Fig. 30.—Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.
By thus limiting its scope, sculpture condemned itself to much repetition and to a uniformity not far removed from sameness; but its very silences are eloquent upon the inhuman originality of a system to which Assyria owed both the splendour of her military successes and the finality of her fall. The great entrenched camp, of which Nineveh was the centre, once forced; the veteran ranks, in which constant war, and war without quarter, had made such wide gaps, once broken, nothing remained of the true Assyria but the ignorant masses of a second-class state to whom a change of masters had little meaning, and a few vast buildings doomed soon to disappear under their own ruins.
Fig. 31.—Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.
When we have completed our examination of Assyrian sculpture, so rich in some respects, so poor in others, we shall understand the rapidity with which silence and oblivion overtook so much glory and power; we shall understand how some two centuries after the victory of Nabopolassar and the final triumph of Babylon and her allies, Xenophon and his Greeks could mount the Tigris and gaze upon the still formidable walls of the deserted cities of Mespila and Larissa without even hearing the name of Nineveh pronounced. Eager for knowledge as they were, they passed over the ground without suspecting that the dust thrown up by their feet had once been a city famous and feared over all Asia, and that the capital of an empire hardly less great than that of the Artaxerxes whom they had faced at Cunaxa, had once covered the ground where they stood.
NOTES
[117] Diodorus, ii. 29.
[118] Fr. Lenormant, Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne de l'Orient, vol. ii. p. 252.
[119] Loftus, Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana, p. 309. The Greeks gave the appropriate name of κλιμακες to those stepped roads that lead from the valley and the sea coast to the high plains of Persia.