It would have been difficult, or rather impossible, to adhere to such a rule in those reliefs in which the actual incidents of military expeditions were retraced. In them the sculptor thought it necessary to insert such details as would permit the various episodes commemorated to be identified. One of the simplest means of insuring the desired result was to render not only buildings, such as castles and fortified towns, but also the natural features of the scene, with the greatest possible truth. This the Assyrian artist did, as a rule, with excellent judgment. Thus, if an action or campaign had been fought in a mountainous country, he made use of a kind of lattice-work or reticulation, which every spectator thoroughly understood (see Vol. I. Figs. 39 and 43); if among forests, he introduced numerous trees among his figures. He made little attempt to distinguish between one kind of tree and another, but in most cases employed forms as conventional as that by which he indicated hills (Fig. 114).

One of the chief merits and most striking features of Assyrian sculpture is, then, its power of selection, its rejection of all that is superfluous, its comprehension, in fact, of the true spirit and special conditions of the art. The field has none of those encumbering accessories which, under the pretext of furnishing and defining, only serve, so to speak, to take away air and elbow-room from the figures. When certain complementary features are required to make the subject clear, the sculptor introduces them, but he never gives more than is strictly necessary. He never gives way to the temptation to exaggerate such details, or treats them as if they had an interest and importance of their own. Such sobriety found its reward. His work no doubt remained faulty in many respects and inferior to that of his Egyptian forerunner, still more to that of his Greek successor; but yet it had an air of frankness, of pride and dignity, to which the more complex and superficially more skilful compositions of the following epoch too seldom attained.

The good qualities of this early Assyrian school are no less conspicuous in the colossal figures with which the doorways of palaces and temples were decorated. The head of the winged bull has nowhere a more lofty expression or one more full of dignity than at Nimroud (see below, Fig. 133). The chisels of these northern artists never created anything more bold, energetic, and lifelike than the figures from the small temple built by Assurnazirpal (Vol. I. Fig. 188); we need only mention the colossal lion in the British Museum (Plate VIII.) and the grimacing demon whom a beneficent god seems to be expelling from the sanctuary in spite of his threats and grinning teeth.[235]

And yet this art which is so masterly in some respects is very primitive and naïve in others. We cannot help being amazed, for instance, at the wide band of wedges that the scribe has been allowed to cut across all the lines and contours left by the sculptor. This proceeding is to be explained, of course, by the essentially historical and anecdotic character of Assyrian art, but nevertheless it betrays the contempt for æsthetic effect which is one of the characteristics of archaic art in Assyria. This feature is by no means without importance, and Sir Henry Layard seems to us to have been ill advised in deliberately suppressing it. In his otherwise faithful reproductions of the best preserved among the bas-reliefs of Assurnazirpal he has everywhere left out the continuous band of inscription which runs across them at about two-thirds of their height. By such a proceeding he has sensibly modified their decorative value.[236]

We must be on our guard against attributing such primitive simplicity to inexperience in the use of the chisel. In the finest works of later years that instrument was never wielded with more assured skill than in the delicate carvings in which the embroidery on the royal robes are reproduced. We have already put several of these motives before our readers; in Fig. 115 we give a last exquisite morsel. It shows a winged lion with the head of a woman, and a king or priest who holds one of her paws in his left hand, while with his right he seems to threaten her with a mace.

