Manual of Oriental Antiquities

INCLUDING THE Architecture, Sculpture, and Industrial Arts OF CHALDÆA, ASSYRIA, PERSIA, SYRIA, JUDÆA, PHŒNICIA, AND CARTHAGE. BY ERNEST BABELON, Librarian of the Department of Medals and Antiques in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. NEW EDITION, WITH A CHAPTER ON THE RECENT DISCOVERIES AT SUSA. With Two Hundred and Fifty-five Illustrations. NEW YORK: G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS LONDON: H. GREVEL AND CO., 1906.
Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.
THE domain which we are about to traverse in this little work embraces all the civilisations of the ancient East except that of Egypt. It includes the Chaldæans, the Assyrians, the Persians before Alexander, the Hittites of Syria, Cappadocia, and Asia Minor, the Jews, the Phœnicians, and even Cyprus, ending with the Carthaginians and their colonies. So vast a field, which, in the monumental work of MM. G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, occupies four volumes, can only be explored here in a summary manner, and the author claims no more than to have written a modest abridgment. It must not be supposed, however, in spite of the diversity and remoteness from one another of the peoples that we have just enumerated, that the subject lacks cohesion and unity. If the reader will have the goodness to follow us to the conclusion, he will be, on the contrary, struck by the perfect homogeneity of the book and the connection of all its parts. The picture, so to speak, contains many figures, but all concur in a common action, and the spectator grasps, at the first glance, the harmony of the composition.
For, in these old Eastern civilisations which held sway over the world before Greece and Rome, only two streams of artistic influence are really to be traced—that which rises in Egypt and that which issues from Assyria. Often they took a parallel course, side by side, sharing like brothers the empire of the arts; sometimes they opposed or obstinately excluded one another; or else they joined forces, mingled closely with one another, and united their original capacities in a common fund. But if these varying conditions produced in certain countries a local and indigenous art which is neither purely Egyptian nor purely Assyrian, we can always decompose its elements and make a chemical analysis of it, so to speak; and, when we have restored to Egypt that which properly belongs to her, and to Assyria all that has been borrowed from her, we perceive that nothing remains at the bottom of the crucible. Thus it may be said that, properly speaking, there is no Persian art, or Hittite art, or Jewish art, or Phœnician or Carthaginian art; everywhere we find the forms of Egypt or those of Assyria grouped, mixed, perhaps altered, in proportions which vary according to time, environment, and political conditions.