Fig. 35.—Chaldæan cylinder (New York Museum, after Menant).
If all Chaldæan cylinders could be classed chronologically and by schools, epochs of perfection or of decadence would no doubt be observed, and also greater activity in some artistic centres than in others, the choice of subjects being modified from town to town and from age to age. In the present state of our knowledge we can only hazard conjectures with regard to this. M. Menant looks upon the cylinders which represent the goddess Istar holding her child upon her knees and receiving the homage of the faithful, as issuing from the workshops of Uruk (Erech); it is the prototype of the divine mother whose worship is to spread even into Greece. At Ur cylinders of very different types, but of a dry execution, which is rather a mark of decadence than of archaism, were manufactured: there are scenes of worship or initiation into mysteries, and sacrifices, among which that of the kid is the most frequent. On certain monuments M. Menant recognises a representation of human sacrifices: the most marked scene of this kind shows us a sacrificer, who, raising his right hand, brandishes a dagger over a kneeling child, whom he seems to prepare to slay, in the presence of a pontiff and of the statue of the god. One of the commonest figures on Chaldæan cylinders is that of the goddess Istar, sometimes decked with rich ornaments, sometimes entirely naked, in full face, with her hands clasping her breasts: this last type, profusely reproduced by the modellers in clay, was perpetuated all over the East up to the time of the Greek and Roman supremacies.
CHAPTER II.
ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE.
Assyria, because she lies nearer to the mountains than Chaldæa, and because the use of stone, without ever being exclusive, was more frequent in northern than in southern Mesopotamia, has left us important ruins which have already been partly explored, and which allow us to reconstruct the forms of her architecture, without material gaps, from the ninth to the seventh century before our era. In temples, palaces, staged towers, and fortresses, the art of building is revealed to our eyes by means of the excavations of which Nineveh and its environs have been the object. But nothing is left of private architecture, and the same must be said of sepulchral architecture, or rather this latter did not exist in Assyria, which has only yielded to our explorers a few jars filled with bones. The corpses were generally carried away into Lower Chaldæa, which continued to be for long ages a sort of Campo Santo, or vast cemetery at the service of the inhabitants of all Mesopotamia. Down to the present day, the Persians, even of the most distant provinces, make a point of having their dead buried at Nejef and Kerbela, near the mosque of Ali, the great saint of the Shiite Mussulmans. This traditional superstition is turned to profit by a company of carriers, who annually transport more than ten thousand corpses. The necropolis of Mugheir and the surrounding tells belongs therefore both to Chaldæa and to Assyria; corpses are piled up there by hundreds of thousands, but beyond the system of drainage, organised in order to catch the rain-water, it offers nothing of great interest. There were no sepulchral monuments; and as for the tombs themselves, they are generally little brick structures with nothing remarkable about them; the furniture consisting of terra-cotta vases and figurines, amulets and cylinders, is of the most wretched description.
Fig. 36.—Tomb at Warka (after Taylor).