Such dexterity as this is not to be seen in works in the round (see Fig. 60). But with the reign of Assurnazirpal commences another series of royal monuments in which the artist, not being compelled to quit work in relief, felt himself more at home. We refer to those round-headed steles on which the standing figure of the king is relieved against a flat ground bordered by a raised edge. An inscription is engraved sometimes upon the bed of the relief, sometimes on the reverse of the stele. An effigy of Assurnazirpal belonging to this class is now in the British Museum. It was discovered still standing in the entrance to one of the temples built by that sovereign on the platform of Calah. Before the stele there was an altar similar to that shown on page 256 of our first volume. This altar is also in the British Museum.[237] From the existence of these steles it has been concluded, with no little probability, that the Assyrian kings, or at least some of them, received divine honours after their deaths. We have chosen that of Samas-vul II. for reproduction, on account of its good condition (Fig. 116). It differs but little from the stele of Assurnazirpal. High up in the field and in front of the head may be noticed symbols like those on the land marks (see Figs. 111, 112, and 143). The king’s right hand is raised in the attitude of adoration. In his left he holds a sceptre, with a ball of ivory or metal at one end and a tassel at the other. These steles must have been set up in great numbers. We find them represented in the reliefs (Vol. I. Figs. 42 and 112, and Plate XII.) and upon cylinders (ib. Fig. 69). They were raised as a sign of annexation in conquered countries, and an invocation engraved upon the stone put them under the protection of the Assyrian gods, who were charged with the punishment of any who might lay hands upon them.[238]

In the British Museum there are fragments of a sculptured obelisk on which the wars and hunts of Assurnazirpal are figured. It is taller than that of his son Shalmaneser II., being nearly ten feet high, but as the material is a soft limestone, it is in far worse preservation; we only mention it to show that Assyrian art was in possession of all its resources in the time of this king.

Under none of the princes who reigned at Calah did sculpture show any sensible change of style; but yet, perhaps, in certain passages of the Balawat gates we may recognize the first signs of a tendency that was to become strongly marked under the Sargonids. The field of the relief there contains a far greater number of picturesque and explanatory details than the great bas-reliefs of Nimroud. The campaigns and victories of Shalmaneser II. was the theme put before the sculptor. In order to do it justice he had to carry the spectator into countries of various aspects, and to give their true character to military struggles whose conditions were incessantly changing. He did not think success was to be attained by confining himself to figuring the cities and fortresses besieged and taken by the Assyrian army; he introduced features for the purpose of determining the seat of war. Such accessories were better placed among figures on a small scale than among those surpassing or even approaching life size; and without knowing exactly why, the artist seems to have been warned of this by a secret and delicate instinct. These strips of bronze are ten inches high; each is divided into two horizontal divisions by a narrow band of rosettes, which is also repeated at the top and bottom of each strip. The figures are on an average about three and a half inches high (see Fig. 117 and Plate XII.).

Our Plate XII. is an exact copy from a part of the band marked B in the provisional numeration adopted by Dr. Birch.[239] According to the inscription upon it this part of the work commemorates a sacrifice offered by Shalmaneser on the borders of the Lake Van, in Armenia. The figure of the king is not included in our plate, but it contains all the sacred vessels of which he made use for the ceremony. Beginning on the left we find a sort of great candelabrum, a three-legged altar, and two standards upon tripods. Must these be accepted as military ensigns of the same class as that shown in Fig. 46 or as religious emblems of the sun and moon? The question is hardly one for us to discuss. Next comes a stele raised upon a rock, or perhaps carved upon its surface. Other reliefs of the same series show us that Shalmaneser erected these steles in every country he conquered. Further to the right we see soldiers throwing into the lake the limbs of the animals sacrificed. This must be an offering to the deity of its waters, perhaps to Anou, who was believed to reside in rivers and lakes as well as in the sea. The denizens of the lake seize upon the morsels thus put in their way; among them we may recognize a large fish, a tortoise, and a quadruped, that may perhaps be an otter.[240]

In the lower division we see the Assyrian army on the march. On the right Mr. Pinches recognizes a fortified camp in which horses were left for flight in case of defeat. There is, indeed, one of these fortified walls shown in projection, of which we have already spoken, but the horse is placed upon a clearly indicated arch. What is this arch doing in the middle of the camp? We ask ourselves whether this circular structure may not be intended to represent a fortified tête-de-pont. It is abundantly proved that the Assyrians and Chaldæans made great use of the vault. Why should they not have employed it for bridges elsewhere than at Babylon? and wherever there were bridges on the great roads and near their own frontiers what could be more natural than to defend them by works flanked, like this, with towers? The horse would then be about to cross the bridge, and his introduction would be explained simply by the sculptor’s desire to give all possible clearness to a representation which could never be complete. He seems to advance with some precaution as if the floor of the bridge, which is indicated merely by a straight line, was made of tree trunks or roughly squared planks badly joined. We offer this hypothesis for what it may be worth. Next come two archers, and then chariots. The ground must be difficult, for not only does the driver support his horses with a tightened rein, but a man on foot walks in front and holds them by the head.

