Sometimes the Assyrians attacked the harder stones, which they obtained from certain districts of Kurdistan and the neighbourhood of the extinct volcanoes of the Sinjar, between the valleys of the Tigris and the Khabour;[127] we shall be content with quoting as examples a basalt statue found at Kaleh-Shergat and the obelisk of Shalmaneser II., in the British Museum, which is cut from the same material (Vol. I. Fig. 111, and below, Fig. 49).[128] It deals with the homage done and the tribute offered to the king by five conquered nations. Among the offerings are several strange animals.[129] The small building at Khorsabad which has been called sometimes a throne-room and sometimes a temple, was decorated with reliefs in basalt,[130] but the use of these hard rocks was always very rare in Assyria. The habits of the northern artists were formed in cutting the softer stones, and their use of such materials explains not only their prodigious fecundity but certain qualities and defects of their style.

Both Chaldæa and Assyria made too constant and skilful use of plastic clay in their architecture for it to have been possible that they should overlook its capabilities as a material for the sculptor, especially in the production of small objects like sepulchral statuettes. Both nations have transmitted to us a vast quantity of such figures. In both cases they are solid; those of Chaldæa are stamped in a mould in a single piece; their reverse is flat and roughly smoothed by the hand; the clay is fine and close-grained, and so hard and well fired that it cannot be scratched with a metal point (Fig. 50).[131] The execution of the Assyrian figures is more simple. They are solidly modelled in clay, and without the use of a mould, although we often find a series made after one pattern and giving a high idea of the Assyrian modeller’s skill (Fig. 51). The coarseness of the material however is surprising; it is a dark grey earth, unequal, knotty, without any mixture of sand, but marked with cross hatchings left by the straw with which it seems to have been mixed. The body is so friable that it crumbles in the hand, but as it resists water it must have undergone a gentle burning.[132]

Examples are also to be found of objects in earthenware or terra-cotta coated with a vitreous glaze, like those that the Egyptians manufactured in such enormous quantities.[133] In these cases the figure is cast in a mould, and the enamel is either blue or green, as in Egypt (Fig. 52).[134]

Clay was used for other things besides these small statuettes; it seems to have been employed in the first sketches from which the sculptor chiselled the alabaster slabs, at least when he attacked the more important and complex groups. We can hardly refuse to recognize such a purpose in a fine fragment brought from the palace of Assurbanipal to the British Museum. It is all that is left of a relief in terra-cotta. The grain is much finer and the colour far redder than in statuettes from the same place. In its present state this slab is about a foot high, and mutilated as it is, its subject may be recognized as an incident in the royal hunt, the rest of which helps to fill the Assyrian basement room. The larger part of the principal figure is wanting, but enough of him remains to leave no doubt as to the character of the scene; it represents a king attacked on two sides by lions, and defending himself with his lance. The firm and precise execution of the lions’ paws and of the king’s body should be noticed. According to the scale obtaining in the sculptures preserved this model was carried out on a half scale. So little of the group is left that we cannot make sure whether the reliefs now in London contain the episode of which this is the original sketch or not.[135] So far as we can tell, however, the exact passage executed after this model is not in the museum, but we must not forget that a large number of the sculptures were left in the palace where they were found; Mr. Rassam only removed the finest and those in the best condition.

The small winged bull carved in the finest limestone, which Mr. George Smith brought from Nimroud, was, no doubt, a model of the same sort (see Vol. I. Figs. 83 and 84). Its execution is of the most careful description, and yet it can hardly have had any other use. We may say the same of the square slab of terra-cotta just mentioned; its figures are too small for the decoration of palace saloons, and the material is too common to have formed a part of those rich schemes of ornament whose existence is attested by the texts as well as by the remains. We can suggest no more plausible explanation of these little monuments, or one in more complete accord with the necessities of rapid production. We have already shown that a vast number of hands were required for the prompt execution of these great sculptural works, and the provision of such models, whether in stone or terra-cotta, would do much towards preventing the evil consequences of employing so many different and variously gifted journeymen. The master produced the model, and nothing was required from the carvers who copied it but skill in enlarging and in the handling of their tools.

