Fig. 71.—Front face of a winged bull from Khorsabad (Louvre).
The philosophical idea expressed in these bulls and lions, these impassible and majestic sentinels, is that of physical strength, calm and sure of itself; it is the conception of the Egyptian sphinxes and of the Græco-Roman Hercules in repose, with a half-smile upon his face. Only, while in the Greek Hercules the human element alone comes in, and in the Egyptian Sphinx there are only two elements, the man and the lion, four, and even more, are found in the Assyrian Kirubu: the man, the bull, the lion, and the eagle. The artist’s chief merit is that he was able to give fair proportions to this fantastic beast, and to combine these various elements which he borrowed from nature, so as to create a figure of harmonious forms, in which nothing shocks the taste, and the expression of which is noble, majestic, and natural. To us, though we are the children of another civilisation, nothing seems grotesque or deformed in these fine and vigorous creations of the Assyrian genius, which could, as skilfully as the Egyptian genius, associate the human form with the animal form in the symbolic representation of deity and of supernatural beings. It is on the banks of the Tigris that we find the prototypes of the Loves, the Centaurs, the Chimæras, the Sphinxes, the Gryphons, the Pegasi, the Hippocampi of Greek art.
Fig. 72.—Battle scene (Bas-relief from Nimroud, British Museum).
It has been calculated that the series of bas-reliefs from the halls of Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad, placed end to end, would form a line a mile and a half long. Those who have visited the British Museum will remember the Nimroud and Kouyunjik galleries, and the Assyrian Basement, each one of which is larger than the Assyrian gallery at the Louvre. What a quantity of material for writing the history of Assyrian sculpture during three centuries is here in our hands! In the interval between every campaign, that is to say, between two springtides, the king had bas-reliefs sculptured to exhibit before men’s eyes his prowess in the chase or in war, and the manifold episodes of official life. Taken as a whole, the sculptures in the interior of the palaces are always in honour of the prince. Everything is for the king, who symbolizes the life of his whole people; he does everything, and nothing is accomplished except by his hands or by his orders; nowhere is the ferocious egotism of Eastern monarchs more conspicuous than in these bas-reliefs. Egyptian sculptures often contain scenes of civil life from which the Pharaoh is excluded: agricultural labour, games, festivals, public markets, and many other episodes in the existence of the ancient Egyptian Fellaheen. In Assyria we find nothing of this sort; the speaking walls repeat, without a moment’s pause, the warlike chronicle of the kings.