We find a scene entirely similar but still better treated in the upper division of another plaque (see Fig. 117).[241] Here we may see that the chariots are progressing not without difficulty and even danger, in the very bed of a torrent. The movement of the men who lead the horses is well understood and skilfully rendered; we feel how carefully they have to conduct their advance among the blocks of stone that encumber the bed of the stream and the tumbling water that conceals the nature of the ground. In the lower division we are presented with one of those scenes that are so common in Assyrian reliefs. The king in his royal robes appears on the left; a line of prisoners guarded by archers approach him and beg for mercy, while the foremost among them “kiss the dust beneath his feet,” to use an oriental expression in its most literal sense.

We should have been willing, had it been possible, to make further extracts from this curious series of reliefs; to have shown, here naked prisoners defiling under the eyes of the conqueror, there Assyrian archers shooting at the heaped-up heads of their slain enemies. But we have perforce been content with giving, by a few carefully chosen examples, a fair idea of the work that intervened between the sculptors of Assurnazirpal and those of the Sargonids.

It is probable that the scheme of this vast composition was due to a single mind; from one end to the other there is an obvious similarity of thought and style. But several different hands must have been employed upon its execution, which is far from being of equal merit throughout. It is on examining the original that we are struck by these inequalities. Thus, in some of the long rows of captives the handling is timid and without meaning, while in others it has all the firmness and decision of the best among the alabaster or limestone reliefs; the muscular forms, the action of the calf and knee, are well understood and frankly reproduced. The passages we have chosen for illustration are among the best in this respect. Taking them all in all these bronze reliefs are among the works that do most honour to Assyrian art.

The only monument that has come down to us from the reign of Vulush III., the successor of Samas-vul, is a statue, or rather a pair of statues, of Nebo; the better of the two is reproduced in Fig. 15 of our first volume. These sacred images are of very slight merit from an art point of view; we should hardly have referred to them but for their votive inscriptions. From these we learn that they were consecrated in the Temple of Nebo by the prefect of Calah in order to bespeak the protection of that god for the king. But the latter is not named alone; the faithful subject says that he offers these idols “for his master Vulush and his mistress Sammouramit.”

In this latter name it is difficult not to recognize the Semiramis of the Greeks, and we are led to ask ourselves whether the queen of Vulush may not have afforded a prototype for that legendary princess. This association of a female name with that of the king is almost without parallel either in Chaldæa or Assyria. In royal documents, as well as in those of a more private character, there is no more mention of the royal wives than if they did not exist. Only one explanation can be given of the apparent anomaly, and that is that Sammouramit, for reasons that may be easily guessed, enjoyed a quite exceptional position. It was in those days that, from one reign to another, the princes of Calah attempted to complete the subjugation of Chaldæa. It may have happened that in order to put an end to a state of never-ending rebellion, Vulush married the heiress of some powerful and popular family of the lower country, and, that he might be looked upon as the legitimate ruler of Babylon, joined her name with his in the royal style and title. This hypothesis finds some confirmation in what Herodotus tells us about Semiramis. She was, he says, queen of Babylon five generations before Nitocris, which would be about a century and a half. He adds that she caused the quays of the Euphrates to be built.[242] This takes us back to rather beyond the middle of the eighth century B.C., that is very near to the date which Assyrian chronology would fix for the reign of Vulush (810–781). As the last representative of the old national dynasty, this Semiramis, associated as she was in the exercise, or at least in the show, of sovereign power both in Assyria and Chaldæa, would not be forgotten by her countrymen, and the population of Babylon would be especially likely to magnify the part she had played. There is nothing fabulous in the tradition as Herodotus gives it, although it may, perhaps, go beyond the truth here and there. Ctesias, however, goes much farther. He brings together and amplifies tales which had already received many additions in the half century that separated him from Herodotus, and he thus creates the type of that Semiramis, the wife of Ninus and the conqueror of all Asia, who so long held an undeserved place in ancient history.[243]