From the earliest times of which any remains have come down to us the Chaldæans understood how to make use of all the different materials that offer facilities to the artist for the rendering of living form. Until bronzes dating from the times of the pyramid builders were found,[136] it was thought that they had anticipated the Egyptians in the art of making that precious alloy and casting it in earthen moulds.[137] This conjecture was suggested by the discovery, near Bagdad, of a metal statuette, which is now in the Louvre (Fig. 53). It is what the Greeks called a canephoros. A young woman carries a basket on her completely shaven head, keeping it in place with her hands. From her waist upwards she is nude, but the lower part of her figure is wrapped in a kind of narrow skirt, on which is engraved a votive inscription containing the name of a king Kourdourmapouk, who is believed to have flourished in the sixteenth century before our era. The casting is solid.

The bronzes inscribed with the name of Gudea (Vol. I. Figs. 146–148) are perhaps still more ancient. The motive of one is identical with that of this canephoros. Metal working cannot have begun with such objects as these; it is pretty certain that forging metals was everywhere an earlier process than casting them. Before learning to prepare the mould and to force the liquid copper into its farthest recesses, men must have commenced by beating it into plates upon the anvil. When they had gathered sufficient skill to make these plates very thin and pliant, the next thing they attempted was to ornament them, which they first did by hammering one of their sides, and so producing reliefs on the other which could be brought to sufficient perfection by repeating the process with varying degrees of strength and delicacy, and by chasing. This is what is called repoussé work.

There is no doubt that these processes were invented in the southern cities. The oldest of the Warka tombs show that metals were abundant from a very ancient period, and that their use was well understood; but we do not possess any important examples of repoussé work dating from the early days of Chaldæa. It is otherwise with Assyria. The exploration of her palaces has brought to light numerous fragments of ornamental sheathing in bronze; plaques and bands, sometimes curved, sometimes straight, according to the surface to which they were applied, were covered in some cases with mere ornamental designs, in others with numerous figures. Only within the last few years have we learnt to how high a pitch the sculptors of Mesopotamia had carried this art, and how well they understood that the rough form left by the hammer should be completed and defined with the burin and chisel. The most important discovery of the kind was made as recently as 1878, by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, who found the bronze gates to which we have already more than once alluded, in the mound of Balawat.[138] Shalmaneser II., who built the palace to which these gates belonged, caused his victorious campaigns and his sacrifices to the gods to be represented upon them. We have already reproduced many of these curious reliefs (Vol. I., Figs. 51, 68, 73, 158; and above, Fig. 28); a last example will help to show the facility of the Assyrian artist and the boldness of his rendering of animals and men (Fig. 54). He played with bronze as he did with alabaster; in both his handling was firm and rapid and his modelling at once broad and strongly felt.[139]

This peculiar handling, at once free and a little hard, is to be found in all the works of these people. It may be recognized in a wooden lion, unfortunately much mutilated, which belongs to the Louvre (Fig. 55), and in those carvings upon the shells of pearl oysters that have been found in such numbers, especially in Lower Chaldæa.[140] The ivories alone are, sometimes at least, without this peculiar character. They display a certain harshness in which the distinguishing mark of Chaldæan origin has been recognized. We may give as an instance the small object thus described in the catalogue of the Louvre: “Lion devouring a wild goat, of which only the head and neck are visible. This group ornaments one face of a small object, rounded above and with a flat base. There is an oblong slit in the latter. The object is apparently a seal” (Fig. 56).[141] On the other hand, although most of the ivory carvings that were used for the handles of walking-sticks and daggers and such purposes, show the characteristics we have mentioned, it must be acknowledged that the ivory tablets from Nimroud are free, for the most part, from the style we have attempted to define as that proper to Chaldæa and Assyria. The treatment is lighter and more elegant, reminding us of Egypt. Must we believe that when the Assyrians attacked this beautiful material they changed their confirmed habits and gave a refinement to their touch it had never known before? Such an idea seems very improbable. We know that their ornamentists borrowed certain motives from the Egyptians, such as the winged globe, the lotus-garland, the sphinx; but in doing so they stamped them with their own personal and independent taste. It seems likely, therefore, that the more carefully wrought of these ivories were imported from abroad, either from Egypt itself, or from its imitator, Phœnicia. In the fragments we have already figured (Vol. I. Figs. 129 and 130) the features and head-dresses are easily recognized as Egyptian. This character is still more marked in another tablet from Nimroud, of which there are several repetitions in the British Museum (Fig. 57). Two women are seated opposite to each other. They are Egyptian in every detail. Their attitudes and symmetrical arrangement; their robes and head coverings; the action of their hands, one raised in adoration, the other holding the hare-headed staff; the crux ansata under their chairs, all are continually found in the monuments of the Nile valley. A still more decisive feature is the oval surmounted by two ostrich plumes in the centre of the plaque. This is not inscribed with hieroglyphs taken at random, as in the small objects of Phœnician origin on which those characters are used merely as decoration, but with a royal name, Auben, or Auben-Ra.[142] It is true that no such name has as yet been encountered on any other monument, but it may very well have been that of one of those petty monarchs who swarmed in the Delta towards the time of the Ethiopian conquest. Most of them left very slight traces; not a few are known only by a single text. This tablet may have been carved, then, either in Egypt, or in Phœnicia after an Egyptian model. In any case, it seems clear to us that it is not the work of an Assyrian or Chaldæan. Other objects in the same material do not, like this, bear an irrefutable mark of their origin, but they are so like it in treatment that we are tempted to say they must have been produced under the same influence. Look at this fragment of a winged sphinx (Fig. 58). Its general physiognomy, the head-dress, the peculiar rendering of the wing-feathers, are none of them Chaldæan, but we often find them in Phœnicia and Cyprus. We may say the same of the fine piece in which two fantastic animals standing upon a peculiar and elaborate capital are surrounded by gracefully designed flowers and leafage (Fig. 59).

