Fig. 75.—Capital; from a small temple. We find these volutes everywhere, upon shafts of stone and wood indifferently. We are tempted to think, when we examine the details of our [Fig. 67], that the first idea of them was taken from the horns of the ibex or the wild goat. The column on the right of this cut bears a fir cone between its volutes, those on the left have small tablets on which are perched the very animals whose heads are armed with these horns.
However this may be, the form in question, like all others borrowed from nature by man, was soon modified and developed by art. The curve was prolonged and turned in upon itself. In one of the capitals of the little temple represented at Kouyundjik ([Fig. 42]), two pairs of these horns may be recognized one above the other ([Fig. 75]), but nowhere else do we find such an arrangement. Whether the column be of wood, as in the Sippara tablet ([Fig. 71]), or of stone, as in those buildings in which the weight and solidity of the entablature points decisively to that material ([Figs. 41] and [42]), we find a volute in universal use that differs but slightly in its general physiognomy from the familiar ornament of the Ionic capital.
Fig. 76.—View of a palace; from Layard.
Let us revert for a moment to the country house or palace of which we gave a general view in [Fig. 39]. We shall there find on the highest part of the building an open loggia supported by small columns many times repeated. We reproduce this part of the relief on a larger scale ([Fig. 76]), so that its details may be more clearly seen. A very slight familiarity with the graphic processes of the Assyrians is sufficient to inform the reader that the kind of trellis work with which the bed of the relief is covered is significant of a mountainous country. The palace rises on the banks of a river, which is indicated by the sinuous lines in the right lower corner. The buildings themselves—which are dominated here and there by the round tops of trees, planted, we may suppose, in the inner courts—stand upon mounds at various heights above the plain. The lowest of these look like isolated structures, such as the advanced works of a fortress. Next comes a line of towers, and then the artificial hill crowned by the palace properly speaking. The façade of the latter is flanked by tall and salient towers, across whose summits runs the open gallery to which we have referred.[262] This is supported by numerous columns which must by their general arrangement and spacing, have been of wood. The gallery consisted, in all probability, of a platform upheld by trunks of trees, either squared or left in the rough and surmounted by capitals sheathed in beaten bronze.
The volute is here quite simple in shape; elsewhere we find it doubled, as it were, so that four volutes occur between the astragali and the abacus ([Figs. 42] and [77]). [263] In other examples, again, it is elongated upwards until it takes a shape differing but little from the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital ([Fig. 78]).[264]
This volute is found all over Assyria and Chaldæa. It decorates the angles of the small temple represented on the stone known as Lord Aberdeen's Black Stone ([Fig. 79]). It occurs also on many of the ivories, but these, perhaps, are for the most part Phœnician. But in any case the Assyrians made constant use of it in the decoration of their furniture. In an ivory plaque, of which the British Museum possesses several examples, we find a man standing and grasping a lotus stem in his left hand ([Fig. 80]). This stem rests upon a support which bears a strong resemblance to the Sippara capital ([Fig. 71]); it has two volutes separated by a sharp point. The fondness of the Assyrians for these particular curves is also betrayed in that religious and symbolic device which has been sometimes called the Tree of Life. Some day, perhaps, the exact significance of this emblem may be explained, we are content to point out the variety and happy arrangement of the sinuous lines which surround and enframe the richly decorated pilaster that acts as its stem. We gave one specimen of this tree in [Fig. 8]; we now give another ([Fig. 81]). The astragali, the ibex horns and the volutes, may all be easily recognized here.