The last Calah prince who has left us anything is Tiglath-Pileser II. (745–727). We have already described how his palace was destroyed by Esarhaddon, who employed its materials for his own purposes.[244] At the British Museum there are a few fragments which have been recognized by their inscriptions as belonging to his work (Vol. I. Fig. 26)[245]; they are quite similar to those of his immediate predecessors.

With the new dynasty founded by Sargon at the end of the eighth century taste changed fast enough. In those bas-reliefs in the Khorsabad palace which represent that king’s campaigns, many details are treated in a spirit very different from that of former days. Trees, for instance, are no longer abstract signs standing for no one kind of vegetation more than another; the sculptor begins to notice their distinguishing features and to give their proper physiognomy to the different countries overrun by the Assyrians. But these landscape backgrounds are not to be found in all the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad.[246]

The art of Sargon was an art of transition. While on the one hand it endeavoured to open up new ground, on the other it travelled on the old ways and followed many of the ancient errors; it had a marked predilection for figures larger than nature, and bas-reliefs treating of royal pageants and processions remind us by the simplicity of their conception of those of Assurnazirpal. We have already given many fragments (Vol I. Figs. 22–24, and 29), and now we give another, a vizier and a eunuch standing before the king in the characteristic attitude of respect (Fig. 118). The inscription which cut the figures of Assurnazirpal so awkwardly in two has disappeared; the proportions have gained in slenderness, and the muscular development, though still strongly marked, has lost some of its exaggeration. All this shows progress, and yet on the whole the Louvre relief is less happy in its effect than the best of the Nimroud sculptures in the British Museum. The execution is neither so firm nor so frank; the relief is much higher and the modelling a little heavy and bulbous in consequence. This result may also be caused to some extent by the nature of the material, which is a softer alabaster than was employed, so far as we know, in any other part of Assyria. At Nimroud a fine limestone was chiefly used.

We shall be contented with mentioning the stele of Sargon, found near Larnaca, in Cyprus, in 1845. It is most important as an historical monument; it proves that, as a sequel to his Syrian conquests, the terror of Sargon’s name was so widespread that even the inhabitants of the islands thought it prudent to declare themselves his vassals, and to set up his image as a sign of homage rendered and allegiance sworn. But the stone is now too much broken to be of any great interest as a work of art.[247]

The artistic masterpiece of this epoch is the bronze lion figured in our Plate XI. It had been suggested that its use was to hold down the cords of a tent or the lower edge of tapestries, a purpose for which the weight of the bronze and the ring fixed in its back make it well suited. This idea had to be abandoned, however, when a whole series of similar figures marked with the name of Sennacherib was found. Their execution was hardly equal to that of the lion we have figured, but their general characteristics were the same, and they had rings on their backs.[248]

These lions are sixteen in number; they form a series in which the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example; the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calculation upon their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscriptions all begin with the word mine; then comes a figure indicating the number of mines, or of subdivisions of the mine that the weight represents; finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have been a magistrate charged with the regulation and verification of weights.