In attempting to give a clear idea of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture we must, therefore, put aside the more artistic among the numerous ivory carvings found in the ruins at Nimroud, and especially in the palace of Assurbanipal. It would seem that such things were imported from abroad when something better than the ivory knobs and handles made in the country was required. When we come to speak of metal cups we shall have to repeat this remark.

It may be said that we should have postponed our notice of these objects, and, if they had all borne as incontestable a mark of their origin as the tablet with the royal oval, we should have done so, we should have reserved both the carved ivories and the engraved cups of metal until we reached those pages of our history in which the arts of Phœnicia will be treated. But, unfortunately, when we come to details it is not always easy to establish the distinction between objects of foreign manufacture and those productions of the same kind that were made at home; in many cases it requires the tact and instinct of the archæologist to know one from the other. Such faculties are always, in some degree, liable to err, while in many cases it is very difficult to give reasons for the conclusions arrived at by their exercise. The simplest way out of the difficulty has seemed to us to describe these remains at the same time as the main compositions to which they were formerly attached. But while we do so we keep their doubtful character in mind; in our definition of the style of Chaldæo-Assyrian sculpture we shall only have recourse to them under great reserve, especially as the style in question is to be amply studied without their help.

§ 3. The Principal Conventions of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture.

The art of Mesopotamia, like that of Egypt, had its conventions, some of which were peculiar to itself, while others are common to all nations that have arrived at sovereign power and maturity of knowledge.

Like all those who attempt plastic figuration by the light of nature, the artists of Mesopotamia began with profiles. In speaking of Egyptian sculpture we had occasion to show how this method of representation is always followed by first beginners,[143] as it is the simplest and easiest of all. The Chaldæo-Assyrian artists, unlike those of Egypt and Greece, were unaccustomed to the nude, and were therefore without the incentive it supplies to fight against nature and to make her live in all her variety of aspect, a variety which work in the round is alone able to grasp without the aid of convention. One consequence of this is that almost exclusive love of the bas-relief in which Mesopotamian art is unlike that of any other people. In its very beginning it seems to have made a vigorous and promising effort to rise to the production of statues in the round, but discouragement appears to have rapidly followed, and in later years but a very few attempts, and those attended with no great success, were made. The salience of figures was increased or diminished according to their place and the part they played, but the idea of detaching them altogether from the background and giving them an independent existence of their own, was soon abandoned. Under the first Chaldæan empire, real statues, round which we can walk, were modelled (see Plates VI. and VII.). In several of these, although the forms are not so round as in nature, the back is as carefully treated as the front. On the other hand, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us are all too thin from front to back, while their backs are hardly more than roughly-dressed stone. You feel at once that they were made to stand against a wall, and you think of children and of those whose limbs are so infirm that they cannot stand without support. Before such things, we are far enough, not only from the grace, vitality, and freedom of the Greeks, but even from the proud repose of the Egyptian colossi. Although our figures show, of course, only the front view, this impression is very striking in the statues of Nebo (Vol. I. Fig. 15) and Assurnazirpal (Fig. 60), which have migrated from Nimroud to the British Museum. The latter was found by Layard at the entrance of one of the temples whose plans we have given (Vol. I. Fig. 189). It is cut from a very hard and close-grained limestone, and stands upon a pedestal that is nothing but another block of the same material. We have been compelled, in order to keep our figure sufficiently large, to reduce this block to the dimensions of a shallow plinth. In reality it is a cube thirty-one inches high and twenty-one and three-quarter inches wide.[144]

