Surprising as the phenomenon is at first sight, Chaldæan pottery was far from following the progress of sculpture. The excavations of Tello have enriched the museum of the Louvre with five hundred terra-cotta cones, bearing the name of Gudea and Ur-Bau, but these are only industrial products, without artistic character, and belonging to the brick manufacture. The necropoles of Warka and Mugheir, where we might have expected to meet with works of art, as in the tombs of Greece or Etruria, have only furnished coarse vases which bear witness to the complete inferiority of pottery among the Chaldæo-Assyrians. They are all singularly barbarous and rustic, whether they come from the archaic tombs of Warka and Mugheir, or issue from the ruins of the palaces where, nevertheless, the art of sculpture soars and displays itself in its perfect development. Assyrian pottery, even that of the best epoch, resembles, sometimes so much as to be mistaken for it, the most archaic pottery of Greece proper and the Islands of the Ægean. But here it is only the beginning of art, the first effort of the potter who before long will fashion masterpieces; there, on the contrary, these vulgar kitchen receptacles form the whole art, and represent at once the start and the finish.
This neglect of ceramics by the Chaldæo-Assyrian artists results from geological and climatic causes analogous to those which, as we shall see, developed sculpture in bas-relief to the detriment of sculpture in the round. It is especially owing to the bad quality of the clay in Mesopotamia, which, though quite fit to be turned into square bricks, has not a fine enough grain for the purpose of fashioning from it the fragile frame of a broad crater, or of a slim amphora, and still less for the purpose of lending itself to all the details of face and drapery in graceful and slender figurines like those of Tanagra, Cyme, or Myrina.
The cohesion of the Mesopotamian clay is so imperfect that the Babylonian terra-cottas which have come down to us crumble almost at the first touch, in spite of the process of baking to which they have been subjected. It is observed that, to give some consistency to the body of the vases and to prevent cracks, the potter has been obliged to mix the clayey paste with chopped straw. It was impossible then to make the sides thin, or to fashion them with art; consequently it would not have been natural to decorate with rich and careful painting vases which could only be heavy and coarse. It was enough to trace out geometrical designs, bands of colour, ovals, symmetrical festoons round the neck of the amphoræ; nothing in this sort of decoration has been borrowed from the animal or vegetable world or from history, of which the artist could, however, make so wonderful a use in the decoration of metal vases, or of knicknacks in ivory, wood, or stone.
The Chaldæan terra-cotta figurines, however coarse they may be, are not entirely divested of interest for the history of art and mythology, and M. Heuzey has been able to appreciate them with delicacy from this point of view.[25]
Fig. 27.—Chaldæan statuette in terra-cotta.
The statuettes collected in great quantities by Loftus, at Warka, are of solid clay, and were manufactured in a mould in one piece; the back is flat and modelled with the hand. The clay is of a greenish grey, or sometimes brown; it is well baked and very hard. The attitude of these grotesque little figures offers singularly striking analogies to the terra-cotta figurines of the first Egyptian dynasty; they are men in long robes, with their beards cut in the Assyrian fashion, women dressed in tight tunics and wearing falling head-dresses like the Egyptian figurines; their hands are clasped on their breast in the religious attitude which we know already from the Tello statues. It is, however, very difficult to give the precise date of these figurines, which, perhaps, for the most part, are not anterior to the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Besides, we shall return to them later on. It is enough for the moment to observe how little varied and meagre was the theme worked out by the Chaldæan modellers in clay, at a time when sculpture and the other arts were nevertheless already most flourishing.
The monuments which we have just reviewed allow us to appreciate the degree of prosperity and perfection attained side by side with the higher branches of art by various industries in Chaldæa, such as tapestry, weaving, and the embroidery of stuffs. The stela of Marduk-nadin-akhi, for example ([fig. 22]), bears witness to the wonderful skill of the women of the royal hareem, or of the men employed in the workshop, whence issued that robe with golden fringe, covered with elegant designs and precious stones set in the web of the tissue, that tiara adorned with feathers and wide-open daisies, those sandals, the broad lozenge-shaped stitches of which can be counted.