With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the exception becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a complex and carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41–43), palms (ib. Figs. 30 and 34; and above, Fig. 21), the vine (Fig. 47), and the tall reeds and grasses of the marsh (Fig. 119) are also imitated.[249]

We feel that the sculptor wished to reproduce all those subordinate features of nature by which his eye was amused on the Assyrian plains; he seems almost to have taken photographs from nature, and then to have transferred them to the palace walls by the aid of his patient chisel. Look, for instance, at the reliefs in which the process of building Sennacherib’s palace is narrated. The sculptor is not content with retracing, in a spirit of uncompromising reality, all the operations implied by so great an undertaking; he gives backgrounds to his pictures in which he introduces, on a smaller scale, many details that have nothing to do with the main subject of the relief. Thus we find a passage in which men are shown carting timber, and another in which they are dragging a winged bull, both surmounted by a grove of cypresses, while still higher on the slab, and, therefore, in the intention of the sculptor, on a more distant horizon, we see a river, upon which boatmen propel their clumsy vessels, and fishermen, astride on inflated skins, drift with the stream, while fishes nibble at their baited lines.[250]

Neither boatmen nor fishermen have anything to do with the building of the great edifice that occupies so many minds and arms within a stone’s throw of where they labour. They are introduced merely to amuse the eye of the spectator by the faithful representation of life; a passage of what we call genre has crept into an historical picture. Elsewhere it is landscape proper that is thus introduced. One of the slabs of this same series ends in a row of precipitous heights covered with cypresses, vines, fig and pomegranate trees, and a sort of dwarf palm or chamærops.[251]

They thought no doubt that the spectators of such pictures would be delighted to have the shadowy freshness of the orchards that bordered the Tigris, the variety of their foliage and the abundant fruit under which their branches bent to the ground, thus recalled to their minds. The group of houses that we have figured for the sake of their domed roofs, forms a part of one of these landscape backgrounds (Vol. I. Fig. 43).[252]

We might multiply examples if we chose. There is hardly a relief from Sennacherib’s palace in which some of those details which excite curiosity by their anecdotic and picturesque character are not introduced.[253] We find evidence of the same propensity in the decoration of the long, inclined passage that led from the summit of the mound down to the banks of the Tigris. There the sculptor has represented what must have actually taken place in the passage every day; on the one hand grooms leading their horses to water, on the other servants carrying up meat, fruit, and drink for the service of the royal table and for the army of officers and dependants of every kind that found lodging in the palace.[254]

This active desire to imitate reality as faithfully as possible had another consequence. It led to the multiplication of figures, and therefore to the diminution of their scale. No figures like those that occupy the whole heights of the slabs at Nimroud and Khorsabad have been found in the palace of Sennacherib. In the latter a slab is sometimes cut up into seven or eight horizontal divisions.[255] The same landscape, the same people, the same action is continued from one division to another over the whole side of a room. The subjects were not apportioned by slabs, but by horizontal bands; whence we may conclude that the limestone or alabaster was chiselled in place and not in the sculptor’s studio.

We have not engraved one of these reliefs in its entirety; with its half-dozen compartments one above another and its hundred or hundred and fifty figures, it would have been necessary to reduce the latter to such a degree that they could only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. The originals themselves, or the large plates given by Layard in his Monuments, must be consulted before the dangers of this mode of proceeding can be appreciated. The confusion to which we have pointed as one of the cardinal defects of Assyrian sculpture, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the battle pictures from Sennacherib’s palace. It is, however, only to be found in the historical subjects. When the sculptor has to deal with religious scenes he returns to the simplicity of composition and the dignity of pose that we noticed in the reliefs of Assurnazirpal.

This may be seen in the figures carved on the rock of Bavian by the orders of Sennacherib. The village which has given its name to this monument lies about five and thirty miles north-north-east of Mossoul, at the foot of the first Kurdistan hills and at the mouth of a narrow and picturesque valley, through which flows the rapid and noisy Gomel on its way to the ancient Bumados, the modern Ghazir, which in its turn flows southwards into the Zab.

