, vol. i. p. 43, note.)
[334] Place, Ninive, vol. iii, plate 21.
[335] Those in the Louvre are fourteen feet high; the tallest pair in the British Museum are about the same.
[336] Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 92, fig. 70.
[337] On the subject of these winged bulls see Fr. Lenormant, Les Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i. chap. 3.
[338] The bas-relief here reproduced comes from the palace of Assurbanipal at Kouyundjik. In the fragment now in the Louvre there are three stories, but the upper story, being an exact repetition of that immediately below it, has been omitted in our engraving.
[339] Loftus, Travels and Researches, p. 176. Layard, Discoveries, pp. 529, 651. Botta, Monument de Ninive, vol. v. p. 44. In the book of Daniel the hand that traces the warning words upon the walls of Belshazzar's palace traces them "upon the plaster of the wall" (Daniel v. 5).
[340] Place, Ninive, vol. i. p. 77.
[341] At Warka, however, Loftus found in the building he calls Wuswas a layer of plaster which was from two to four inches thick. (Travels, p. 176.)
[342] Place, Ninive, vol. ii. pp. 77, 78.
[343] Place, Ninive, vol. iii. plate 25.
[344] Ibid. vol. i. pp. 141-146; vol. ii. pp. 79, 80; vol. iii. plates 36 and 37.
[345] Herodotus (Rawlinson's translation), i. 98.
[346] Place, Ninive, vol. iii. plate 32.
[347] G. Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, pp. 77, 78. Layard (Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 130) also says that some rooms had no other decoration.
[348] In writing thus we allude chiefly to the restorations given by Mr. James Fergusson in The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored (1 vol. 8vo. Murray), a work that was launched upon the world at far too early a date, namely, in 1851. Sir H., then Mr., Layard, had not yet published his second narrative (Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon) nor the second series of Monuments of Nineveh, neither had the great work of MM. Place and Thomas on the palace of Sargon (a work to which we owe so much new and authentic information) appeared. In Mr. Fergusson's restorations the column is freely used and the vault excluded, so that in many respects his work seems to us to be purely fanciful, and yet it is implicitly accepted by English writers to this day. Professor Rawlinson, while criticising Mr. Fergusson in his text (The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 303, note 6), reproduces his restoration of the great court at Khorsabad, in which a colonnade is introduced upon the principle of the hypostyle halls of Persepolis. Professor Rawlinson would, perhaps, have been better advised had he refrained from thus popularizing a vision which, as he himself very justly declares, is quite alien to the genius of Assyrian architecture.
[349] Loftus, Travels and Researches, pp. 187-189.
[350] Loftus thinks that the process was very common, at least in Lower Chaldæa. He found cones imbedded in mortar at several other points in the Warka ruins, but the example we have reproduced is the only one in which well-marked designs could still be clearly traced. Taylor saw cones of the same kind at Abou-Sharein. They had no inscriptions, and their bases were black (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 411). They formed in all probability parts of a decoration similar to that described by Loftus. In Egypt we find cones of terra-cotta crowning the façades of certain Theban tombs (Rhind, Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, p. 136). Decoratively they seem allied to the cones of Warka, but the religious formulæ they bear connects them rather with the cones found by M. de Sarzec at Tello, which bear commemorative inscriptions. To these we shall return at a later page.
[351] Loftus, Travels and Researches, pp. 190, 191
[352] Layard, Discoveries, p. 607. Rich also bears witness to the abundance of these remains in his Journey to the Ruins of Babylon. See also Oppert, Expédition scientifique, vol. i. p. 143.
[353] A French traveller of the last century, De Beauchamp (he was consul at Bagdad), heard an Arab workman and contractor describe a room he had found in the Kasr, the walls of which were lined with enamelled bricks. Upon one wall, he said, there was a cow with the sun and moon above it. His story must, at least, have been founded on truth. No motive occurs oftener in the Chaldæan monuments than a bull and the twin stars of the day and night. (See Rennell, History of Herodotus, p. 367.)
[354] Loftus collected some fragments of these enamelled bricks at Warka, "similar to those found," he says, "at Babylon in the ruins of the Kasr" (Travels and Researches, p. 185). Taylor also tells us that he found numerous fragments of brick enamelled blue at Mugheir (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 262).
[355] The most interesting of these fragments, those that allow the subject of which they formed a part to be still divined, have been published by M. de Longperier, Musée Napoléon III. plate iv.
[356] I examined at the British Museum the originals of the glazed bricks reproduced by Layard in his first series of Monuments, some of which we have copied in our plates xiii. and xiv. The outlines of the ornament are now hardly more than distinguishable, while the colour is no more than a pale reflection.
[357] Loftus believes that the external faces of Assyrian walls were not, as a rule, cased in enamelled bricks. He disengaged three sides of the northern palace at Kouyundjik without finding any traces of polychromatic decoration. (Travels and Researches, p. 397. note.)
[358] Καθ' ὁν εν ωμαις ετι ταις πλινθοις διετετυπωτο θηρια, παντοδαπα τη των χρωματων φιλοτεχνια την αληθειαν απομιμουμενα (Diodorus, ii. 8, 4.) Diodorus expressly declares that he borrows this description from Ctesias (ὡς Κτησιας φησιν), ibid. 5.
