In any case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the vases engraved in Mesopotamia by native workmen and those imported from Phœnicia, or made at Nineveh by workmen who had received their training at Tyre or Byblos. The resemblances between the two are too many and too great. At most we may unite all the platters found in Mesopotamia into a single group, and point out a general distinction between them and those that have been discovered in the Mediterranean basin. The ornament on the Nimroud cups is, on the whole, simpler than on those found in Cyprus and Italy; the figure plays a less important part in the former, and the compositions are more simple. The Assyrian cups, or, to be more accurate, those found in Assyria, represent the earliest phase of this art, or industry, whichever it should be called. In later years, after the fall of Nineveh, when Phœnicia had the monopoly of the manufacture, she was no longer content with purely decorative designs and small separate pictures. Her bronze-workers multiplied their figures and covered the concentric zones with real subjects, with scenes whose meaning and intention can often be readily grasped. This we shall see when the principal examples of this kind of art come under review in our chapters upon Phœnicia.[426]
Fig. 218.—Bronze cup. British Museum.
Meanwhile, we shall not attempt to establish distinctions that are nearly always open to contest; they would, besides, require an amount of minute detail which would here be quite out of place. To give but one example of the evidence which might lead to at least plausible conclusions, we might see pure Assyrian workmanship in the cup figured below (Fig. 218),[427] where mountains, trees, and animals stand up in slight relief, both hammer and burin having been used to produce the desired result. Among these animals we find a bear, which must have been a much more familiar object to the Assyrians living below the mountain-chains of Armenia and Kurdistan than to the dwellers upon the Syrian coast. In the inscribed records of their great hunts, the kings of Assyria often mention the bear.[428] Nothing that can be compared to these wooded hills peopled by wild beasts is to be found on the cups from Cyprus or Italy. I may say the same of another cup on which animals of various species are packed so closely together that they recall the engravings on some of the cylinders (see Fig. 149).[429]
On the other hand, there are plenty of motives which may just as easily have had their origin in one country as the other. The two vultures, for instance, preparing to devour a hare stretched upon its back, which we figure below (Fig. 219).[430]
Fig. 219.—Border of a cup; from Layard.
It may be thought that we have dwelt too long upon these cups; but the sequel of our history will show why we have examined them with an attention that, perhaps, neither their number nor their beauty may appear to justify. They are first met with in Assyria, but they must have existed in thousands among the Greeks and Italiots. Light, solid, and easy to carry, they must have furnished western artists with some of their first models. As we shall see, they not only afforded types and motives for plastic reproduction, but, by inciting them to find a meaning for the scenes figured upon them, they suggested myths to the foreign populations to whom they came.
§ 5. Arms.
We shall not, of course, study Assyrian arms from the military point of view. That question has been treated with all the care it deserves by Rawlinson and Layard.[431] From the stone axes and arrow-heads that have been found in the oldest Chaldæan tombs, to the fine weapons and defensive armour in iron and bronze, used by the soldiers of Nineveh in its greatest years, by the cavalry, the infantry, and the chariot-men of Sargon and Sennacherib, the progress is great and must have required many long centuries of patient industry. In Assyria no trade can have occupied more hands or given rise to more invention than that of the armourer. For two centuries the Assyrian legions found no worthy rivals on the battlefields of Asia; and, although their superiority was mainly due, of course, to qualities of physical vigour and moral energy developed by discipline, their unvarying success was in some degree the result of their better arms. Without dwelling upon this point we may just observe that when war is the chief occupation of a race, its arms are sure to be carried to an extreme degree of luxury and perfection. Some idea of their elaboration in the case of Assyria may be gained from the reliefs and from the original fragments that have come down to us.