The statues of Nebo and Assurnazirpal are standing figures, but, at Kaleh-Shergat, Layard found a seated figure of Shalmaneser II. (Fig. 61).[145] It is in black basalt and has no head. It is of great interest because it recalls the very oldest Chaldæan statues both in material and attitude. It has suffered so much, however, and its workmanship seems to have been so sketchy, that even in the original itself the details of modelling and costume are hardly to be recognized. We give a slight sketch of it merely to show its pose.

These statues, if they deserve such a name, show the work of the Assyrians at its feeblest; the plastic genius of the people must not be judged from them, but from the genre in which they were most at home, from the long lines of figures that stand out in various salience from the palace walls. Among the productions of this latter class that have come down to our time we find every degree of relief, from the bas-relief strictly speaking, to what is but little removed from the round.

Let us begin with the bas-relief. It is with sculptures executed on this principle that the walls of temples and palaces were covered, as if with a stone tapestry. The Assyrian process is identical in principle with that afterwards adopted by the Greeks, as, on the whole, the most convenient for the purpose in view. We find no examples of the Egyptian fashion of defining the outlines of figures by a deep groove cut with the point, nor of those figures that were, so to speak, let into and modelled within the surface of the wall.[146] In both Chaldæa and Assyria the figure stands out from the bed of the relief from two or three millimetres to a centimetre, according to its size. The bed is nowhere hollowed, it is one even surface, except that where the figures are very small, and consequently of very slight relief, the sculptor has reinforced them with an incised outline one or two millimetres deep. This artifice must be examined on the monuments themselves; it could hardly be shown in reproductions on a reduced scale.

Most of the great bas-reliefs have but one plane, and to this they owe the simplicity that gives them a certain nobility in spite of their monotonous design (see Vol. I. Figs. 4, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 23, 24, &c.). Examples of two planes, in which the figures are grouped in couples, the nearest to the spectator in each couple covering a large part of his companion, are by no means rare (see Fig. 62); we may say the same of those in which a background of trees is introduced beyond the figures (Fig. 63). This arrangement is especially frequent in the more complicated pictures, where the figures are small and numerous; but even in the last century of the Assyrian monarchy, when the sculptor showed an ever-increasing desire to draw attention and excite interest by the introduction of these picturesque details, he never quits his hold of a right instinct for the true conditions of the bas-relief. Unlike the Roman sculptors, and even those of the Renaissance, he shows no hankering after those effects that seem to get rid of the bed; he never destroys the clarity of his conception by unduly multiplying the planes. He did not understand how to put objects in perspective or manage foreshortening, and this ignorance served him well; it preserved him from the temptation into which more skilful artists are so prone to fall; it prevented him from forgetting “that the design best suited to the bas-relief is purely geometrical in its essentials.”[147]

The relief, of course, becomes higher as the size of the figures increases. It is as much as from eight to ten inches in the winged genii (Figs. 27 and 34) that accompany and divide the bulls on the decorated façades and in the gateways. Even when it is highest the salience does not go beyond what is called mezzo-relievo; that is to say, no part of the principal or accessory figure, of the genius himself or of the lion, stands out from the wall in the round, as, for instance, do the heads and limbs in the metopes of the Parthenon.

The same remark holds good of the colossal figures of lions (Plate VIII.) and winged bulls (Plate IX.) which acted as guardians of the palace. We have already explained the ideas attached to these monsters by the Assyrians,[148] we shall here dwell upon some peculiarities of their execution. In these images there is a compromise between “the round” and the bas-relief of a very original and peculiar character.

Looked at from in front these lions and bulls seem to be independent statues; the head, the chest, the legs stand out with as much freedom and amplitude of development as in nature; but step a little to one side, to the right or the left as the case may be, and their aspect will change. You will then see that only the fore-part of the animal is disengaged from the block of alabaster or limestone in which it is cut, the rest of the body remains imprisoned in its substance. The contours alone are indicated, in low relief, on the two sides of the ponderous slab. Thus we have half, or rather a quarter, of the statue standing out from sixteen to twenty inches in front of the slab on which the sides are shown in silhouette. It looks as if the image had made an effort to shake itself clear of the mass of stone and had only partially succeeded. We find ourselves wondering whether, if Nineveh had not perished and the development of her art had gone on without interruption, these great beasts would not have ended by conquering their liberty and winning for themselves an existence independent of the walls to which they were attached. But the nature of the material employed says no—alabaster is too soft, and the legs of the lions and bulls could not support their massive bodies without assistance.