[359] Ενησαν δε εν τοις πυργοις και τειχεσι ζοα παντοδαπα φιλοτεχνως τοις τε χρομασι και τοις των τυρων απομασι κατασκευασμενα. (Diodorus, ii. 8, 6.)
[360] Παντοιων θηριων ... ὡν ησαν τα μεγεθη πλειον η πηχων τετταρων. Four cubits was equal to about five feet eight inches. At Khorsabad the tallest of the genii on the coloured tiles at the door are only 32 inches high; others are not more than two feet.
[361] Place, Ninive, vol. iii. plates 24 and 31.
[362] "The painting," says M. Oppert, "was applied to a kind of roughly blocked-out relief." (Expédition scientifique, vol. i. p. 144.)
[363] De Longperier, Musée Napoléon III., plate iv.
[364] This palace was then inhabited for a part of the year by the Achemenid princes, of whom Ctesias was both the guest and physician.
[365] Oppert, Expédition scientifique, vol. i. pp. 143, 144.
[366] Two of these enamelled letters are in the Louvre. See also upon this subject, Place, Ninive, vol. ii. p. 86. I have also seen some in the collection of M. Piot.
[367] Place, Ninive, vol. i. p. 236.
[368] Only two rafts arrived at Bassorah; eight left Mossoul, so that only about a fourth of the antiquities collected reached their destination in safety. The cases with the objects despatched by the Babylonian mission, that is by MM. Fresnel, Oppert, and Thomas, were included in the same disaster. But for this the Assyrian collections of the Louvre would be less inferior than they are to those of the British Museum.
[369] Place, Ninive, vol. i. p. 253.
[370] Place, Ninive, vol. ii. p. 253. These marks were recognized upon many fragments found at Babylon by MM. Oppert and Thomas (Oppert, Expédition scientifique, vol. i. pp. 143, 144). Loftus has transcribed and published a certain number of marks of the same kind which he found upon glazed bricks from the palace at Suza. These are sometimes cut in the brick with a point, sometimes painted with enamel like that on the face. (Travels and Researches, p. 398.)
[371] Ezekiel xxiii. 14, 15.
[372] Berosus, fragment i. § 4, in vol. ii. of the Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum of Ch. Müller.
[373] Texier, Armenie et Perse, vol. ii. p. 134. In the same work the details of the magnificent decoration upon the mosque of the Sunnites at Tauris (which afforded a model for that at Ispahan) will be found reproduced in their original colours. It is strange that this art of enamelled faïence, after being preserved so long, should so recently have become extinct in the East. "At the commencement of the last century," says M. Texier (vol. ii. p. 138), "the art of enamelling bricks was no less prosperous in Persia than in the time of Shah-Abbas, the builder of the great mosque at Ispahan (1587-1629); but now the art is completely extinct, and in spite of my desire to visit a factory where I might see the work in progress, there was not one to be found from one end of Ispahan to the other." According to the information I gathered in Asia Minor, it was also towards the beginning of the present century that the workshops of Nicæa and Nicomedia, in which the fine enamelled tiles on the mosques at Broussa were made, were finally closed. In these fabriques the plaques which have been found in such abundance for some twenty years past in Rhodes and other islands of the Archipelago were also manufactured. [The manufacture of these glazed tiles is by no means extinct in India, however. At many centres in Sindh and the Punjab, glazed tiles almost exactly similar to those on the mosque at Ispahan, so far as colours and ornamental motives are concerned, are made in great numbers and used for the same purposes as in Persia and ancient Mesopotamia. There is a tradition in India that the art was brought from China, through Persia, by the soldiers of Gingiz-Khan, but a study of the tiles themselves is enough to show that they are a survival from the art manufactures of Babylon and Nineveh. For detailed information on the history and processes used in the manufacture of these tiles, see Sir George Birdwood's Industrial Arts of India, part ii. pp. 304-310, 321, and 330; also Mr. Drury Fortnum's report on the Sindh pottery in the International Exhibition of 1871.—Ed.]
[374] Sir H. Layard noticed this at the very beginning of his explorations: "Between the bulls and the lions forming the entrances in different parts of the palace were invariably found a large collection of baked bricks, elaborately painted with figures of animals and flowers, and with cuneiform characters" (Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 13).
[375] Place, Ninive, vol. i. p. 234; vol. iii. plates 9 and 17.
[376] Ibid. vol. iii. plate 14. We should have reproduced this composition in colour had the size of our page allowed us to do so on a proper scale. M. Place was unable to give it all even in a double-page plate of his huge folio.
[377] Place, Ninive, vol. iii. plates 23-31.
[378] Layard, Monuments, 2nd series, plates 53, 54. Elsewhere (Discoveries, pp. 166-168) Layard has given a catalogue and summary description of all these fragments, of which only a part were reproduced in the plates of his great collection.
[379] Ibid. plate 55.
[380] Geo. Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 79.
[381] Botta gives examples of some of these bricks (Monument de Ninive, plates 155, 156). Among the motives there reproduced there is one that we have already seen in the bas-reliefs (fig. 67). It is a goat standing in the collected attitude he would take on a point of rock. The head of the ibex is also a not uncommon motive (Layard, Monuments, first series, plate 87, fig. 2; see also Botta).
[382] Fig. 1 of our Plate XIV. reproduces the same design, but with a more simple colouration.