The sculptures consist of several separate groups cut on one of the lofty walls of the ravine. Some are accompanied by inscriptions, but the latter speak of canals cut by the king for the irrigation of his country and of military expeditions, and do not explain why such elaborate sculptures should have been carried out in a solitary gorge, through which no important road can ever have passed.[256]

The valley, which is very narrow, is a cul-de-sac. May we suppose that during the summer heats the king set up his tent in it and passed his time in hunting? According to Layard’s description the scene is charming and picturesque. “The place, from its picturesque beauty and its cool refreshing shade even in the hottest day of summer, is a grateful retreat, well suited to devotion and to holy rites. The brawling stream almost fills the bed of the narrow ravine with its clear and limpid waters. The beetling cliffs rise abruptly on each side and above them tower the wooded declivities of the Kurdish hills. As the valley opens into the plain the sides of the limestone mountains are broken into a series of distinct strata, and resemble a vast flight of steps leading up to the high lands of central Asia. The banks of the torrent are clothed with shrubs and dwarf trees, among which are the green myrtle and the gay oleander bending under the weight of its rosy blossoms.”[257] Such a gorge left no room for a palace and its mound,[258] but a subterranean temple may have been cut in the limestone rock for one of the great Assyrian deities, and its entrance may now be hidden, or even its chambers filled up and obliterated, by landslips and falling rocks, and two huge masses of stone that now obstruct the flow of the torrent may be fragments from its decoration. They bear the figures of two winged bulls, standing back to back and separated by the genius who is called the lion-strangler.[259]

The principal relief fills up a frame 30 feet 4 inches wide and 29 feet high (see Fig. 120). The bed has been cut away by the chisel to a depth of about 8 inches. Sheltered by the raised edge thus left standing the figures would have been in excellent condition but for the unhappy idea that struck some one in later years, of opening chambers in the rock at the back and cutting entrances to them actually through the figures. These hypogea do not seem to have been tombs. They contain no receptacles for bodies, but only benches. They were, in all probability, cells for Christian hermits, cut at the time when monastic life was first developed and placed where we see them with the idea of at once desecrating pagan idols and sanctifying a site which they had polluted. In Phrygia and Cappadocia we found many rock-cut chambers in which evidence of the presence of these pious hermits was still to be gathered. In some, for instance, we found the remains of religious paintings. As examples we may mention the royal tombs of Amasia, which were thus converted into oratories.[260]

The composition contains four figures. Two in the middle face each other and seem to be supported by animals resembling dogs in their general outlines. They are crowned with tiaras, cylindrical in shape and surrounded with horns. One of these figures has its right hand raised and its left lowered; his companion’s gesture is the same, but reversed. The general attitudes, too, are similar, but the head of one figure has disappeared, so that we can not tell whether it was bearded like its companion or not. They each carry a sceptre ending in a palmette and with a ring attached to it at about the middle of the staff. In the centre of this ring a small standing figure may be distinguished. Behind each of these two chief personages, and near the frame of the relief, two subordinate figures appear. In attitude and costume they are the repetition of each other. Their right hands are raised in worship, while in their left they hold short, ball-headed sceptres.

The two figures in the centre must represent gods. The king is never placed on the backs of living animals in this singular fashion; but we can understand how, by an easily-followed sequence of ideas, such a method of suggesting the omnipotence of the deity was arrived at. Neither did the kings of the period we are considering wear this cylindrical tiara. In the palaces of the Sargonids it is reserved for the winged bulls. It is larger than the royal tiara, from which it is also distinguished by its embracing horns. Finally, the ringed sceptre is identical with the one held by Samas, in the Sippara tablet (Vol. I. Fig. 71). No one will hesitate as to the real character of these two personages; the only point doubtful is as to whether the one on the left is a god or a goddess. The mantle worn by the right hand figure is wanting; but the question cannot be decided, because the head has been completely destroyed. In any case, the difference of costume proves that two separate deities, between whom there was some relation that escapes our grasp, were here represented.

As for the two figures placed behind the gods, they would have been quite similar had they been in equally good condition. They represent Sennacherib himself, with the head-dress and robes that he wears in the sculptures of his palace at Nineveh. He caused his image to be carved on both sides of the relief, not for the sake of symmetry, but in order to show that his worship was addressed no less to one than the other of the two deities.

