The temperaments of the two nations were, then, vastly different, and by the time their mutual relations became close and continuous, each had thought too much, had worked too much, and created too much for itself to be in any great danger of losing its originality under the influence of the other. Moreover, the two civilizations never penetrated within one another. Their moments of contact were short and superficial. Under the great Theban conquerors of the eighteenth dynasty, the Egyptian armies advanced to the Euphrates, and the princes of Mesopotamia may, for a time, have recognized the suzerainty of the Pharaohs; this is proved to some extent by the numerous scarabs engraved with the name of Thothmes III., which have been found in the valley of the Khabour,[342] but after the nineteenth dynasty their hold upon these distant conquests must have been lost. Their access to them was barred by the Khetas, in Syria, and, a few centuries later, it was the Sargonids who invaded Egypt and admired its monuments so much that they carried some of them away, such as the lion found at Bagdad. It bears the oval of a Pharaoh who is believed to be one of the shepherd kings.[343] In the interval the importation of objects of luxury, which was carried on through the Phœnicians, had introduced a few foreign motives into the repertory of the Assyrian artists, such as the crouching sphinx and the lotus flower; the winged globe may also be Egyptian; but these borrowings never go beyond details; even if they were far more numerous than they are, they would not deprive the sculpture of the Mesopotamian Semites of its right to be considered an independent and autonomous form of art, whose merits and defects are to be explained by the inborn genius of the race, by its manner and beliefs, by the natural conditions of its home, and the qualities of the different materials employed.[344]

It is in the same order of ideas that we must seek a reason for the differences we have remarked between the art of the early Chaldæan monarchy as it has been revealed to us in the monuments recently discovered, and Assyrian art as we have known it ever since the explorations at Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyundjik. In all this there is a most interesting question for the study of the historian. Of what nature was the bond by which the sculptors of Calah and Nineveh were allied to those who had chiselled the Sirtella statues, perhaps a thousand years before? What place does the brilliant and prolific art of Assyria occupy in the series of phases whose succession was governed by the laws that have presided over the development of human societies in every age and place? Until within the last few months we should have found it difficult to give a satisfactory answer to this question. Assyrian art offered contradictory features to the observer, and it was not easy to understand how, with so lively a feeling for form, and especially for movement, it could have admitted so much conventionality and repeated itself with so much insistence and prolixity. The combination of skill and awkwardness, of energy and platitude, was more than surprising. But the problem resolves itself as soon as we go back to the art of Chaldæa, the first-born of the two sister nations, and the pioneer of Mesopotamian civilization.

Assyrian art, even in its most ancient productions, was not, as we once believed, a primitive or even an archaic art; neither was it what we call a classic art, an art employing the skill it has acquired for the renewed study of nature and the sincere imitation of its beauties. We shall not call it a debased art or an art in its decadence; to do so would be to exaggerate our meaning; but it was an art no longer in its progress, an art that, for the sake of rapid and ample production, made use of conventional formulæ invented by deceased masters and handed down by tradition.

Perhaps we may give a clearer notion of what we mean by a comparison.

Under all the reserves implied by such collations, we should say that Chaldæan art was to that of Assyria what the Greek art of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus was to the Alexandrian and Græco-Roman art which we now call Hellenistic. In the studios of Nineveh, as in those of Pergamus, of Rhodes, of Antioch, of Rome, great activity, great skill, and no little science were to be found; even originality was sought for, but it was sought rather than won. Thus we find in Macedonian and Roman Greece, here a school drawing attention by audacious and perhaps theatrical execution, there another devoting its skill to pathetic subjects, and attempting to render physical agony by contracted muscles. So it is in Assyria. The ease with which alabaster and soft limestone could be cut allowed the artists who worked for Assurnazirpal to give to the ornamentation of the rich stuffs they figured a delicacy and refinement that were impossible in the stubborn stones of Chaldæa. Two centuries later the sculptors of Assurbanipal sought a new element of success in the complication of their scenes, in the grace of their execution, in the picturesque details of their landscape backgrounds, in the increased slenderness of their figures, and in a certain elegance spread over their compositions as a whole.

It is certain that neither the Greek of the later centuries nor the Assyrian invented and created in the proper sense of the word. The Greek sculptor, thanks to a deeper comprehension of the true conditions of art and to the necessity under which he laboured of reproducing the nude, certainly did not remit his care for modelling, but he looked at the contours and the significance of the human body rather with the eyes of his masters and predecessors than with his own. It was to those masters that he was indebted for his propensity to see one set of features rather than another, and to give that interpretation to form that, taken altogether, constitutes the Greek style.

The Assyrian sculptor was in much the same case, but as his figures were draped, almost without exception, it was much easier for him to put nature aside altogether and to fall into manner and routine. It is only when he has to represent animals that he seems to work from the living model. The human body, hidden under its long and heavy robes, did not discover enough to awake his interest; all that he sees—the features and the profile of the face, the throat, the lower parts of the arms and legs—he treats after the examples left to him by his Chaldæan leader. In the whole of Assyrian sculpture there is no passage studied from nature with faith and sincerity, like the hand, the shoulder, and the back in the statues of Gudea. The Chaldæan sculptor had a taste for strong modelling, and in this his Assyrian pupil copied him with such an excess of zeal that he arrived at exaggeration and pure convention. He knotted the knees of his figures, he gave them knee-caps standing out like huge bosses, and muscles so stretched and salient that they look like cables rather than flesh and blood. It is an early edition of what is now an old story. The master is betrayed by the pupil, who copies his mannerisms rather than his beauties and turns many of his fine qualities into defects.