There are other peculiarities in these images. Looked at from in front they appear stationary, their two fore-feet being on the same plane and close together; any other arrangement would have been awkward. But if we look at them from the side they appear to be walking, in which attitude alone would all the four legs be visible and clear of each other. In most cases the bulls were not parallel to the façades they decorated, but perpendicular to them;[149] they faced the visitor as he approached the gate, and it was not until he entered the passage that he got a side view of their bodies stretching along its walls (Figs. 26 and 27). Some contrivance was sought by which their figures should appear complete from both points of view, and the following expedient was hit upon. As soon as you had entered the passage between the bulls, you could, of course, no longer see more than the fore-leg nearest you; the other was hidden by it. The latter was then repeated by the sculptor and thrown back under the body of the animal, which, in the result, had five legs.

The idea is a better one than we are at first inclined to believe. More than once, perhaps, at the Louvre or the British Museum, you have paused before these colossal images, you have measured their height with your eye and admired their tranquil majesty. But have you ever noticed the artifice I have just described? To see it clearly you must choose a standpoint on the right or left front, as our draughtsman has done (Plates VIII. and IX.). If no chance has led you to such a standpoint in the first instance, if you have, as is most likely, looked at the figure first in front and then from the side, you have probably never suspected the sort of trick that the sculptor has played upon you. This contrivance is one of the distinguishing marks of Ninevite art;[150] it occurs nowhere else, unless in monuments such as those of Cappadocia, which are more or less feeble copies of Assyrian models.[151]

The conventions that remain to be noticed will not detain us so long. They are such as have been practised in all imperfect schools of art,—in all, in fact, that preceded the art of the Greeks.

Even in the greatest and most perfect schools of sculpture, the bas-relief, as if influenced by a souvenir of its origin, prefers figures in profile to those in full face. In those exceptional instances in which the Assyrians abandoned this preference, as, for example, in the decoration of entrances, they were visibly embarrassed. They did not understand how to foreshorten the feet, therefore they put the lower part of the figure in profile while the upper part faced the spectator (see Fig. 34).[152] This puts the figure in a painful and awkward attitude which could not be imitated by a living man without a violent effort, or retained for more than a second or two. It is the same when they wish to make a figure turn; the movement of the shoulders and neck is so clumsily rendered that the sculptor seems to have put on the head the wrong side foremost.[153] In general, however, the ample draperies help the artist out of his difficulties. Thanks to the veil which hides his ignorance of the attachment of limbs and the play of muscles, he succeeds in avoiding those dislocations that are so frequent in the Egyptian bas-reliefs and sometimes result in obvious deformity.[154]

When he had to render the human countenance the sculptor of Babylon or Nineveh fell into the same fault as he of Memphis; he placed a full, or nearly a full, eye in his profiles, and for the same reason.[155] This defect is not always so conspicuous as in a bas-relief from Nimroud representing a tributary of Assurnazirpal bringing two apes, one of which stands on his master’s shoulders while the other leaps before his feet (Fig. 64); but it is never absent altogether.

If in its fidelity to habits that we may call childish the sculpture of Mesopotamia bears a strong resemblance to that of Egypt, it is nevertheless far inferior to it in other respects. The artist never seems to have looked closely enough or with a sufficiently awakened eye to perceive the differences that distinguish one individual or even one race from another; at least if he saw them he did not understand how to reproduce them; he did not even try to do so. From the very beginning—so far as we know it—the art of the Nile valley turned out portraits both of Pharaoh and of private individuals that are astonishing in their truth and life.[156] Even in those executed in a more summary fashion and not in any way to be classed as masterpieces, we find a singular aptitude in seizing and noting those peculiarities which make of every human face an unique creation, a medal of which but one example has been struck. Ethnic characteristics are given with no less truth; we have seen elsewhere how many faithful portraits they have left of the races with whom they entertained long and unbroken relations.[157]