This rock-cut picture is not the only evidence of Sennacherib’s desire to leave a tangible witness of his piety and glory in this narrow valley. In another frame we find some more colossal figures, only one of which is fairly well preserved; it is that of a cavalier who, with his lance at rest, seems to be in act to charge an enemy. His attitude and movement recall those of a mediæval knight at a tournament.[261]

Layard counted eleven smaller reliefs sprinkled over the face of the rock. Some are easily accessible, while others are situated so high up that they can hardly be distinguished from below. Each of these has an arched top like that of the royal steles (see Fig. 116) and incloses a figure of the king about five feet six inches high. Above his head symbols like those on the Babylonian landmarks (see Figs. 43 and 111) and the Assyrian steles (Fig. 116) are introduced.[262] Three of these reliefs had inscriptions, and to copy them Layard caused himself to be let down by ropes from the top of the cliff, the ropes being held by Kurds who could hardly have had much experience of such employment. The illustration we have borrowed from his pages shows the adventurous explorer swinging between sky and earth (Fig. 120).

As a last example of these works cut in the rock, we may here mention a fountain that was cleared and for the moment restored to its original state by Mr. Layard (Fig. 121). By means of conduits cut in the living rock, they had managed to lead the water of the stream to a series of basins cut one below the other. The sketch we reproduce shows the lowest basin, which is close to the path. The face of the rock above it is smoothed and carved into a not inelegant relief. The water seems to pour from the neck of a large vase, seen in greatly foreshortened perspective. Two lions, symmetrically arranged, lean with their fore-feet upon the edge of the vase.[263] The work is interesting, as it is the only thing left to show how the Assyrians decorated a fountain.

The Assyrians thus found, in the very neighbourhood of their capital, great surfaces of rock almost smooth and irresistibly inviting to the chisel. Their unceasing expeditions led them into countries where, on every hand, they were tempted by similar facilities for wedding the likenesses of their princes to the very substance of the soil, for confiding the record of their victories to those walls of living rock that would seem, to them, unassailable by time or weather. Their confidence was often misplaced. In some places the water has poured down the face of the rock and worn away the figures; in others, landslips have carried the cliff and its sculptures bodily into the valley. In some instances, no doubt, the accumulations cover figures still in excellent condition, but several of these fallen sculptures have already been cleared.

We have already spoken of the bas-relief of Korkhar;[264] it is about three hundred miles from Nineveh, but the Assyrian conquerors left traces of their passage even farther from the capital than that, in the famous pass of the Lycos, for instance, near modern Beyrout, and now called Nahr-el-Kelb, or river of the dog. A rock-cut road passes through it, which has been followed from the remotest times by armies advancing from the north upon Egypt, or from the latter country towards Damascus and the fords of the Euphrates. Following the Pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty, Esarhaddon caused his own image and royal titles to be cut in this defile; they may still be seen there, on rocks whose feet stand in the bed of the torrent (Fig. 122).[265]

Without going so far as northern Syria we might find, if we may believe the natives of the country, plenty of sculptures in the valleys that open upon the Assyrian plain if they were carefully explored. Near Ghunduk, a village about forty-five miles north-west of Mossoul, Layard noticed two reliefs of the kind, one representing a hunt, the other a religious sacrifice.[266] But after Bavian the most important of all these remains yet discovered is that at Malthaï. This village is about seventy-five miles north of Mossoul, in a valley forming one of the natural gateways of Kurdistan. The road by which the traveller reaches Armenia and Lake Van runs through the valley.[267] There, in the fertile stretch of country that lies between two spurs standing out from the main chain, stands a tell, or mound, which seems to have been raised by the hand of man. Place opened trenches in it without result, but he himself confesses that his explorations were not carried far enough, and, the beauty of the site and other things being considered, he persists in believing that the kings of Assyria must have had a palace, or at least a country lodge, in the valley. However this may be, the bas-reliefs, of which Place was the first to make an exact copy, suffice to prove that this site attracted particular attention from the Assyrians (see Fig. 123). They are to be found on the mountain side, at about two-thirds of its total height, or some thousand feet above the level of the valley. In former days they must have been inaccessible without artificial aids. It is only by successive falls of rock that the rough zig-zag path by which we can now approach them has been formed. The figures, larger than nature, are arranged in a long row and in a single plane. Place was obliged, by the size and shape of his page, to give them in two instalments in the plate of which our Fig. 123 is a copy. In the absence of a protecting edge they have suffered more than the figures at Bavian. They have, indeed, a slight projection or cornice above, but its salience is hardly greater than that of the figures themselves.

