NOTES
[411] As to the simplicity of Egyptian engineering, see the History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 72, and fig. 43.
[412] See Layard, Monuments, 2nd series, plate ii. The same author gives a detailed description of this picture in his Discoveries, pp. 104-106.
[413] Layard, Discoveries, p. 112.
[414] Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 32.
§ 10.—On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations of Buildings.
The Chaldæans and Assyrians knew as little of perspective as they did of mechanics. When they had to figure a building and its contents, or a landscape background, they could not resist the temptation of combining many things which could not be seen from a single standpoint. Like the painters and sculptors of Thebes they mixed up in the most naive fashion those graphic processes that we keep carefully apart. All that they cared about was to be understood. We need not here reproduce the observations we made on this subject in the corresponding chapter of Egyptian Art;[415] it will suffice to give a few examples of the simultaneous employment by Ninevite sculptors of contradictory systems.
Fig. 153.—Chaldæan plan. Louvre.