The brilliant period of Chaldæan statuary, which reached the apogee of its development in the monuments of Tello, came to an end with the fall of the petty principalities which flourished in Lower Mesopotamia before the Ninevite supremacy. Chaldæan statuary did not emigrate to Assyria with the other arts, or rather the Assyrians disdained to receive it. The principal cause which prevented this art from developing among the Ninevites was the nearness of the alabaster quarries, and the absence of marble, diorite, porphyry and other kinds of stone which allow of being carved in the round. Alabaster can only be hewn in thin, flat pieces, which, for this reason, lend themselves admirably to be carved in bas-relief, but are unsuitable for statuary. An alabaster statue of ordinary human proportions would be extremely fragile, and would run the risk of crumbling away in flakes, at any rate in the thinnest parts, such as the feet and hands. On the other hand, the abundance of alabaster in the neighbourhood of Nineveh caused the Assyrians to dispense with the importation from distant countries, at great cost, of blocks of diorite and porphyry like those which the Chaldæans, who possessed neither alabaster nor any other stone, were obliged to procure at any price. At least we must admit that up to the present time the excavations in Assyria have scarcely yielded to our curiosity anything that can enable us to assert that statuary flourished in Northern Mesopotamia. On the contrary, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us prove the poverty and neglected condition of this branch of sculpture. The principal objects that can be cited are two statues of the god Nebo at the British Museum, a statue of the King Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857), and two other figures of priests which took the place of Caryatids at Khorsabad.
Fig. 61.—Statue of Assur-nasir-pal (British Museum).
The statue of Assur-nasir-pal represents this king dressed in a long robe without folds and devoid of ornament, which almost gives him the appearance of a cylindrical Terminus. His beard and hair lie close to his head and neck, and in each part it is evident that the artist, through want of skill or on account of the difficulties he felt in dealing with the block which he had to fashion, did not dare to attribute to the limbs a suppleness and ease that would have damaged their solidity, nor to give to the beard and the delicate parts of his work a finish which would have run the risk of splitting the stone.
The fringes of the robe are only indicated by slight strokes of the burin; the arms are united to the bust, and so are the sceptre and the crook which the monarch holds in his hands.