Very few traces of this talent or disposition are to be found in the monuments of Mesopotamia. Of course in a draped school of sculpture we could hardly expect to find any great preoccupation with the various beauties of the human body. Given the Assyrian costume, it was impossible that the Assyrian artist should aspire to bring out those beauties. In many works from the Nile valley the influence of the sex, the age, and even the profession upon the development of the muscles, upon, if we may be allowed the expression, the physiognomy of the flesh, is skilfully shown in the modelling.[158] But faces were not concealed by the Assyrian draperies; why then were their distinctive marks of individuality so consistently ignored? The sculptor should have concentrated his attention upon them all the more, and so arrived at a faithful portrait. He did not do so however. Neither Assyrian nor Chaldæan had any such ambition. By a process of selection and abstraction they arrived at a kind of mean, at a certain ideal of manly beauty which served them to the end. That ideal is characterized by the abundance and symmetrical arrangement of the hair and beard, by a low forehead, heavy and strongly-arched eyebrows, a hooked and rounded nose, a small mouth with full but not too heavy lips, a strong, rounded chin, and limbs whose muscular development betrayed their vigour.

The universal acceptance of this type is proved chiefly by the Assyrian sculpture. The fact is that among all the thousands of figures it produced there are but two heads, the one with, the other without, a beard. We have already encountered the first in all the scenes in which the king, his ministers, his officers or his soldiers appear. It is also used for the gods (Vol. I. Figs. 13 and 15) and the winged bulls, whose heads, perhaps, like the Egyptian sphinxes, were supposed to be reproductions of the royal features. The beardless variety seems, in the royal processions, to be confined to those eunuchs who have always played such an important part at Oriental courts (Vol. I. Figs. 23 and 24, and Vol. II. Plate X.); the fleshy heaviness of their cheeks and necks (Fig. 65) has been thought to confirm this idea. But we should be mistaken if we recognized these miserable beings in all the beardless figures. The latter are so numerous in some compositions that no such explanation is admissible. In many instances they seem to represent people of the lowest class, peasants, labourers, and slaves (see Vol. I. Figs. 45, 151, 152, and Vol. II. Figs. 44 and 48). As the oldest sculptures of Chaldæa suffice to prove, the habit of wearing the hair and beard long did not date from the earlier years of that country. In those sculptures we find heads completely shaved. It is possible that the ancient custom was changed when the formidable army to which Assyria owed its power and fortune was created. The beard may then have become, as the moustache used to be with us, a sign of the military caste. We never find soldiers or their officers without it;[159] but their hair and beards are shorter than those of the king and his ministers (Fig. 66); they do not fall upon the chest and shoulders in several rows of curls carefully arranged.[160] In the reliefs the amplitude and length of the beard are always a sign of the highest rank.

The temples, the forehead, and the nape of the neck were lost under this abundant hair, while the beard covered all below the cheek-bones and the tiara the top of the head. Beyond the nose and eyes there was hardly anything left by which one individual could be distinguished from another. Now the Assyrian race was a race in the proper sense of the word; it was homogeneous and pure-blooded. Between one member and another of the aristocracy that reigned and fought, these two features would vary little. All their noses were more or less aquiline, all or nearly all their eyes large and black. The national fashion of wearing the hair would suppress many of the characteristics by which we know one man from another. From all this it results that the crowd of kings and nobles who furnished the sculptor with his favourite theme are vastly like each other. This similarity or rather uniformity was ill calculated to awaken the sense of portraiture in the artist. The features that distinguished one king from another are slurred over by the sculptor simply because they were in reality so lightly marked that he hardly perceived their existence.