We may now see how much the Chaldæan excavations and the collection which the Louvre owes to M. de Sarzec are calculated to teach the historian of art. These discoveries, by their intrinsic importance and by the light they have thrown on the origin of a great civilization, may almost be compared to those of Lepsius and Mariette, to the systematic researches and happy finds that have revealed the Egypt of the ancient empire to us. Assyrian art is no longer a puzzling phenomenon. Like the Egyptian art of the Theban epoch, it was preceded by a realistic and naturalistic, an inquisitive, simple-minded, and single-hearted art, which had faithfully studied the human form and had thus created one of the original styles of antiquity, a style, perhaps, in which Greece at its first beginning found the most useful lessons and the most fertile suggestions.

As we have already confessed, we can form but a very imperfect notion of what the art of Chaldæa was in its best days, in its period of youth and freshness. The remains are few and small; they are heads separated from the bodies to which they once belonged, chips from broken reliefs and a few small bronze and terra-cotta statuettes. Even supposing that new discoveries come to fill up the gaps, so that the development of Chaldæo-Assyrian art may be embraced as a whole, even then it would, we believe, be interior to that of Egypt. No doubt it possesses certain qualities not to be found in the latter. The statues from Tello have a freedom and vigour of modelling in certain parts that can hardly be prized too highly, and the Memphite artist never chiselled anything so full of intense life and movement as the animals at Kouyundjik; but without again referring to faults already treated at length we may say that the supreme defect of Mesopotamian sculpture is its want of variety.

It is a powerful but monotonous art. For each class of figures it had but one mould. It seems never to have suspected how unlike men are to each other when they are looked at closely; we are tempted to believe that it never made a portrait in the true sense of the word. It held through many centuries to the general and abstract types created at first, and repeated them with a constancy that inevitably causes some weariness in the spectator. It also committed the mistake of spreading a single colour, speaking metaphorically, over all its pictures; as a musician would say, all its compositions were in the same key; it was always serious; it did not understand how to laugh or unbend. In the elaboration of its demons it certainly cast about for as much ugliness as it could find, but that was to frighten and not to amuse. In all the remains of Assyrian art there is no trace of playful humour, of the light-hearted gaiety that is so conspicuous in more than one Egyptian monument. In the subordinate parts of some of the reliefs from the Sargonid period we find certain groups and scenes belonging to what we should call genre, but neither here, nor in the bronzes, nor in engraved gems, nor even in the terra-cottas, do we find anything that approaches caricature. The comic element, without which no representation of life can be faithful and complete, is entirely wanting.

A final defect of Assyrian art is the almost total absence of woman from its creations. In Chaldæa we found her in the small bronzes and in a few clay figures; the canephorus with bare arms and bust, the nursing goddesses who bear a child in their arms or who press their breasts with their open hands, will be remembered, but it would seem that such subjects were treated only in figures of very small dimensions. In the fragmentary reliefs and statues from Chaldæa there is nothing to suggest that female forms, either wholly or partially nude, were either cast or chiselled in anything approaching life size. Still less were such things made in Assyria, where no terra-cotta figure even of the deity to whom the names of Istar, Beltis, Mylitta, and Zarpanitu have all been given, has yet been found. It was, however, at Kouyundjik that the only nude female torso yet discovered in Mesopotamia was dug up. It bears the name Assurbilkala, and is now, as we have said above, in the British Museum.[345] Among the ivories, indeed, we find female statuettes in which we are tempted to recognize the same goddess; but where were those ivories carved? We have good reason to believe that not a few are of Phœnician workmanship.

The real national art of Assyria must be sought in the palace reliefs, and in that long illustrated chronicle of the court, the chase, and the royal campaigns, woman plays a very subordinate part. It has been thought that a tall, beardless individual who occurs near one of the doorways of Assurnazirpal’s palace, in the place generally reserved for divinities, should be accepted as a goddess (Fig. 162).[346] She is winged, and her hair is gathered together at the back of the neck, one long knotted and tasselled tress falling nearly to her loins. Her right arm is raised, her left lowered; in her left hand she holds a small wreath or garland. A wide girdle at the waist confines a long robe falling to the feet, and a fringed and flounced mantle. Nothing is seen through this drapery, such as amplitude of bosom or hips, to suggest the female sex, while the jewels that may be noticed on the neck and wrists and in the ears are also to be found on figures that are certainly male. In fact there is nothing to suggest a woman but the arrangement of the hair and a certain unwonted refinement in the execution of the features. And it is only by external signs like these, by the pose and the costume, that the few women in the bas-reliefs are to be recognized. This observation holds good for the queen of Assurbanipal as well as for the musicians who celebrate his victories and the captives led into slavery by the Assyrian armies.

We can hardly say then that woman had any place in Assyrian art; she was represented, if at all, only by her robes. In the long series of reliefs you find none of the charming variety given to Egyptian art by the slender forms of goddesses, queens, dancers, and players on the mandolin, who crowd the pictures and allow the graceful contours of their youthful bodies to be seen through their transparent robes. In spite, then, of all its merits, the art of the Assyrian sculptor is far from complete. His neglect of the soft nobleness inherent in the beauty of woman deprived him of a precious resource; his works are without the telling contrasts that nature has set up between the forms of man and those of his mate. We have endeavoured to do him justice; we have sought to put in full light the merits by which he attracts our admiration, but we cannot help seeing that he lacks something that we have found in Egypt and shall find again in Greece; he is without the charm of grace and light.