The composition contains three groups, or rather one group repeated three times without sensible differences. The middle group, which is divided between the upper and lower parts in our woodcut, has been more seriously injured by the weather than those on each side of it; three of its figures have almost disappeared. The first group to the right in the upper division has part of its surface cut away by a door giving access to a rock-cut chamber behind the relief, like those at Bavian. It is, then, in the left-hand group that the subject and treatment can now be most clearly grasped.

In the first place, we may see at a glance that the theme is practically the same as at Bavian; it is a king adoring the great national gods. But the latter are now seven in number instead of two; instead of being face to face they are all turned in one direction, towards the king; but the latter is none the less repeated behind each group. There are some other differences. Among the animals who serve to raise the gods above the level of mere humanity we may distinguish the dog, the lion, the horse, and the winged bull. The gods are in the same attitude as at Bavian; their insignia are the same, those sceptres with a ring in the middle, which we never find except in the hands of deities. The sixth in the row also grasps the triple-pointed object that we have already recognised as the prototype of the Greek thunderbolt.[268] Finally, each god has the short Assyrian sword upon his thigh. To this there is one exception, in the second figure of each group. This figure is seated upon a richly-decorated throne, and has no beard, so that we may look upon it as representing a goddess. The last of the seven deities is also beardless, and, in spite of the sword and the standing attitude, may also be taken to represent a goddess. The tiaras, which are like those of Bavian in shape, each bear a star, the Assyrian ideogram for God.[269]

There is no inscription, but both Place and Layard agree that the proportions of the figures, and their execution, and the costume of the king, declare the work to have been carried out in the time of the Sargonids, probably under Sennacherib, but if not, during the reign either of his father, his son, or his grandson.

We have been led to give a reproduction and detailed description of these reliefs, chiefly because they acted as a school for the people about them. We find this habit of cutting great sculpturesque compositions on cliff-faces followed, on the one hand by the natives of Iran, on the other by those of Cappadocia, and in the works they produced there are points of likeness to the Assyrian reliefs that can by no means be accidental. When the proper time comes we shall, we believe, be able to show that there was direct and deliberate imitation.

It was not only on these rock-cut sculptures that the gods appeared thus perched on the backs of animals; the motive was carried far afield by small and easily-portable objects, on which it very often occurs. It is to be found on many of the cylinders; we reproduce two as examples. Each of these shows us an individual in an attitude of worship before a god standing on a bull’s back. The main difference between the two is one of style. The cylinder engraved in Fig. 124 dates from the early Chaldæan monarchy, while its companion (Fig. 125) is ascribed by M. Ménant to the Assyrian dynasty of Calah.[270]

By their simplicity of arrangement and the nudity of their field, the sculptures of Bavian and Malthaï belong in some sense to the archaic period, but their figures are designed with that finer sense of proportion that distinguished Assyrian art from the reign of Sennacherib onwards. It was, however, in the palaces that the new tendency towards grace and slenderness chiefly made itself felt. We have no sculptures to speak of from the time of Esarhaddon, but no monarch has left us monuments more numerous or in better preservation than his son Assurbanipal. A visit to London is necessary, however, for their proper examination, as they have not yet been made the subject of any such publication as that devoted by Mr. Layard to remains from the time of Sennacherib and Assurnazirpal. Some idea of them may be formed, however, from the numerous fragments figured in these pages (Vol. I., Figs. 5, 27, 28; below, Figs. 162, 172, 174, 177–180, 188).