The pictorial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians shows us two distinct periods—an older and a more recent one. The older works had a bluish-green ground; the later a light, either whitish or yellowish, ground. In both styles the outlines are marked strongly in black or dark red. In the older, the sinews are more rope-like and less correct in their anatomy. In the more recent style a finer treatment, and a more correct knowledge of the human frame, may be traced. Wild animals are reproduced with a keen eye of observation, and a strong tendency to naturalism.
Polychromy was known to them, but it is very difficult to decide whether they coloured in tempera or in fresco, with wax or by some other means—perhaps even in oil. The incrustation of clay walls with baked and painted, and even glazed, tiles it is difficult to explain. In many instances, as at Vurka, each cone has its own colour, and, by a proper arrangement, squares, imbrications, diapers, and networks were produced; but at Babylon and Nineveh the tiles show clear marks of painting. Diodorus (probably after Ktesias) gives us a description of the interior circular wall of the royal palace at Babylon, and says: ‘It was decorated with all sorts of coloured human and animal forms baked in clay, much resembling nature. The whole represented a hunt. The figures were more than four yards high. Semiramis was to be seen by the side of her husband Ninus, she killing a panther, he piercing with his dart a lion.’ The principles of decoration with the Assyrians far surpass mere ornamentations in geometrical patterns. Dramatic life of a higher kind is introduced, showing greater artistic power than the reliefs in stone. The outlines are neither black nor red, the treatment is tasteful, the colours a tender blue, brown, white or yellow, and the ground a lightish green. These paintings are not mosaics, as at Vurka.
The baking and glazing must have taken place in the following manner. The unbaked tiles were arranged and numbered in a horizontal position on the ground, then they were painted and placed vertically on the wall as a tapestry decoration. When the wall was finished it must have been heated, so as to change the light and fluid colours into a kind of enamel, giving the clay-wall a thin terra-cotta coating.
The utilitarian purpose was everything with the Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. This is evident in their furniture, especially in their tables, chairs, and footstools. The construction of the frame was taken from plants and trees, whilst wild animals were used as silent and obedient domestic creatures. In supporting their furniture with the legs of the lion, tiger, or leopard, they used these animals for an excellent ornamental purpose. The legs of the brute were made to support, the body was turned into a seat, and the head was conventionally used as a side-ornament for the backs or arms of the throne or chair. We see in the Cis-Himâlâyans, in accordance with their greater activity in life, a further progress in art. Merely geometrical figures do not suffice; not monstrous divinities, but animals and men, are the most important subjects of sculpture. Their architecture was without symmetry and proportion, the material of their buildings in no accordance with the monumental tendencies of their construction, and their efforts did not carry them further than the vague attempts of half-settled nomads. Their walls, which once consisted of textile hangings, retained this character, stretching for thousands of feet without any interruption, except that the doorways had their colossal symbolic guards, which to a certain extent relieved the monotony of the construction. The art of Persia and Assyria is in every sense the transition-link between nomadic and monumental art.
[CHAPTER VI.]
EGYPTIAN ART.
‘Anything capable of uniting many souls—is sacred,’ says Goethe. The sacredness of religious tenets or monumental buildings is at once explained by this. To unite humanity into one great brotherhood was first attempted by the Babylonians with their huge tower of Belus, Baal, or Babel. Men for the first time left patriarchal particularism, and tried to build a beacon reaching up to the stars, calling humanity together to one spot, by a work produced by their united labour as a visible sign of their union. This first attempt at a really monumental building was made in the plains of the Euphrates. Whilst the people of Asia still struggled to settle down, and changed their habitations and with them their forms of art, we see monuments emerge from the dim past, which reflect man for the first time in his grandeur as wielder of matter.
The sphinx in its incomprehensible, mysterious form, half brute, half human being, may be looked upon as the very emblem of Egyptian art.
It is written in one of the Hermetic books, ‘O Egypt, fables alone will be thy future history, wholly incredible to later generations, and nought but the letter of thy stone-engraved monuments will survive.’ Our knowledge of Egypt is scarcely half a century old. It originated in a black basalt stone, the so-called Rosetta-stone, deposited, at the beginning of the century, in the British Museum. Approached by Dr. Young, of Cambridge, with the wand of investigation, this stone poured forth a little spring, which has now swollen into a mighty river, carrying off with irresistible force all those little souls who, on their small boats of prejudice, with tiny chronological ladles, try to stop the sweeping power of historical truth. We know something at least of Egypt; we have monumental evidence, which surpasses all written documents, which may be voluntarily or involuntarily falsified. Egyptologists may be divided into two parties:—the long and the short chronologists. The short chronologists, in the face of our advanced knowledge of geology, of the vast accumulation of pre-historic relics, consisting of flint instruments, pottery, weavings, and architectural remains (lake and pile-dwellings), deserve no consideration. They follow the chronological dislocation of Rabbi Hillel, of the first half of the fourth century A.D., with childish ignorance. This view is the most charitable, as otherwise we should be driven to accuse them of interested knavery. After the exertions of a Champollion-Figeac, Böckh, Barucchi, Bunsen, Brugsch, Henry, Lesueur, Lepsius, Hincks, Kenrick, Uhleman, &c.—who all belong to the long chronologists, to turn to the short chronology is impossible.