This short examination of the spirit and principles of Assyrian figuration was necessary in order to prevent embarrassment and doubt in speaking of the architectural designs and other things of the same kind that we may find reproduced in the bas-reliefs. Unless we had thoroughly understood the system of which the sculptors made use, we should have been unable to base our restorations upon their works in any important degree; and, besides, if there be one touchstone more sure than another by which we may determine the plastic genius of a people, it is the ingenuity, or the want of it, shown in the contrivance of means to make lines represent the thickness of bodies and the distances of various planes. In this matter Chaldæa and Assyria remained, like Egypt, in the infancy of art. They were even excelled by the Egyptians, who showed more taste and continuity in the management of their processes than their Eastern rivals. Nothing so absurd is to be found in the sculptures of the Nile valley as these hills and trees turned upside down, and we shall presently see that a like superiority is shown in the way figures are brought together in the bas-reliefs. In our second volume on Egyptian art we drew attention to some Theban sculptures in which a vague suspicion of the true laws of perspective seemed to be struggling to light. The attempt to apply them to the composition of certain groups was real, though timid. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Assyrian sculpture. The Mesopotamian artist never seems for a moment to have doubted the virtues of his own method, a method which consisted in placing the numerous figures, whose position in a space of more or less depth he wished to suggest, one above another on the field of his relief. He trusted, in fact, to the intelligence of the spectator, and took but little pains to help the latter in making sense of the images put before him.
NOTES
[415] Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. chapter i. § 1.
[416] M. J. Halévy disputes this reading of the word. As we are unable to discuss the question, we must refer our readers to his observations (Les Monuments Chaldéens et la Question de Sumir et d'Accad) in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions, 1882, p. 107. M. Halévy believes it should be read as the name of the prince Nabou or Nebo. The question is only of secondary importance, but M. Halévy enlarges its scope by reopening the whole matter of debate between himself and M. Oppert as to the true character of what Assyriologists call the Sumerian language and written character. The Comptes rendus only gives a summary of the paper. The same volume contains a résumé of M. Oppert's reply (1882, p. 123: Inscriptions de Gudéa, et seq).
[417] Layard, Discoveries, p. 341.
[418] The same disproportion between men and buildings is to be found in many other reliefs (see figs. 39, 43, and 60).