We know that this opinion is not shared by all those who have busied themselves with the Assyrian monuments. It has been said and, in the belief of some, proof has been given, that we possess the elements of an Assyrian iconography, that the images of the kings, in the steles and on the palace walls, are true and faithful portraits.[161] We believe this to be a mistake. No doubt the proportions of the body, the expression of the face, and the general lines of the profile, are not the same for Assurnazirpal, Sargon, and the sons and grandsons of that prince. But what must we conclude from that? Only that Assyria did not escape, any more than Egypt, from the action of that law of change which is the very condition of life; that from one century and one reign to another the taste and execution of the Assyrian sculptors were modified, though in a very feeble degree. Thus figures are shorter and more thickset in the north-western palace at Nimroud than at Khorsabad or Kouyundjik; they are finer in their proportions, more graceful, and altogether better in their art under Assurbanipal than under his grandfather, the founder of the dynasty. Art, as we shall bring abundant evidence to prove, followed the same path at Nineveh as everywhere else. This is not to be denied; but before the hypothesis against which we contend can be accepted, its advocates must show that, in each series of monuments, the king is to be distinguished by his personal features from the people about him. You must not take the evidence of drawings or even of photographs; you must examine the originals themselves. This I have done with the most scrupulous attention both in the British Museum and the Louvre. I have carefully examined and compared the four great series of royal bas-reliefs that have come down to us, belonging respectively to Assurnazirpal, Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. If such an examination be made without prejudice, I am satisfied that only one conclusion can be come to. In all the pictures dating from one reign the king himself differs not at all from his officers and nobles; he is only to be recognized by his lofty tiara, an ornament that he alone had the right to wear, by his sceptre or some other attribute of the kind, by his richer costume, and, finally, by his greater stature. The sculptor always makes him taller than his subjects, still more than his enemies and captives (Vol. I. Fig. 22, and Fig. 15 above). This latter proceeding seems childish, but it is so natural, and is found in so many countries, that it is not at all astonishing. The sculptor has counted upon all these attributes to show, at a glance, which is the king; and they are, in fact, of a nature to prevent any chance of a mistake. He has not troubled himself to seek in his royal features for something by which he might be distinguished from the people about him. Winged genii, king and viziers, all have the same eye, the same nose and the same mouth. One would say that for each group of bas-reliefs the original designer only drew one head, which was repeated by tracing or some other process as often as there might be heads in the composition, and that it was afterwards carved and modelled in the alabaster by the chisel of the journeyman.

No, in spite of all that has been said, the Assyrians made no portraits. They did not even attempt to mark in any precise fashion, those physical characteristics by which they themselves were so sharply divided from many of the races by whom they were surrounded. Among the numerous peoples that figure in the sieges and battles that cover the palace walls, although some, like the Chaldæans, the Jews, and the Syrians, were near relations of their own, others belonged either to the Aryan or Turanian family; but any one who will examine the reliefs as we have done, will see that all the prisoners of war and other vanquished enemies have the same features as their conquerors.[162] The only exception to which we can point is in the case of certain bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal in which the episodes of an expedition into Susiana are retraced. There we can perceive in some of the figures—by no means in all—an endeavour on the part of the sculptor to mark the difference of race otherwise than by details of costume and head-dress. Here and there we find a head that suggests a negro;[163] but his characteristics are never as clearly marked as in Egypt. This may be merely the result of caprice on the part of some individual artist who has amused himself by reproducing with the edge of the chisel some head which had struck his fancy; but even here we only find one profile several times repeated. The modelling is far from searching, but wherever the work is in fair condition and the scale not too small the character we have described may be easily distinguished. The only differences over which the Assyrian sculptors naturally troubled themselves were those of costume and equipment; thus we find them recording that the people subdued in one of the expeditions of Sennacherib wore a crown or wreath of feathers about their heads (Fig. 48).[164] So, too, in the relief of a man with apes, the foot-covering, a kind of buskin with upturned toes (Fig. 64), should be noticed. But the lines of his profile remain unchanged; and yet there can be no doubt that the sculptor here meant to represent a man of negro race, because, as Layard, who dug up the monument, tells us, traces of black paint might be distinctly perceived upon the faces of this man and his companions.[165] On a Babylonian stele that we have already figured (Fig. 43), some have attempted to recognize a Mongol type, and thence to confirm the hypothesis that would make a Turanian race the founders of the Chaldæan civilization. This, too, we think a mistake.[166]

At first sight this curious monument surprises those who are accustomed to Assyrian art, but the nature of the material has not a little to do with that. The hardness and darkness of basalt affect the treatment of the sculptor in quite a different way from a gypseous stone like alabaster. Add to this that the proportions are quite unlike those of the Ninevite reliefs. This Marduk-idin-akhi is a work of the ancient school, which made its figures far shorter than those of such Assyrian reliefs as have come down to us. Finally the head-dress should be noticed. In place of being conical it is cylindrical, a form which overweights the figure and shortens its apparent proportions. On the whole, any one looking at this stele without bias on one side or the other, will, we think, acknowledge that the type it presents is the same as the figures at Nimroud, Khorsabad, and Kouyundjik. It is, moreover, identical with that we see in monuments even older than this royal Babylonian stele, such as the fragmentary relief found by M. de Sarzec at Sirtella (Fig. 67).