Kardassy and Dandour in Nubia; Esneh.
[3.] See Goodyear’s Grammar of the Lotus for an elaborate and ingenious presentation of the theory of a common lotus-origin for all the conventional forms occurring in Egyptian ornament.
[CHAPTER IV.]
CHALDÆAN AND ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE.
Books Recommended: As before, Reber. Also, Babelon, Manual of Oriental Antiquities. Botta and Flandin, Monuments de Ninive. Layard, Discoveries in Nineveh; Nineveh and its Remains. Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Chaldæa and Assyria. Peters, Nippur. Place, Ninive et l’Assyrie.
SITUATION; HISTORIC PERIODS. The Tigro-Euphrates valley was the seat of a civilization nearly or quite as old as that of the Nile, though inferior in its monumental art. The kingdoms of Chaldæa and Assyria which ruled in this valley, sometimes as rivals and sometimes as subjects one of the other, differed considerably in character and culture. But the scarcity of timber and the lack of good building-stone except in the limestone table-lands and more distant mountains of upper Mesopotamia, the abundance of clay, and the flatness of the country, imposed upon the builders of both nations similar restrictions of conception, form, and material. Both peoples, moreover, were probably, in part at least, of Semitic race.[4] The Chaldæans attained civilization as early as 4000 B.C., and had for centuries maintained fixed institutions and practised the arts and sciences when the Assyrians began their career as a nation of conquerors by reducing Chaldæa to subjection.
The history of Chaldæo-Assyrian art may be divided into three main periods, as follows:
1. The Early Chaldæan, 4000 to 1250 B.C.
2. The Assyrian, 1250 to 606 B.C.
3. The Babylonian, 606 to 538 B.C.